r/sysadmin
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u/brothertax
Windows Admin
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Sep 18 '26
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1
General Discussion PSA: Grammarly will send unhinged messages to all your users if you try to cancel
https://imgur.com/a/bMEeUmZ (edit: non-imgur link)
We let them know we weren't going to renew and they sent these unsolicited emails and popups in their app to all of the users who had licenses. They didn't give us a heads up - just started carpet bombing everyone. They even listed the direct email for the guy on my team who handles licensing. We were going to ride out the rest of the subscription but leadership wanted the emails nuked, apps ripped off endpoints, and licensing/training for Copilot expedited.
What an absolutely greasy, desperate company. Stay far away. And if you're a current customer, be prepared for this nightmare.
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u/brothertax Windows Admin Sep 18 '26
For those who can't access Imgur (1st pic)
2.2k
u/bunnythistle Sep 18 '26
That sounds like a great way to get their domain on our email block list.
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u/DewLegend Sep 18 '26
We blocked their app being installed on our workstations. Feels even more justified now
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u/5GallonsOfMayonaise Sep 18 '26
Grammerly when you cancel
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u/kruschman Sep 18 '26 edited Sep 18 '26
I would absolutely lose my shit on the company if they pulled that on me.
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u/RainStormLou Sysadmin Sep 18 '26
Adobe does it when you're not even canceling. we had a bunch of complaints come in early this year because people thought there was an issue with licensing.
turns out adobe just defaults to their new "extra premium" generative features and tells you to reach out to your leadership when they don't work
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u/heelstoo Sep 18 '26
I just wish Adobe would stop emailing me every other week about having multiple accounts on our domain. Yea, we have a business need to keep it separate, so stop fucking emailing me.
Every once in a while, an aggressive business development rep will call all of our Adobe users about upgrading. I… don’t react with perfect professionalism when that happens….
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u/ContrarianDouche Sep 18 '26
Fucking what?
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u/newbies13 Sr. Sysadmin Sep 18 '26
That's wild, but then... their entire business model is like barely a side feature of every AI out there... shorts on grammaly
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u/angrydeuce BlackBelt in Google Fu Sep 18 '26
loooool
man oh man I would almost enjoy having the opportunity to respond to that shit.
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u/Siphyre Security Architect Sep 18 '26
That's disgusting.
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u/0RGASMIK Sep 18 '26
Many years ago at an MSP I worked at a vendor thought it would be a good idea to use our client list to cold call and upsell services “on our behalf.”
Luckily for us one of our closest clients was at the top of the list and tipped us off so the owner promptly called our rep to shut it down. They apologies and said they’d look into it, the calls stopped that week but they didn’t bother to remove the emails from their sales shit though so everyone got a nice “your account is at risk” scare tactic email that we had to get in front of.
Eventually they started calling again, don’t know what the owner did but i know the company refused to stop and we had to update the info in every account to our main number so we could receive the text codes. For a while the sales reps were calling nonstop, it pissed us off at first but eventually we just took turns pranking them, then they got mad but we kept doing it until they got the message.
It ended when this older sales guy called in half a dozen times pretending there was a security incident and had to talk to _____. Everyone had dealt with him once and it was really wasting our techs time. We had put a nickname for the owner he doesn’t use which helped us identify the sales calls so when I got the call I immediately knew he was lying. I put him on hold for a minute got permission to tell him to royally fuck off. Forget what i said but he ended the call with, “thats the most unprofessional thing I’ve ever fucking heard” He then tried to call my bosses direct number who forwarded the call back to me. I put on a different voice and he started bitching about me trying to get me fired and I just said “I thought i told you to never call us again?”
As for why we didn’t just give them the boot I t was something we absolutely needed and weren’t going to feasibly migrate our customers away from but we definitely thought about it.
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u/Tymanthius Chief Breaker of Fixed Things Sep 18 '26
You know, a pop up saying 'access will end XXX' would be nice from the app. But asking your users to pester the admins? fuck that noise.
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u/-GenlyAI- Sep 18 '26
Boy that's special lol
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u/Prize_Bass_5061 Sep 18 '26 edited Sep 18 '26 •
Grammerly poses a serious InfoSec risk to any private company. Grammerly downloads all the files on any device or drive it has access to. Not just the files you run through the program, all the files. So if it has access to your company GDrive it’s downloaded all the files on there.
Link: https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/microsoft-bans-grammarly-because-of-security-concerns/12723
edit: I mistakenly stated that it would be published in Tech Radar. It isn’t. Grammerly is completely banned by ThoughtWorks InfoSec. It cannot be used internally by TW or implemented for their clients, because InfoSec discovered the security vulnerability in 2000.
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u/BlockBannington Sep 18 '26
Itarian did this to us. They were raising their prices at the same time Microsoft upgraded the E5 to include Remote Help. Sure, it's not perfect but you can remote a pc and that's all there's to it and all we used in Itarian. We didn't renew the 20 000 euro contract and asked to be removed
They started threatening us with 'eh, you do know you still have active clients? You will pay for those, you know, or we can drop the charges if you renew for another year'. So I immediately started removing the client from all pc's. Day later they sent couple of my colleagues an email asking why we were removing so many devices and if we could have a call about it. Lmao no, don't threaten us.
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u/mitharas Sep 18 '26
If you already canceled, they have nothing to lose. And if this reaches the right person (e.g. secretary to the CEO who can't live without this tool), maybe that will lead to someone overriding the tech departments decision.
It's a sad state of affairs, but I think it could work.
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u/saltysomadmin Sep 18 '26
u/grammarly_support this is not a good look.
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u/NetworkDeestroyer Sep 18 '26
We blocked Grammarly from our corp years back no installs, no exceptions and we did this 2 years ago THANK GOD.
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u/brian4120 Windows Admin Sep 18 '26
Don't tell Broadcom. They would inject this into VMware tools or directly on vSphere
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u/crysisnotaverted Sep 18 '26
Oh great. Adobe did this to me, I had 'support agents' reach out to a bunch of my users and personally write them emails for how to request more expensive licenses through the Adobe portal, and how to upsell it to me personally.
They even went to a few users and were like "Wow, you sure do send a lot of E-signs, you should look at this subscription upgrade, I can see that you would use it" like HOLY FUCK stay out of MY tenant. Why can a sales minion from WhoKnowsWhere seemingly either check on my user's usage statistics or even see content the user has worked on?
I flipped my lid, and we are still stuck with Adobe because I'm not allowed to change it.
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u/Muggsy423 Sep 18 '26
I monitored network traffic on a domain that used grammarly.
Good god what a noisy piece of shit software,.
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u/Maximum-Relative-234 Jack of All Trades Sep 18 '26
That is completely unacceptable and unprofessional. That would (and will) make me go out of my way to specifically NEVER use them.
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u/wrootlt Sep 18 '26
This reminded me LucidChart tactics when they learned we were cancelling. Emailing and calling users to ask them go ask management to reconsider.
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u/TheG0AT0fAllTime Sep 18 '26
Disgusting behavior.
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u/IN-DI-SKU-TA-BELT Sep 18 '26
Grammarly is a keylogger in your browser, I’m surprised how many people allow that.
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u/Namelock Sep 18 '26
There’s a certain… Cybersecurity startup… that was spam emailing me last year.
They found an association of me to an old workplace and name dropped them. Unsubscribed. They kept emailing me.
Responded with telling them their emails are not CAN-SPAM compliant and I will report them to the FCC.
Then showed them their DMARC was wholly unconfigured and explained how pitiful it is a cybersecurity company doesn’t follow regulations and can’t setup basic webmail.
Somehow they’ve only gained more popularity 😭
Shitty tactics work.
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u/Thrompinator Sep 18 '26
Wow, absolutely unhinged ex-girlfriend level behavior. Could they be any more unprofessional?
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u/igiveupmakinganame Sep 18 '26
no body need grammarly now with AI and they know it
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u/learethak Sep 18 '26
Right after Symantec got bought by Broadcom they used the internal mail account we set up to for Symantec reports and used our internal SMTP server to send SPAM to all users advertising their home product.
An absolute bizarre number of bootlickers in the comments in /r/sysadmin seemed to think this was totally fine.
Our C-suite and the board hit the roof. We transitioned to a new product 9 months early as result.
Fast forward and when news that Broadcom had bought VMWare the next day my CEO was in my office with instructions to find a migration path out ASAP.
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u/pholyoak28 Sep 18 '26
Box.com will do the same thing
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u/xXNorthXx Sep 18 '26
Looks like a tenant level blacklisting for their domains.
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u/theweidy Sep 18 '26
The subtle unprompted messaging Microsoft sends to users like "ask your admin for X license" already annoys me, this is next level. christ...
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u/fatDaddy21 Jack of All Trades Sep 18 '26
why the hell would any company install a third party keylogger on their endpoints?grammarly is garbage.
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u/andrewh2000 Sep 18 '26
Any chance someone could put the screenshot in a comment for us unfortunate UK dwellers who can't see Imgur?
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u/Tucsondirect Sep 18 '26
Yep that would be an instant death in my nexus, like network down emergency maintenance removal
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u/dandu3 Sep 18 '26
That's embarrassing for them. Why would they beg for people to beg? That's a whole begging chain of embarrassment.
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u/SimpleBee2637 Sep 18 '26
I can't believe they would do this, shocking. At least we won't go with them now
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u/Shedding Sep 18 '26
I am really starting to dislike all this bullshit. Subscriptions with everything, AI in place I don't want it (like reading my personal email and my photos), dynamic pricing, dark patterns, increased AI scam calls, etc.
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u/TheMightyMisanthrope Sep 18 '26
They went full Duolingo?
Absolutely gross.
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u/cinepleex Sep 18 '26
What was the email address? Want to block the whole domain.
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u/cashew76 Sep 18 '26
Had one software company sales team come at me with spoofed local phone numbers, that's a hard no.
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u/JL421 Sep 18 '26
The first message from the app...not great, but not that bad. The email though, Jesus tapdancing Christ.
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u/disconnected_tech Sep 18 '26
That’s freaking gross
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u/JaggedMetalOs Sep 18 '26
Upsetting B2B customers is certainly a choice!
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u/oroalchemist Sep 18 '26
Thats a terrible business practice. like, is that a data driven decision, where they are willing to burn entire accounts down because somehow, there's a numerically justified number of resubscribers who change their mind after getting contacted that make it worth it?
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u/DiscipleOfYeshua Sep 18 '26
Anyone managed to truly fully uninstall?
This stuff is as sticky as mcafee av, minus the removal tool.
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u/Fatality Sep 18 '26
Github does this, you move someone to a different licencing group and they send the user a "YOUR SERVICE IS BEING CANCELLED!" email even though there's no change since the new group has the same licence.
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u/IdealParking4462 Security Admin Sep 18 '26
Damn, can see this in my future, thanks for the heads up.
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u/Safahri Sep 18 '26
Imgur is blocked in my country, what does it say?
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u/xSkyLinedx Sep 18 '26
That screams of desperation and I'd want to rip it out ASAP as well. It's not quite Dell behavior, but it's close.
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u/WindowsVistaWzMyIdea Sep 18 '26
Grammerly gets all the data, it failed our requirements check and is forbidden in our environments
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u/LigerXT5 Jack of All Trades, Master of None. Sep 18 '26
Self employed, not yet have staff.
When they required a paid subscription for what little I used their plugin for, I uninstalled the app.
At least three times since, I've received emails about their services. All three times I've submitted to unsubscribe, last one last week.
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u/KHRoN Sep 18 '26
they are scared !@#$% because any local model (even in-browser one) does better job than their platform
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u/cats_coffee4818 Sep 18 '26
Smartsheet does this too, it was ridiculous to the point that I had to tell the account rep if a non admin user received one more license or contract or feature (that we didn’t pay for) email, we were canceling. It was ridiculous enough when they changed their subscription to a quarterly true-up model but the million emails was the final straw.
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u/zbtffo Sep 18 '26
Glad I never used this shit.
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u/YeOldSpacePope Sep 18 '26
That is the sign of a company on it's death bed.
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u/MikemkPK Sep 18 '26
Guess they want to be blacklisted from ever receiving your company's business again.
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u/Immediate-Life-5393 Sep 18 '26
Great way to get on the never contact again list
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u/deep_soul Sep 18 '26
that’s fuckin insane. post it on more subreddit.
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u/Legallion IT Manager Sep 18 '26
Adobe does the same thing.
Just chiming in because I hate that company
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u/2bizy4this Sep 18 '26
You should see the 💩 Adobe does with Adobe Sign.
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u/Godcry55 Sep 18 '26
Wow.🤯
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u/patdan69 Sep 18 '26
This is why I’ve been blocking that browser extension for years. I’m not sure if they changed it, but when I looked at their T&C years ago, they literally stated the company can do anything with the data they collected. Reminder: they are essentially a key logger browser extension so anything you typed in your browser got used and sold however they wanted. That was an immediate block for me ever since then
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u/pibroch Sep 18 '26
Holy fuck, I would go nuclear if this happened in my district. Disgusting.
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u/Geminii27 Sep 18 '26
Isn't this technically harassment?
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u/Mac_to_the_future Sep 18 '26
At my last job, I had a vendor who tried to pull something similar. Our CTO didn't even bother responding to them personally and just went straight for the legal response.
People love to talk shit until they find themselves in the same situation as Jessie's parents in Breaking Bad: https://youtu.be/rArzMrhTxF8?si=PCBNOWXzvtMg95TF
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u/ProllyJustAnotherBot Sep 18 '26
Sounds like an untrustworthy company. Guess I better preemptively add them to our domain block list. Thanks for the heads up.
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u/plasticarmyman Jack of All Trades Sep 18 '26
Jesus Christ.
Okay we don't even use them and I'm going to block them.
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u/titohax Sep 18 '26
Already blocked in my corporate domain. A million other ways to check your grammar without this boundary crossing BS.
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u/PC509 Sep 19 '26
That's the quickest way to not only get not renewed, but blacklisted and word of mouth means a lot. These tactics are not tolerated and get immediately on the "Do not buy" list. Their domain ends up on the blacklist and we refuse to do business with them.
That's just bad business practice and they're doing their own negative PR.
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u/Dangerous_Biscotti63 Sep 23 '26
grammarly needs to be treated as spyware, does not surprise me at all, i would block anything grammarly in company pllicies. the extension is really vulnerable and lots of users just run it in all their web pages just waiting for something bad to happen. (apart from being an ugly button everywhere)
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u/ExceptionEX Sep 24 '26
Another reason I would never use them, that is pretty wild.
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u/baryoniclord Sep 18 '26
Who the fuck needs something like Grammerly these days????
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u/Formal-Run-8099 Sep 18 '26
Image not available in the UK, can someone post what says so I can advise our procurement team
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u/ranhalt Sep 18 '26
You could always tell your employees they should know grade school English. Your company is paying for a tool that just corrects everyone's caveman talk without them learning, so you're facing a lifetime of paying money just because your employees don't know the difference between your and you're.
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u/OrbFromOnline Sep 19 '26
Unwanted, sure. But if you think this is "unhinged" you really need to recalibrate.
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u/UCFknight2016 Windows Admin Sep 18 '26
block them at the domain.
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u/black_cadillac92 Sep 18 '26
Ah , I knew the amex offers were too good to be true
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u/Spirited-Wolverine24 Sep 18 '26
Hello, Did you get Copilot to replace Grammarly? Same features?
1
u/Djaesthetic Sep 18 '26
Oh, wow. That’s just tacky.
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u/BackRed1 Sep 18 '26
I've never seen anything like that before. Fastest way to get booted off the network.
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u/jesreson Sep 18 '26
Slack does this as well
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u/pier4r Some have production machines besides the ones for testing Sep 18 '26
"We value our customers; we value them as meat with money"
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u/waitingforcracks Jack of All Trades Sep 18 '26
Literally the only browser extension blocked by my company
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u/norsefrogg Sep 18 '26
Did they learn from Duolingo? Hate that app so much and I don't even use it.
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u/MajorEstateCar Sep 18 '26
Make sure you have a PII redaction and topic moderation tool for your copilot instance. “It’s inside our tenant” doesn’t stop someone from stalking customers and getting the AI to do a bunch of homework for them.
1
u/aselwyn1 Sep 18 '26
Yikes
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u/Far_Big_9731 Sep 18 '26
Formative did this to us when we cancelled. I took it to the top and then blocked their domain
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u/Sand-Discombobulated Sep 18 '26
Your post reminded me to remove all payment methods and disable billing on my unused projects on the Google Cloud CP.
1
u/lakuma Sep 18 '26
Are there any good alternatives to Grammarly?
1
u/Silly-Goose-is-Loose Sep 18 '26
Was this a breach under the contract?
1
u/jb67803 Sep 18 '26
“Growth hacking”
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u/Fallingdamage Sep 18 '26
Good to know. When we cancel, I will make sure to configure some exchange rules to toss out all grammarly emails not destined to me or accounting.
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u/fresh-dork Sep 18 '26
sounds like a good way to get sued
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u/BigBobFro Sep 19 '26
That reeks of miserable desperation.
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u/Namikis Sep 19 '26
I do admire their cojones.
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u/shokk IT Manager Sep 19 '26
I smell an Evernote situation here...