We have made the difficult decision to limit the use of LanguageTool’s browser extension to Premium users only. The rise of generative AI has made it more challenging to sustainably monetize our offering. A majority of users use our products for free, and the relatively small percentage of Premium subscribers is all that is subsidizing our continuously increasing server costs. To improve our Premium experience and to sustain our business model, we’ll be making the LanguageTool browser extension available exclusively for paying customers.
Keep in mind that self-hosting is still available at no cost.
If you are a developer, you can still host and run your own instance of LanguageTool’s server. The browser extension will continue to work as it currently does for users who use it with their own server.
It’s a horrible time to have a ram shortage right now.
Anyways, I don’t think their choice to paywall extensions is a huge deal breaker since you ought to be self-host LanguageTool anyways, but I’m very concerned about the longevity of LanguageTool if they can’t get funding squared away.
If you are a developer, you can still host and run your own instance of LanguageTool’s server. The browser extension will continue to work as it currently does for users who use it with their own server.
I’m thankful they allow self-hosting for free, but to host LT self is a pure headache.
Their server software has a few memory leaks that are not getting fixed, but are known and reported about multiple year ago and so it comes that the LT server just crashes.
Plenty of stuff online. Also, how to run Proxmox or a container is not really about Privacy or digital freedom. It’s more about getting your hands dirty inside of a terminal.
Just take a leap of faith and buy yourself a Raspberry Pi or a cheap N100 from Beelink/alike.
People are gonna get upset, but this is another example of enshittification. I understand why they are doing it, but it’s still enshittification all the same. Removing or limiting features that were once free, and hence making the experience for the user worse, is enshittification. And this is not the first time LanguageTool does this.
It doesn’t help that they themselves embraced generative AI. They have a huge advantage over apps like Grammarly by offering their service in multiple languages. IMO, if a privacy company made a powerful writing tool available for multiple languages, it could crush the competition.
The user experience is the same. Its just more paywalled. Also, enshittification is also about platform decay. In this case, the quality of the service or product is not depreciating/deteriorating. It’s just being paywalled a little more. Not to mention, self hosting is still possible as it always was. If they even took away this, then yes, I’d agree with you more.
But I can see why people will consider this enshittification nonetheless. They are very close to being enshittified.
It is inherently not the same if it’s paywalled. The terms of use have changed.
I fundamentally disagree. If a company changes the terms of use, they are changing the user experience. And if this new experience is worse and not better, it means it’s deteriorating, hence why I think the use of the term enshittification is justified. I understand LT may be in a difficult financial situation, but it doesn’t change what the nature of what they are doing.
Honestly, this is what I hoped Proton Scribe would be.
Yes. Yes, I am aware of your views. But I don’t want to go round and round again.
It doesn’t mean that. You are calling it that and attributing it to that. It’s what you feel. But you can’t claim it. No one can.. everyone decides for themselves for what and how they feel about it.
“It is deteriorating to me” would have been a clearer statement.
It can be.. it’s not always. Sometimes it’s obvious. Like in this case, I think they are very close to it and are flirting with the idea but I am also evaluating from using the product POV and not necessarily assessing the product POV. It also depends on the product in question.
I don’t have a conclusive answer for you so make of this what you will.
I see. To me, this announcement clearly crosses that line, but as I mentioned in my first comment, they had already done it long before, and I am curious what you think of it.
Almost two years ago, I noticed that LT would no longer correct me when I made spelling mistakes on very simple, basic words. I would deliberately mistype certain words, realized that LT didn’t mark it as a mistake. And I’m talking basic words that children use.
I emailed them about it, and they denied changing anything, but I didn’t believe them because I saw it with my own eyes. Also, it was impossible for me to prove. For that, I would have needed a recording of LT correcting me for certain words before they made their changes, and I have no such recording.
I also have friends who use LT in other languages than English, and who reported the same thing. If on the free version LT would correct me when I type “Helloo” (fake eg), but doesn’t highlight it as a mistake when I do it now, that’s enshittification.
In this example, if true (and not that I question your experience), it would be enshittification in that they are not keeping up with the quality of the product for what it is meant to do that it used to. Something has to be up but we can’t prove. But we as users notice it because we use it everyday no matter what the company claims. Also, sometimes the customer service/client facing team is not at all in sync with the dev team with every little change they may make and how it may measurably (however little) impact the existing operation and working of a tool. Either way, bad result.
You make some valid points. Although I cannot prove it, I think it’s fair to say that if the free tier of a spellchecker does not mark “Helloo” as a mistake in the sentence “Helloo my name is Bob.”, then something is seriously wrong.
Yes that’s a very basic MVP functionality you’d expect for/from a product like this.
For you, the product became enshittified. For someone new who has never tried this tool, the product is already/exists enshittified if they see it like that. Or they can begin to see for what the product is now and then if it further deteriorates, it’s enshittified then.
But the geniuses in the boardrooms always think the opposite. The deluded understanding of how to improve the bottom line is misguided leading to unpopular decisions that translates to shittier user experience culminating in losing users or at the very least dissatisfied users who are even more in the edge of leaving the product.
I’ve been a happy paying user for nearly 4 years now. Yes, I can self-host, but I chose not to for this very reason. If that service ever goes away, I will miss it a lot!
Honestly, this is what I hoped Proton Scribe would be.