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GemType
Free, open-source Grammarly alternative powered by Gemini
35 followers
Free, open-source Grammarly alternative powered by Gemini
35 followers
GemType checks your grammar and rewrites text on any website — Gmail, LinkedIn, X, Reddit, anywhere. Like Grammarly, but free and open source: you plug in your own free Google Gemini API key. No account, no subscription, no tracking.
Thanks @hanifah1 ! Notion works — tested it myself (check Screenshot). Same for Gmail, LinkedIn, X, Reddit, forums, and normal text fields anywhere.
Google Docs is the one hard no for now: it doesn't use real text fields at all (everything is drawn on a canvas), and Google only opens its annotation API to a small whitelist of vendors. It's the same reason only Grammarly and a couple of others work there.
This looks incredibly clean! The automatic sentence re-check feature is brilliant because word-level fixes so often break the overall flow. Since the extension checks our writing every time we pause, have you run into any issues with Gemini's free-tier rate limits during heavy, fast-paced writing sessions?
@andati_abednego Thanks — the sentence re-check is honestly my favorite part too.
On rate limits: GemType is built to stay inside the free tier. It only checks after you pause (~1s), skips anything unchanged, caches results, and re-checks are scoped to one sentence instead of the whole text. Requests also go out one at a time, and if Gemini ever says 429 the extension just backs off and retries quietly.
In practice, a heavy writing day is a few hundred small requests against a much larger daily quota. In the worst case, after a fast burst, you wait a couple of seconds and see a spinner; I haven't been able to hit a real wall with normal writing.
How do you handle context when rewriting text on different websites? For example, does GemType adapt its suggestions differently for professional emails versus casual social media posts?
@lilia_amora Good question Lilia. Right now I keep those two things deliberately separate:
- Corrections never touch your tone — they make the minimal edit that fixes the grammar and keep your wording.
- Rewrites are explicit: you select text and choose the tone yourself — Improve, Shorten, Formal, or Casual. So for a work email you hit Formal, for a tweet you hit Casual.
Automatic per-site tone preferences (e.g. "always formal on Gmail") are on the roadmap — I'd rather ship that as an opt-in setting than have the tool silently guess your voice.
How does GemType handle websites with complex editors like Notion, Google Docs, or Figma? Have you run into any compatibility challenges?
@jack47501 Great question — this was most of the actual engineering work.
The core trick: GemType never touches the page's editor DOM. Underlines are drawn on a transparent overlay in a shadow root, and fixes are applied the same way a user edit would be — so React/ProseMirror editors don't fight it. That covers Gmail, LinkedIn, X, Reddit (nested shadow DOM), and Notion — all tested.
Google Docs and Figma are the exceptions: both render to a canvas, so there's no text in the DOM to read. Docs has a private annotation API but it's whitelisted to a few vendors.
Favorite war story: on Reddit everything worked perfectly — invisibly. Their CSS hides unknown custom elements, so my overlay was rendering with visibility:hidden. Fixed with inline !important styles. The code's open source if you want to see how it's done.
For Notion, check this screenshot; it works.
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"Great launch, Ripon! The privacy aspect of sending text straight from the browser to the Google API is a huge selling point. Have you thought about adding a 'Team/Workspace' feature down the line where a small company could plug in a single shared paid Gemini API key for all their employees, or is GemType strictly staying focused on individual solo users?"
@barun3 Thanks! And honestly, great question — you've basically described where the roadmap is heading.
Today, nothing stops a small team from doing this manually: a company can create one paid Gemini key and each person pastes the same key into their own GemType. It works fine (limits are per Google Cloud project), it's just not managed — no per-user controls, and everyone has to handle the key themselves.
The proper version of what you're describing is on the roadmap as the "hosted key" option: a small backend that holds the key once, so individuals get zero-setup installs and a company admin could plug in one paid key for the whole team with per-user limits. Same privacy stance though — the backend would forward text to Gemini, not store or read it, and the client stays open source so that's verifiable.
So: not strictly solo forever — solo-first, teams next. If you have a team size / use case in mind I'd genuinely love to hear it, it helps me prioritize.
Does Gemtype support team collaboration in real time,how does it handle conflicting changes?
@berhanu_tesfaye Good question, Berhanu — short answer: GemType isn't a collaboration tool, so there's nothing to conflict. It's a personal writing assistant that runs entirely in your own browser: it checks what you type, in your own view, and applies fixes only when you click Accept.
If you're writing inside a real-time collaborative editor (Notion, a shared doc, etc.), the collaboration and conflict handling stay the editor's job. GemType plays nicely with that by design — it applies a fix exactly the way a normal keystroke would, so the host editor's own sync treats it like you typed the correction yourself. Nothing is synced between GemType users, and nothing leaves your browser except the API call to Gemini.
So: everyone on a team can use it at the same time in the same doc — each person just sees their own suggestions.