Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly
38 comments
·July 14, 2025cjs_ac
Normal_gaussian
Lets be fair here, this tool is new - the domain was registered on Saturday.
What you suggest does seem like a good early doors feature; but the cut they've made seems to be the right one to prove market potential.
cjs_ac
It's fine if the tool has severe limitations at this stage. However, it's crucial to clearly state what those limitations are: not only does it prevent the flurry of complaints and chargebacks from customers who were disappointed that their specific case is unsupported, but it's also an opportunity to introduce a 'we're on this journey together' aspect that helps to make customers emotionally invested in the product.
tossandthrow
I get this.
> ... in 'full fat' English ...
English is a bastard of a language and getting messier every day as new nations adopt it is their standard language.
Setting the bar where it is well written and unambiguously understandable is IMHO completely fine for a 15$ product.
Having a text spell checked to comply with contemporary Oxford English is likely not the goal of this product.
cjs_ac
> English is a bastard of a language and getting messier every day as new nations adopt it is their standard language.
I disagree strenuously with this idea, because it suggests that there is one 'big' English in which anything goes. A better idea is the one of the register[0]: there are many Englishes, many sets of rules. Different rules are used in different regions, by different groups of people, and have different connotations (e.g., the King James Bible was intentionally written in a form of English that was considered archaic at the time because that would make it sound more grandiose).
If I were to use this tool, I'd be using it to ensure that whatever I'm writing is well-received by my intended audience. Because English usage is so varied, I would need to be able to control the register that it uses to ensure that the output is suitable. The fact that the product website doesn't even mention a list of supported languages, let alone supported dialects and registers within those languages, has a very everyone can see what a horse is kind of feeling[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)
gardnr
You can use a local instance of LanguageTool in a docker container for this:
InsideOutSanta
This is precisely what I've been hoping somebody would build. In my initial testing, it works well. I can even mix sentences with different languages, and it still makes correct suggestions.
The fluency suggestions are seemingly largely malfunctioning. It frequently suggests starting and ending sentences with quotes, although it also makes some useful suggestions. There seems to be an issue with analysis running synchronized, or something like that; when I type into a text field and Refine starts to run, it often blocks text entry. Selecting a suggested replacement blocks the app for half a second or so. Neither of these problems occurs with Grammarly or Language Tool. I also noticed a bunch of issues that Grammarly catches (like verb agreement) that Refine does not.
But this is an amazing first release and extremely promising. Congrats!
Deukhoofd
Does anyone know how this compares to other products in its field, such as LanguageTool and Harper? LanguageTool can be hosted locally, and Harper runs entirely as an extension, so I'm interested in how the spelling and grammar checks compare.
raegis
I just tested both on the text "Look Dick. See Jane. Jane run home. I says you go home to. They eats dinner." LanguageTool does what I would expect. Harper does not. However, both whine about two spaces after a period.
Edit: Alas, Hacker News also removes the extra space after periods.
boramalper
+1. Also worth noting that both LanguageTool [0] and Harper [1] are FOSS.
jasekt
Wonderful! I've given it a go, works in Apple's Notes app, but it does not seem to trigger suggestions in Chrome, Firefox or Slack. It does however highlight misspellings there. Any idea what can I do to enable suggestions there? I was looking for a product like this.
smcleod
How well does it handle standard international English? So many of the tools I've seen seem to only support American English.
Andrew_nenakhov
Speaking of which, isn't it time to consider American English to be the standard one?
Colour and licence are so quaint.
smcleod
Well, only Americans use it. There's no point in arguing about it your version of a language is better or worse but for the rest of the world it's incredibly annoying having to correct Zs with Ss when using LLMs or American only software.
londons_explore
> Powered by local AI models
I worry that this will make my writing more likely to fail an AI coursework detector, which could really impact my life. The risk just isn't worth it till someone has tested the output through all the big players (turnitin etc.)
Inviz
Couldnt make it to show suggestions in vscode/cursor. I would like to use the tool, but i'd expect it to work consistently across all widgets in the system (i.e. like superwhisper). Is there a technical limitation here or my misconfiguration of things?
nk8620
why is there no open source alternatives to this? Seems ripe to be just built.
admiralrohan
If you are running local LLMs what is the hardware requirement in my machine? Don't see any mention of that.
smartmic
Worth to mention as another alternative: Harper[0]
patrakov
Harper is so basic that I can't recommend it.
Does not catch a singular/plural discrepancy between the subject and the verb in a sentence--a common mistake when the expressed thought applies equally to one thing or to many things.
Does not catch a missed indefinite article--a common mistake for speakers of languages that don't have articles. Similarly, does not catch the use of the indefinite article for a thing already mentioned before.
Does not even catch the obvious "don;t" typo.
Yoric
What I'd be interested in would be something I could host on my local server (e.g. with ollama) to get suggestions on my laptop, where I write typst or markdown with Zed or VSCode.
I realize I'm a niche :)
Does anybody know of such a tool?
The screenshot shows the (corrected) example sentence:
> Sometimes I still make mistakes with articles and prepositions, but my grammar is getting better every day I practice.
In American/Simplified English, this is grammatically correct. However, in 'full fat' English, practice is a noun, whereas practise is a verb; e.g.:
> I go to my practice to practise medicine.
The problem I have with this website is that it's entirely concerned with peripheral issues. The product respects my privacy - good. The product is performant - good. The product doesn't require an Internet connection - good. The product works in many writing apps - good. The product has transparent pricing - good. But I don't give a shit about any of this until you convince me that this will consistently do the correct thing, and this website singularly fails to achieve this.