As of right now, Grammarly is not free for students, nor does it offer a cheaper plan for students. The only way students might have the opportunity for a discounted Grammarly account is if they join with other students to obtain a business plan together for the cheaper monthly option. Colleges could also purchase the Grammarly business plan for students and provide them with a login, but it does not seem to be very common.
After a quick search, it looks like these institutions may offer free Grammarly for students. A deeper search might reveal a ton more!
Iowa State: “Grammarly Premium is Free for students!”
Chapman: “Chapman University provides Grammarly free of charge to all students, faculty, and staff.”
Clemson: “Grammarly Premium Now Available For Students And Employees”
Importance of Grammarly
Students who have written extensive texts, whether it be at the high school or collegiate (undergraduate or graduate) level, have heard about or used Grammarly—an extremely helpful tool that can aid kids, teens, and adults in writing those perfect book reports, papers, and blog posts they’re striving for.
Founded by three main creators: Max Lytvyn, Dmytro Linder, and Alex Shevenko back in 2009, Grammarly’s main purpose is to review the spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement, and even delivery mistakes within the text throughout your paper, blog, and other writing projects.
What makes it so valuable? I mean, if all Grammarly did was implement spell check, the program would have gone to the wayside thanks to free classics like Microsoft Word and Google Docs.
Instead, it’s all about writing more efficient and impactful content, where Grammarly utilizes an artificial intelligence system to analyze sentences written in English.
Thanks to Grammarly’s team of computational linguists and engineers, the tool is able to use that AI to analyze a sentence and will then search for and suggest ways to improve it. This improvement could be anything from correcting a verb tense, suggesting a stronger synonym, or even changing the structure of a sentence.
Grammarly Versions
There are three versions of Grammarly: free, premium, and business.
Free Version
The free version of Grammarly is of course a simplified tool where users can utilize grammar help, spell check, punctuation, conciseness, and tone detection (which is helpful when conversing with someone over email). In addition, the free version offers basic writing suggestions.
Premium Version
The premium version, however, offers more clarity, a wider vocabulary, and tone improvements. In addition, Grammarly premium not only includes everything offered in the free version (obviously), but also unlocks full-sentence rewrites, choices for different words, tone suggestions, and even citations.
Business Version
Last, the business version of Grammarly is great for teams, organizations, and enterprises, as it offers verything within the free and premium versions, with the addition of a style guide, snippets, brand tones, an analytics dashboard, account roles and permissions, and a SAML single sign-on. As for pricing, the premium version is offered as low as $12.00 USD per month, and the business version for as low as $15.00 USD per month per member.
Grammarly Discounts
Depending on the plan you choose, there are discounts available. The premium version offers an annual subscription, where you pay for the full year at once. This works out to be a $144 USD bill, which breaks down to $12 USD per month—a 60% savings!
Grammarly premium also offers a quarterly option where you would have a one-time payment of $60 USD for three months ($20 USD per month) which is about 33% cheaper than the monthly plan. For monthly premium access to Grammarly, the user would have to pay $30 USD per month.
Last, the business option also offers discounts, depending on how long you want to be billed for and how many members are in your group. Discounts for the entire team come into effect when there are 11 or more members on the plan and you are electing to pay annually. The business plan offers the option to purchase either annually or monthly, unfortunately, the quarterly plan is not yet available. I
If choosing the annual plan, one would have about 40% in savings at $45 USD per month if purchasing for 3 team members which is $15 per member per month. For that same number of members, it would be $75 USD per month or $25 per month per member.
For teams consisting of 11 or more members, it works out to be $145 USD per month, which is $14.50 per month per member. The discount goes even higher when you reach 50 members ($625 per month or $12.50 per month per member).
Grammarly Disadvantages
While Grammarly offers many benefits to its users, it does have a few disadvantages that users should be aware of while using it.
First of all, the site will lag when it is editing larger chunks of text, causing you to slow down.
Furthermore, the tool is not perfect, and users will sometimes take all suggestions without even looking at them and giving them thoughtful consideration.
Another disadvantage is that acclimatization can take time.
Finally, Grammarly is only available in English, so if you are writing in another language, you will not be able to use this software.
Because Grammarly offers so many plans, it’s pretty easy to pick a plan that fits your needs. For example, if you are a college student, you wouldn’t really need the premium access during the Winter and Summer breaks, so a quarterly option might work best for you.
