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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.
This looks interesting! Since GemType uses my own Gemini API key instead of a subscription, how does the free Gemini API tier hold up in day-to-day use? Have any users run into rate limits when using it for emails, documents, or social media writing throughout the day?
@abush Thanks! For one person's daily writing, the free tier holds up comfortably — that was a hard design goal. GemType debounces checks, skips unchanged text, and caches results, so even a heavy day stays well inside the free quota.
And if you ever outgrow it, the paid tier costs roughly $0.0003 per check — around a dollar a month for very heavy use. Compare that to $12–30/month for a subscription tool.
What makes GemType different from Grammarly?
@rose_trentinella
Fair question, rose — the short version:
- Free: it runs on your own Gemini API key (Google's free tier, no card needed) instead of a $12–30/month subscription
- Private: your text goes straight from your browser to Google's API — there's no #gemtype server in the middle, no account, no tracking
- Open source: Apache-2.0, so you can read exactly what it does — or paste the repo into an AI and ask it to audit the code for you
- Any language, auto-detected — not just English
The honest trade-offs are that you spend two clicks getting a free API key, and Google Docs isn't supported (working on it). If those are acceptable, you get the Grammarly experience without the subscription.
@rhoda_kathambi Honest answer: making underlines appear in the right place on every website without breaking the site's own editor. Rich editors like the ones in Gmail or Reddit fight back if you touch their DOM, so everything is drawn on a separate overlay and fixes are applied the way a real user edit would be.
My favorite bug: on Reddit everything worked perfectly — invisibly. Reddit's CSS hides unknown custom elements, so my overlay was rendering with visibility:hidden the whole time. Took a while to figure out that the code wasn't broken, it was just invisible.
Can Gemtype be used completely offline, or does it require an internet connection because it uses Gemini?
@duvan_molano . It needs an internet connection, duvan — the checking itself happens on Google's Gemini API, so there's no offline mode today. The upside of that trade-off is there's no heavy model running on your machine.
Support for local models (like Ollama) is something I'm considering for the roadmap — that would make fully offline checking possible for people who want it.
curious, can it learn my writing style over time or does it just use generic prompts?
@ddamba_eddy Right now it doesn't learn your style — and that's actually deliberate. GemType stores nothing about you anywhere (no server, no account), so there's nothing to learn from. Corrections keep your exact wording, and rewrites are presets you choose (Improve, Shorten, Formal, Casual).
Per-site tone preferences are on the roadmap ("always formal in Gmail"). Real style learning would mean storing your writing somewhere, so if I ever add it, it'll be local-only and opt-in.
"Can Gemtype be used for commercial projects, and are there any licensing limitations?"
@alma_joy_awitin There are no limitations. Since it is open-source, you are free to use it.
Heym
Thanks for shipping this, Ripon. The bring-your-own-key model is a smart way to sidestep both the subscription and the trust problem, since the text goes straight to Gemini instead of sitting on a GemType server in between.
One place I can see this helping a lot: someone drafting external support replies across Gmail and a helpdesk widget who can't justify Grammarly Business but still wants clean grammar without a vendor logging every outgoing message.
I'm curious how the shadow-root overlay holds up against editors that aggressively manage their own undo history, like ProseMirror-based apps. Does a correction ever get treated as an external edit and get flagged or reverted?
The rewrite modes, Improve, Shorten, Formal, Casual, applied per selection rather than as a blanket setting feels like the right call, since it keeps the tool from silently changing someone's voice across an entire doc.