May 2026
TidyText is a free, browser-based AI writing tool that improves, polishes, and translates your text using your own AI API key. No account. No subscription. No data sent to us. Just better writing.
You paste in text. TidyText sends it to the AI provider you've chosen — Google Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, or any OpenAI-compatible API. The improved version comes back. That's it.
Behind that simplicity is a carefully designed set of prompts tuned for different goals: improving clarity, fixing grammar and spelling, adjusting tone, translating naturally, and making AI-generated text sound human again.
It's a tool for people who care about the quality of their words.
Polish drafts without surrendering your voice to a subscription service.
Sharpen emails, reports, and proposals without the bloat of enterprise tools.
Write naturally in English (or another language) without losing your meaning.
Bring your own key, run it how you want, inspect every prompt in the source.
Your API key. Your text. Your choice of AI. No lock-in, no monthly fee, no black box.
Most AI writing tools are subscriptions that sit between you and the underlying AI model. They mark up the cost, store your data, and nudge you toward their preferred provider. TidyText does the opposite.
You connect directly to whatever AI provider you trust and pay for. TidyText just provides the interface, the prompts, and the experience. When you're done, close the tab. Nothing is left behind on our end.
| Feature | TidyText | Grammarly | QuillBot |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free to use | ✓ | Partial | Partial |
| No account required | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Works with any AI provider | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Data never sent to our servers | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Translation included | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Humanise AI text | ✓ | ✗ | Add-on |
| Monthly subscription cost | £0 | £16+/month | £16+/month |
Most professionals who use AI to improve their writing — emails, reports, proposals, LinkedIn posts — are paying £16–£20 a month for ChatGPT Plus or a similar subscription. For a tool they use mainly to tidy up text.
With TidyText and your own API key, the same task costs a fraction of a penny. Here's what the numbers actually look like.
| Scenario | TidyText + Gemini API | ChatGPT Plus |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly fee | £0 | ~£16/month |
| Cost per text improvement | ~£0.001 | Included in subscription |
| 100 improvements/month | ~£0.07 | £16 |
| 500 improvements/month | ~£0.35 | £16 |
| Annual cost | Under £5 | ~£192 |
| Account required | No | Yes |
| Data sent to a third party | Only your chosen AI provider | OpenAI servers |
How the maths works: TidyText uses Gemini 2.5 Flash by default — one of the most capable and cheapest models available. A typical text-improvement request uses roughly 400 input tokens and 300 output tokens. At current API rates, that costs about $0.001 per request.
Gemini also offers a free tier of 1,500 requests per day via Google AI Studio. For most professionals, the cost of using TidyText is effectively zero — unless your usage is extremely high.
You'd need to run over 22,000 improvements in a single month to spend the equivalent of one ChatGPT Plus subscription.
The subscription tools aren't bad — they're just not built for this use case. If all you need is clean, polished text, you're paying for a lot of features you'll never touch.
TidyText is an independent project — not a VC-backed startup, not a growth-at-all-costs product. It was built by someone who wanted a writing tool that respected their API spend and their privacy, and couldn't find one that existed.
If you have a question, a bug report, or just want to say hello, use the contact form. Questions about how TidyText works are also answered in the FAQ.
Try TidyText →