Best AI writing tools: free limits and paid catches

Product	Best for	Per month, yearly plan	The deciding fact, and the catch	Link
Grammarly	Best overall	$12	2,000 AI prompts a month and plagiarism checks at $12 a month on annual billing. Pay monthly and it's $30, or 2.5x.	Visit
Jasper	Best for brand voice	$59	Pro has 2 Brand Voices at $59 a seat on annual billing, about 5x Grammarly. No free plan, and annual is a 12-month commitment.	Visit
Writesonic	Best for AI search tracking	$79	Starter tracks 50 prompts daily across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. At $79 a month on annual, it costs more than Jasper's $59.	Visit

Buy Grammarly at $144 a year, or stay on its free plan with 100 AI prompts a month. If that bill stings, try LanguageTool's free plan first. Its Premium price isn't confirmed yet, as of November 1, 2026.

Everything below runs from free to dear. LanguageTool and QuillBot come before the paid plans because their prices aren't confirmed. The priced ones climb fast.

$0 a year

Grammarly's free plan has the widest reach of the five. Costbench.com lists browser extensions for Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge, desktop apps for Windows and Mac, and iOS and Android keyboards. There's no plagiarism check.

LanguageTool caps free text at 2,000 characters per field. It works without an account in Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, Word and LibreOffice, and that's a shorter list of places than Grammarly's, with no phone keyboards (checked Nov 1, 2026).

QuillBot's free Paraphraser takes 125 words at a time. Its Summarizer takes 1,200.

Jasper has no free plan, only a 7-day trial. Writesonic's page says "Start free" and lists no free-plan limits, so assume nothing (checked Nov 1, 2026).

LanguageTool: the wider language list

Premium raises the limit from 2,000 characters per field to 150,000 and adds 20,000+ extra checks for languages including English, German, French and Spanish. Pick it over Grammarly for that language list.

Its Premium price isn't confirmed yet. The vendor page showed no readable price, and third-party listings disagree, so check the checkout before you compare it with Grammarly.

$144 a year: Grammarly

Pro gets you 2,000 AI prompts per member per month, plagiarism checks and AI-text detection. Against LanguageTool, you're paying for phone keyboards and all those prompts.

Usecarly.com, dated Jul 15, 2026, gives $30 monthly and $144 yearly. Costbench.com confirms the $12 a month annual rate but not the $30. Grammarly's own page showed EUR 12 when read.

Month-to-month comes to $360 a year. Same software. Nobody should choose that without a reason.

QuillBot: for paraphrasing

Its price isn't confirmed yet. Quillbot.com returned a 403, and the third-party listings I found disagree. Check at checkout.

QuillBot works with Google Docs and Microsoft Word and as a Chrome extension. It needs an internet connection, with no offline mode.

$708 a year: Jasper

Pro is $59 per seat a month billed yearly, or $69 billed monthly. You get 1 seat, 2 Brand Voices, 5 Knowledge assets and 3 Audiences.

The yearly plan is paid up front with a 12-month commitment, and that 7-day trial is all the warning you get. It's about five times Grammarly, for 2 Brand Voices. No brand to protect? Skip it.

$948 a year: Writesonic

Starter is $79 a month billed annually, under a label reading "Save $240/year". Saved from what? The page implies $99 a month, which is derived from those two numbers and isn't shown directly.

That buys 15 AI articles and 10 site audits a month, for 1 user and 1 project. If articles were all you wanted, 180 a year at $948 works out to about $5.27 each.

Writing isn't really the product anymore, though. The page centers on AI search visibility, tracking 50 prompts daily across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. If you want a writing tool, Jasper is $240 a year cheaper.