Grammarly Trust Audit: It Won’t Sell Your Words — but Check the Toggle It Leaves On, and Don’t Expect a Refund

What it actually costs

Grammarly has three tiers. Free costs nothing and covers spelling, grammar, punctuation and tone detection, plus 100 generative-AI prompts a month. Pro is the paid plan most people mean: $12 per member per month billed annually — that’s $144 charged upfront, once a year. There is also a quarterly option at $20 a month and a monthly option at $30 a month. Enterprise is custom-priced with unlimited AI prompts.

Pro’s headline features are full-sentence rewrites, tone adjustment, plagiarism and AI-text detection, and 2,000 AI prompts per member per month, plus light team features (one style guide, one brand tone) for groups up to 149 members.

Now the traps:

• The $12 price is a prepayment price. Pay month-to-month and the identical product costs $30 — two and a half times more, $360 over a year. Flexibility is punished, not priced.
• A 7-day free trial exists — and if it rolls into a paid plan because you forgot it, the no-refunds clause below applies to you in full. Reviewers repeatedly flag the same story: people who expected one monthly charge and found $144 gone, or who forgot a trial entirely.
• You’re being steered into a bundle. Since the company’s reorganisation (see Company risk), the sales push is toward the “Superhuman” suite: a Business bundle around $33 per member per month that marries Grammarly Pro to an AI email client most writers never asked for. Standalone Pro still exists — you just have to know it’s the thing you want.
• Pricing is per seat, flat, with no lifetime option. Every prompt, rewrite and “make this sound professional” click draws down the monthly AI allowance; Pro’s 2,000 is generous, Free’s 100 disappears fast.

Your data: what the fine print actually says

Grammarly’s model requires trust by design: the tool reads what you type across your browser, documents and apps, and routes text through its servers to check it. Within that model, the official commitments are decent. Its privacy policy states: “We do not sell personal information to third parties.” Its Trust Centre says you can opt out of letting Grammarly use your content to train its models and improve the product for everyone, via a setting called Product Improvement and Training.

Here is the catch that decides this audit: according to Grammarly’s own support documentation, that setting is on by default for individual Free and single-user Pro accounts. Accounts bought through sales channels (Enterprise, Education, larger Business plans) default to off. Translation: the people least likely to read settings pages are the ones whose writing may be used to train and improve the product unless they actively opt out. Third-party providers, Grammarly says, are not permitted to train on your content — but Grammarly itself reserves the right to learn from your text until you say no.

Other documented details worth knowing:

• Anything you save in the Grammarly Editor is stored until you delete the document or your account. There is no automatic expiry on drafts you forgot about.
• If you turn off a “tailored assistance” feature, the personalisation data stored for that feature is deleted — a genuinely good behaviour, and easy to miss.
• The privacy policy gives you access and deletion rights (GDPR/CCPA style), and its hosting runs on mainstream cloud providers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Rule of thumb: the day you sign up, turn Product Improvement and Training off, then decide what you paste into it. Unpublished manuscripts, contracts, HR matters — all have passed through tools like this by accident.

Refunds & cancellation

This is where Grammarly loses the most trust.

Its Terms of Service carry a section titled “No Refunds”: to the fullest extent the law allows, all payments are non-refundable, payment obligations are non-cancelable, and there are no credits for partially used periods. The only refund you’re entitled to is one the law forces. A billing error is handled case-by-case through support; an unrecognised charge can be disputed; subscriptions bought through the Apple or Google app stores fall under Apple or Google’s refund rules instead. But “I changed my mind,” “I forgot the trial,” and “I barely used it” are not refund reasons. Ever.

Cancellation itself is civilised: cancel any time from your subscription page, keep access until the end of the period you’ve paid for, and the account then converts to Free. No exit interviews with a retention agent, no dark maze. The problem is purely asymmetric — leaving is easy, but every dollar already paid is final.

Practical advice follows directly: start on the monthly plan or the free trial with a calendar reminder set for day five, and only move to the $144 annual plan once you’re certain. The discount is real; so is the trap.

Company risk

The company is not going anywhere — it claims 40 million daily users — but it has been reshaping itself aggressively. In December 2024 it acquired the workspace tool Coda, whose co-founder Shishir Mehrotra became CEO. In mid-2025 it acquired the Superhuman email client; in October 2025 the parent company renamed itself Superhuman, keeping “Grammarly” as a product name inside a suite that now includes an AI email client, a docs workspace and an agent layer (“Superhuman Go”) designed to reach into your mail, calendar and other apps. Even customer support now lives at a Superhuman address.

For a buyer, the risk is scope creep. You subscribed to a writing checker. The company selling it wants to become the agent platform that reads your inbox and schedules your meetings, and its bundle pricing already reflects that ambition. Product names, bundles and defaults have all changed within two years; there is no reason to assume they’ve finished changing.

Who should / shouldn’t buy it

Buy it if: you write in English all day across many apps and want checking where you type; English isn’t your first language and the rewrites earn their keep; or your small team wants one shared style guide and tone — and you’re disciplined enough to manage the defaults and the renewal date.

Skip it if: you handle sensitive drafts (legal, medical, unreleased financials) and won’t audit settings first; you’re bad at cancelling trials; you only write occasionally — the free tier or the AI assistant you already pay for probably covers you; or you object on principle to paying a company that trains on your words until told not to.

Bottom line

Trust score 6/10. Grammarly does not sell your data, cancellation works as advertised, and the product’s been around long enough to trust its plumbing. But a trust audit reads defaults and clauses, not promises — and here the defaults favour Grammarly (training on by default for individuals) and the clauses favour Grammarly (no refunds, ever, unless the law insists). Buy it with your eyes open, flip the training toggle off on day one, and never let a trial decide for you.

How we audit: we have not purchased or hands-on tested Grammarly. This audit is written from Grammarly’s privacy policy, Trust Centre, terms of service and support documentation, plus reputable published reporting, checked in October 2026. Prices and terms change; the links below show exactly where each claim comes from.

Sources

• HyperWrite, Grammarly Pricing 2026 (Pro $12 annual / $20 quarterly / $30 monthly; 100 vs 2,000 AI prompts; 7-day trial): https://www.hyperwriteai.com/articles/grammarly-pricing
• Become a Writer Today, Grammarly Free vs Pro 2026 (billing table, $144 upfront annual charge): https://becomeawritertoday.com/grammarly-free-vs-premium/
• The Side Hustler, Grammarly Review 2026 (month-to-month trap, forgotten-trial complaints, Superhuman suite bundle ~$33): https://thesidehustler.blog/grammarly-review/
• Grammarly User Trust Center (training opt-out; saved documents stored until deleted; tailored-assistance deletion): https://www.grammarly.com/trust
• Grammarly Privacy Policy (“We do not sell personal information to third parties”; data rights): https://www.grammarly.com/privacy-policy-fall-2023
• TechHelp, GrammarlyGO settings guide (Product Improvement and Training defaults by account type, per Grammarly support docs): https://techhelp.ca/grammarly-go/
• Grammarly Terms of Service, via BillSensor’s billing-policy analysis (No Refunds clause; cancel anytime; support routes): https://billsensor.com/blog/grammarly-charged-after-cancelling
• Fast Company, “Grammarly just rebranded to Superhuman” (Superhuman Mail acquisition; 40M daily users; repositioning): https://www.Fastcompany.Com/91427120/inside-the-superhuman-effort-to-rebrand-grammarly
• CB Insights company profile (Coda Dec 2024 and Superhuman Mail acquisitions; Oct 2025 company rename; Superhuman Go): https://www.cbinsights.com/company/super-human