Free writing tools, and which one to use when

Writing and rewriting

Tools that produce text, or change text you already have. These are the ones that call a language model, so they are the ones your daily word allowance applies to.

AI Writer

Starts a draft from a brief. Give it the subject, the audience and roughly how long it should be, and it returns structured prose you can edit rather than an empty page. Reach for it when you know what you want to say but not how to open.

Email Writer

Turns a few bullet points into an email you can actually send, in a register you choose. It is most useful for the awkward ones — chasing an unpaid invoice, turning something down politely, apologising without grovelling.

Ask AI

A conversation rather than a single-shot tool. It reads PDF and Word files, so you can ask questions about a document instead of reading all of it again, and it will tell you when it does not know something rather than inventing an answer.

Paraphraser

Says the same thing in different words, at a strength you set. Useful when a sentence is correct but clumsy, and when you have stayed too close to a source and need genuinely your own phrasing.

AI Humanizer

Rewrites machine-flat prose so it reads like a person wrote it: sentence lengths vary, stock openers go, and the vocabulary comes back down to ordinary words. It will not promise to defeat AI detectors, and its page explains at length why any tool promising that is misleading you. Every rewrite now comes back with a receipt listing which names, numbers and quoted phrases were checked and preserved.

Tone Changer

The same content in a different register — formal, friendly, confident, direct. It is a rarer tool than it sounds: of twenty-one competing sites we catalogued, only three have one at all.

Summarizer

Reduces long text to its actual argument at a length you choose. It keeps the claims and the qualifications, and drops the padding, which is the opposite of what a word-count-based summary does.

Translator

Translation across more than a hundred languages, with a formal or informal register and the option to keep names, brands and technical terms untranslated so they survive the trip.

Checking

Tools that look at text you already have and tell you what is wrong with it, or what changed.

Grammar Checker

Spelling, grammar and punctuation, with each suggestion explained so you can disagree with it. A checker that cannot say why it wants a change is asking you to trust it blindly, which is how good sentences get flattened.

AI Detector

Estimates whether text reads as machine-written, and shows the evidence behind the number instead of a bare percentage. It is also candid about its own limits: no detector is accurate enough to act on by itself, and false positives fall hardest on people writing in a second language.

Text Compare

Shows exactly what changed between two versions — by word, character or line, including blocks that moved rather than changed. It makes no network request at all: the text never leaves your browser, and a test fails the build if that ever stops being true.

Measuring

Tools that count, score and analyse. These run in your browser or on plain arithmetic, so they cost nothing to serve and nothing to use.

Word Counter

Much larger than its name suggests. Alongside words, characters, sentences and paragraphs it gives six readability formulas, keyword density with stopwords filtered out, a case converter, reading and speaking time, and the character limits for 35 platforms from X to a meta description.

SEO Keyword Tool

Pulls the real keywords out of a page or a block of text, with density, weighting and where each term actually appears — title, first heading, opening paragraph, meta description. It prints no search-volume figures, because we have no licensed source for them and will not invent numbers.

Sources and notes

Tools for the work around the writing: citing what you read, and keeping what you wrote.

Citation Generator

Paste a DOI, ISBN, PubMed or arXiv ID, a URL or just a title, and get a finished reference and in-text citation in any of 10,861 styles, exportable to Word. Nothing is gated and there is no sign-up, which is deliberate: students are the people least able to pay for this.

Notebook

A private place to write and keep notes, with optional end-to-end encrypted sync so they survive a cleared browser and follow you to another device. It imports Word, PDF, Markdown and plain text, keeping headings, lists and tables intact.

Which one should I use?

If you are not sure where to start, find what you are trying to do.

What it costs

Nothing, to start. You can use every tool on this page without an account, and the tools that run in your browser — Text Compare, the Word Counter, the Citation Generator and the Notebook — have no usage limit at all, because they cost us nothing to serve.

The tools that call a language model do cost us money on every run, so they draw on a daily word allowance. Making a free account raises it; Pro raises it a great deal further. What the plan never changes is which tools you can open: every plan includes every tool, and every tool released in future is included in the plan you already have, at no extra cost.

Questions people ask before they start

Do I need an account?

No. Every tool works signed out, on a smaller daily allowance. An account is free and raises it, and is the only way to sync Notebook or keep drafts across devices.

Are these tools actually free, or free until the second paragraph?

Actually free, with an honest ceiling. Nothing is hidden behind a paywall mid-result: you are told the limit up front on the pricing page and again if you reach it.

Will anything here get me through an AI detector?

We will not claim that, and you should be careful of any tool that does. The humanizer improves how writing reads; whether some future detector flags it is not something anyone can promise. Our own position on academic use is written down rather than implied.

Which tool is best for students?

The Citation Generator and the Word Counter are the two most used, and both are free without limit. The AI Detector is worth reading about before relying on it, particularly if English is not your first language.

Is there more written about how this works?

Yes — the blog goes into how AI detection actually works, why false positives happen, and what to do if you are wrongly accused. Each tool page also explains its own method and its own limits.