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By the toolist.ai editors. Researched from ProWritingAid's own pages and hands-on tests published by others, not hands-on tested by toolist.ai. Updated October 14, 2026.

ProWritingAid review: pricing, features and what testers found

ProWritingAid is a grammar and style checker built for fiction and long-form writers, with 25+ editing reports, AI rewrites and chapter critiques, and whole-manuscript analyses sold as Story Credits. Premium costs $30 a month, $10 a month billed yearly ($120) or $399 once for a lifetime licence.

Our take

ProWritingAid suits novelists and other long-form writers who want to study their own prose: 25+ reports flag pacing, repetition, sticky sentences, clichés and dialogue tags, and AI critiques read a chapter or, for extra Story Credits, a whole manuscript. Premium costs $30 a month, $10 a month billed yearly ($120) or $399 once for a lifetime licence; Premium Pro, at $36, $12 ($144 a year) or $699, raises the daily AI limits from 1 to 30 Chapter Critiques and from 5 to 50 Sparks. Zapier's grammar-checker roundup picked it for creative writing, and in a side-by-side test Zapier's Ryan Kane found its reports far deeper than Grammarly's and its AI rewrites better at fitting the tone of the surrounding text, but its interface busier, with no mobile app and plagiarism checks sold separately. Kindlepreneur's Dave Chesson, a user for about ten years, finds it catches more than Grammarly on long pieces but reaches for Grammarly on quick emails. Its AI story feedback divides testers: Kevin J. Duncan found Manuscript Analysis worth running, while Ground Crew Editorial's Ariane Peveto, an editor, found the 2024 version of its chapter critique generic and contradictory. The catches are the extras and refunds: whole-book analyses cost $17.50 to $50 a credit, by plan and pack size, on top of any plan, monthly plans are never refunded, and yearly and lifetime plans only within 3 days.

Based on ProWritingAid's published plans and the hands-on tests linked below, not on a test of our own.

Good for

  • Novelists and nonfiction authors self-editing a full manuscript before it goes to beta readers or an editor
  • Writers in Scrivener, Word or Google Docs on Windows or Mac who want the reports where they already write
  • Writers who would rather not subscribe: Premium is $399 once for a lifetime licence, Premium Pro $699

Watch out for

  • Refunds are narrow: monthly plans are never refunded, yearly and lifetime plans only if you ask within 3 days of buying (cancelling or deleting the account does not trigger one), and Story Credits and plagiarism checks are non-refundable; monthly and yearly plans renew automatically.
  • Whole-book analyses are in no plan: each run costs a Story Credit, $50 at full price, $35 on Premium ($30 each in a 10-pack for $300) and $25 on Premium Pro ($17.50 each in a 10-pack for $175). Credits do not expire, and the one credit a new account gets gives only a partial analysis on the free plan.
  • Plagiarism checks cost extra on every plan, from $10 for 10 checks, and each check covers up to 2,000 words.
  • The AI limits are daily, resetting at 00:00 UTC: Premium gets 5 Sparks and 1 Chapter Critique a day, and no plan has unlimited Sparks (Premium Pro's cap is 50). A Chapter Critique counts even if you cancel it before it finishes, and after a downgrade to Free you lose access to past critiques.
  • A lifetime licence is personal (it does not pass to heirs) and lasts as long as ProWritingAid offers the service; it covers the features of the plan you bought, not new plans or services, and ProWritingAid says it may drop integrations or features few customers use.
  • There is no phone or tablet app, only browser and desktop integrations (Zapier's and Kindlepreneur's testers point to Grammarly for mobile), and ProWritingAid works in English only (US, UK, Canadian and Australian).
  • Sparks and Rephrase write text with large language models from AI developers ProWritingAid does not name (it promises never to train on your writing), and its help center warns that detectors such as Turnitin may flag writing edited with ProWritingAid even without them, so check a publisher's, contest's or school's AI rules first.

What ProWritingAid does

Price

Free plan: Grammar, spelling and punctuation checks on 500 words at a time, each editing report twice a day, and 10 Rephrases and 3 Sparks a day; new accounts also get one Story Credit (a partial whole-manuscript analysis on the free plan) and two plagiarism checks.

PlanBilled monthlyBilled yearly, per monthIncludes
Free free free 500 words at a time; grammar, spelling and punctuation, Word Explorer and thesaurus; each line-editing report twice a day; 10 Rephrases, 3 Sparks and 3 Creative Nudges a day; Story Canvas and Writing Sessions; no Chapter Critique; Story Credits at the full $50
Premium $30 $10 $120 billed yearly (the page says save 67%) or $399 once for a lifetime licence. Unlimited runs of the 25+ reports on documents of any length, unlimited Rephrases, 5 Sparks, 1 Chapter Critique and 9 Creative Nudges a day; custom style guide and dictionary, author comparison, comment and share, unlimited document storage; up to 40% off Story Credits; 3-day money-back guarantee on yearly and lifetime only; students get 25% off yearly plans through Student Beans
Premium Pro $36 $12 $144 billed yearly or $699 once for a lifetime licence. Everything in Premium plus 50 Sparks, 30 Chapter Critiques and 15 Creative Nudges a day, up to 65% off Story Credits, and the community features only Premium Pro gets: weekly live workshops with authors and editors, 200+ on-demand workshops, daily cowriting sprints, group critiques, networking events and guided challenges
Teams not listed $12 Per user, billed yearly only ($144 a user a year) for 2 to 100 users: all integrations, 1,000 term-base items and 1,000 style-guide rules, unlimited Rephrases, central user management and team analytics; SOC 2, with US or EU hosting on Microsoft Azure
Enterprise not listed not listed Contact sales, for more than 100 users: everything in Teams plus premium account management, custom integrations, on-premise options, SSO and data processing agreements

Prices last checked: 2026-10-16 on ProWritingAid's pricing page. Full breakdown: ProWritingAid pricing.

Price history

No price change since we first recorded these prices on October 14, 2026. We re-check them every week and list each change here.

What hands-on testers found

We have not tested ProWritingAid ourselves. These are the published tests we found that used it hands-on, newest first; follow the links for the full reviews.

Kindlepreneur · Kevin J. Duncan · updated August 10, 2026

What they tested: Manuscript Analysis on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (just over 29,000 words), after years of using ProWritingAid for sentence- and chapter-level editing, plus questions to ProWritingAid's team about AI training.

  • The analysis finished in 2 minutes 50 seconds and graded themes, plot, characters and setting from working well to major concern, with flagged points linked to the relevant spot in the text.
  • Some feedback was insightful and some debatable; it was right that the Mad Tea-Party lacks conventional direction, but he suspects Carroll would have ignored that note, and he treats the report as another perspective, not instructions.
  • Every new account gets one Story Credit, but no paid plan includes more, so each rerun costs a credit from $25 to $50 depending on plan (less in bundles), which he wishes ProWritingAid handled differently.
  • ProWritingAid's team told him on a call that it does not train its AI on text run through Manuscript Analysis or checked in ProWritingAid.

Kindlepreneur · Dave Chesson · updated August 10, 2026

What they tested: About ten years of use on blog posts, subscriber emails and book drafts, mostly in Google Docs, with the grammar checker, repetition reports, Rephrase, Word Explorer and writing-style settings, after the redesign into Plan, Write and Edit; the review carries his affiliate discount link.

  • As a dyslexic writer he finds it catches more than Grammarly, especially on long pieces, and a final full pass surfaces repetition and overused words.
  • It raises many flags, and acting on all of them would strip your voice out of a piece, so using it well means learning which flags to skip.
  • There is still no iPhone or Android app, only the web editor in a mobile browser, and for quick emails Grammarly is easier.
  • The one-time lifetime licence is the main reason he has stayed with it.

Zapier · Ryan Kane · updated May 7, 2025

What they tested: ProWritingAid and Grammarly side by side, from quick professional emails to a 42,000-word unfinished young adult novel (a 128-page Google Doc), with the reports, Chapter Critique, Manuscript Analysis, Rephrase and Sparks; the article was first written by David Hartshorne in June 2023.

  • The pasted novel drew nearly 2,000 suggestions; out of the box it marks many names and informal words as possible errors, which the style guide can tune, and the Clichés report caught over a dozen stale phrases in only about two chapters.
  • Chapter Critique was mostly praise with a few real critiques, but Manuscript Analysis, after five minutes, caught inconsistent rules for a key object, an unearned training montage and a character introduced and then barely mentioned again.
  • He rated Rephrase and Sparks above Grammarly's suggestions and better matched to the document's tone, but 5 Sparks a day on Premium were too few, so he gave Grammarly, whose AI edits were then unlimited, the edge for heavy AI use.
  • The interface is busier than Grammarly's, it steers you toward checking a long manuscript a section at a time, there is no mobile app, and plagiarism checks and Virtual Beta Reader cost extra.

Ground Crew Editorial · Ariane Peveto · October 4, 2024

What they tested: The 2024 version, in a review dated October 4, 2024: a colleague's 5,000-word fantasy short story that she had already edited, run through the reports and Sparks on the Premium plan and through the AI critique (now Chapter Critique, then capped at 4,000 words) three times, once on the free plan and twice on Premium, compared with her own developmental edit.

  • In 2024 the critiques of the unchanged story were mostly praise and contradicted themselves and each other, calling the world vivid and then asking for more vivid detail; only one matched a point from her own edit.
  • Sticky-sentence rewrites came out stiffer than the originals, and the cliché check flagged 'in the darkest' and 'ginger'.
  • The pronoun and sentence-length checks were useful; she rates it best for line-level mechanics, with hundreds of suggestions that are often not real problems, and judged the Sparks she tried a likelier hindrance than help to a story.

What users say

Test result

toolist.ai has not run its own test of ProWritingAid; the findings above come from the published tests linked. See how we research and test.

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Sources