Grammarly will send unhinged messages to all your users if you try to cancel
reddit.com130 points by ksec 5 hours ago
130 points by ksec 5 hours ago
For those in Europe, this kind of behaviour usually is taken care by consumer protection agencies, fill in a complaint /report them, in you jurisdiction.
Unless you're in country A and ordered from country B (both in Europe), in which case the consumer protection agency from country A may just tell you "well they're not in our country so we can't do much, try contacting the European consumer agency, which after spending 30 minutes finding their form, and checking that you do qualify (which you won't, for some stupid reason like "did you try calling them nicely and sending a letter and waiting for 30 days?"), they will just say "ok cool we sent them an e-mail, we'll tell you how all of this will work out".
Or maybe I'm just in a bad European country who pulls this kind of demotivating stints every time I have this kind of problem.
Sure, I don't say it is easy, it is also a matter of perseverance, in most cases.
Sometimes you really hit a dead end. Some orgs just don't respond, or say they don't have the resources to process your complaint, or lie. The codified consumer protection laws are nice, in principle. Multinationals know they can get away with pretty much anything.
Consumer protection applies to individual consumers, not businesses. OP looks like a business.
Yes - unfortunately this looks to be completely irrelevant to consumer protection.
"A contractor of my employer asked me to contact another member of my organisation to persuade them to do something commercially advantageous for them" - at no point is anyone here a consumer.
Business emails are subject to fairly different rules by the looks of it: https://tietosuoja.fi/en/faq-direct-marketing ("Can a person working in a company be sent direct electronic marketing") - it appears there's a fair bit of an exception that doesn't require consent.
Here in Australia unless that particular user that received the emails gave consent to receive marketing emails (and the emails have identification + unsubscribe) it would be violating our Spam act.
https://www.acma.gov.au/publications/2024-07/guide/consumer-...
What are you going to report? There’s nothing illegal going on here.
Bad business practices, this sometimes also ends up in the agency reaching out to the related companies.
Or having their names listed in industry reports, which their marketing departments usually don't like.
Good luck actually getting them to do something. Also "Europe" is an entire continent with many different countries and laws, you might want to be more specific.
Grammarly was a great idea in the pre-AI era. Now I bet they're losing a lot with so many AI solutions that are better integrated across every ecosystem.
Some people will argue that Grammarly still has a better suggestion system, but models have become increasingly good at writing. I think this product and its revenue model will become obsolete pretty soon.
> but models have become increasingly good at writing.
That's not the impression I have. HN has almost daily articles bemoaning the use of AI to enhance or pad-out human-to-human communication and the comments almost universally agree that the output is bad, using AI to communicate is rude, and they'd rather read the human-written prompt than the AI-"enhanced" version.
I'm not aware of any model that has solved the AI writing problem. Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 improve on Fable 5 and Opus 5, but neither are good. They all seem to overuse jargon, misuse literary devices and write ill-fitting metaphor. They all produce prose that is dense and hard to read, but sparse on actual information. Even non-techy people can identify AI writing.
I suspect they're also losing a lot of university subscriptions after they started advertising how they offer a service to make LLM-written text look human-written, if I recall correctly they even explicitly advertised that you could use it to cheat. I don't know what they were thinking with that marketing campaign given that universities are probably one of their biggest market segments.
i wonder how much of this is a consequence of AI...
Most analytics tools have the ability to create segments (for example, you could create a group of users who are part of an account that is not going to renew their plan).
And then they have the ability to send emails and notifications to users in a segment.
I wonder how much companies are running agents with access to their analytics tools, and letting them build their own campaigns.
I asked ChatGPT to design a campaign to reduce churn for a SaaS like Grammarly, and it came up with a very similar idea.
Displaying a full page warning in an app where grammarly is just an integration is... not a good look.
Doesn't appear to be what's happening though.
> We let them know we weren't going to renew and they sent these unsolicited emails and popups in their app to all of the users who had licenses
Not "our app".
You know it's bad when you make your user switch to Microsoft faster.
> Grammarly was founded in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2009 by Ukrainians Alex Shevchenko, Max Lytvyn, and Dmytro Lider, and it still maintains a major office in Kyiv alongside its international headquarters
Part of the reason.
Later edit: Meaning some of the people from that part of the world have become accustomed with this type of behaviour knowing full-well that there will be no repercussions, to the contrary, it wouldn't surprise me to read that canceling a contract with Grammarly means giving in to the Russians.
I never liked grammarly. It feels like spam.
They must be desperate
This is extreme short sightedness.
We have no proof but it feels like someone asked Claude how to reduce churn and picked an option.
I guess consumers are going to have to “push back” often in the near future.
Just wait until the emails threaten to reveal all the compromising messages that users unwittingly sent to Grammarly's servers ...
I'm more surprised that anyone was still using grammarly in the first place.
I have a rule, if I hear an advert that I didn't search for on any video site, I say "fuck off <company name>" to ensure I form a negative association with the brand. I've definitely heard "grammarly" far too many times to ever spend a penny on them.
Their whole operation seems like some sort of five-eyes information proboscis. If AI is putting them out of business, good.
They are an AI business, just a more focused one. The creepy information gathering, the way it blandifies output and encourages reliance over building communication and language skills, it's all the same problems frontier companies have writ small. Their lunch is being eaten by bigger fish and they're shamelessly trying to remain relevant. This will not result in any less spying or bad behavior.
That is ... bold.
I'm surprised people get worked up about this. I've felt like folks have learned to tolerate much worse and manipulative behavior from companies in the last two decades of personal computing... Not that I like it. I believed that society kind of accepted dystopia. Is it just that people are more sensitive because this happened in a corporate setting?
ngl respect the hustle ig. Maybe there's some dude in the company that uses grammarly everyday that leadership could otherwise care less about..
But why are we giving sys admins grammarly lmao
It's in the sysadmin sub because we are routinely the people told buy and manage Grammarly deployments, and we're the people generally cancelling those services now given everyone is being pushed to use their flavor of AI instead. And those emails from users upset that we're doing what management told us to do (following this Grammarly advice)? They go from end users to sysadmins.
Doesn't look that unhinged to me.
An in-app notification saying 'your access ends on X date and here is who you should contact if that isn't what you want' is exactly what I'd expect.