You cancelled Grammarly. Now what?

First, make sure the cancellation actually took

Before anything else, confirm it. Open the billing page and check that the plan shows as ending rather than renewing, and look at the date. Annual plans often keep working until the period ends, which is fine — you have already paid — but it also means you have a window of full access you may as well use on anything you have pending.

Check the email address the receipts went to, too. A charge that arrives on a card you rarely look at, for a plan you believe you cancelled, is the single most common version of this story.

What you still have, for nothing

More than people expect.

The free tier of whatever you cancelled usually survives the cancellation and still catches spelling and basic grammar.

Microsoft Word's Editor flags wordiness, passive constructions and formality, and it is already installed.

Google Docs suggests rephrasings inline and is free with any account.

LanguageTool's free tier handles a few thousand characters per check and is unusually strong outside English.

Reading it aloud. Unpaid, unglamorous, and it catches more than any of the above. Every sentence you stumble over is a sentence to rewrite.

Run a document through these and a good deal of it will be fixed. What survives is the category the free tiers are drawn to exclude: sentences that are correct and still hard to follow.

Covering the gap the free tiers leave

That remaining category is the rewriting, and it is the part a subscription was charging you for.

The per-use answer is to buy an edit for the document you actually have. polishdoc does exactly this: paste the text, get a free sample of the edit on your own words, and pay once for the whole document if the sample is good. Nothing renews, so you are not re-entering the situation you just left.

A general AI chat tool is the other option and it works, with one caveat worth taking seriously: it will add sentences you never wrote unless you tell it not to, and for an application or an assignment that can be a real problem. A tool built for editing is not permitted to add content at all, which is a smaller promise but a more useful one.

Keeping the quality without the plan

Three habits do most of the work the extension was doing for you.

Write first, edit second. The extension trained you to fix as you go. Drafting without interruption and editing in a single pass afterwards is faster and produces better paragraphs.

Keep a list of your own three mistakes. Nearly everyone has a small fixed set — a preposition that always goes wrong, a tense that drifts, a comma habit. After two edited documents you will know yours, and you can check for them directly.

Leave it overnight. Twelve hours is the cheapest editor there is. You will see the document as a stranger would, which is the thing the tool was approximating.

When to go back

Go back without embarrassment if your writing load changes. A new job with client-facing email, a dissertation, a year of applications — at one or two documents a week a subscription is genuinely the cheaper option and the extension earns its keep.

The point of cancelling was never that the product was bad. It was that you were paying a writer's price on an occasional writer's schedule. If the schedule changes, so should the answer.