Big news: Grammarly is acquiring Coda!

[Adam_Maggs]

I imagine financial pressures likely influenced the acquisition (Coda’s market struggles and Grammarly’s uncertain future in the new AI landscape), but I can also see a genuine product synergy between the two companies. By combining Grammarly’s AI communication expertise with Coda’s collaborative workspace and workflows, they can create a more competitive, AI-driven platform for modern knowledge workers.

That said, I feel that if Coda had only turned their AI attentions on assisting with doc schemas and formulas they would have lowered the learning curve for SME’s and individual users, enough to become the dominant product in the space.

[Justin_McDaniel1]

This is just… bizarre. I really don’t know what to make of this. When I first read the headline, I thought, “you know, maybe there’s something here that I’m missing”, but now after reading the blog post, I’m realizing that this is just another tech company with no real vision. Coda always struck me as a team of trailblazers building an app that actually empowered people and businesses by making programming principles accessible to anybody. But instead, we’re getting an app built to empower AI.

I’m so tired of this whole “sneak peak into the future” bullshit from companies like this. You have people that have dedicated immense amounts of time and invested REAL MONEY into your platforms, and the best you can give them is a blog post and a fireside chat? I want to see a real roadmap.

Just take this sentence for example:

“In the longer term, we plan to weave the best of Coda and Grammarly together. It will combine your company knowledge, generative AI chat features, a full productivity suite, and hundreds of agents to help you work smarter. We aim to redefine productivity for the AI era.”

This literally tells us nothing. It sounds like every single ambiguous announcement from every tech CEO in the last three years. Did you ever even stop to think if your users actually want this? Or are you too caught up in your own ego to care?

This is really disappointing. If you all were struggling so bad that you had to sell out to Grammarly, then you should have just open sourced the app and let the users take the wheel. We actually would have done something unique with it, at least. This is probably the last time I’ll ever open up this website again. Rant over.

[Jordan_Axani]

It sounds good in the surface, but it’s a bit different.

We run a mental health clinic. Our therapists are a mix of part-time and full-time, we’re bootstrapped, and in a red ocean. Healthcare service businesses in our sector have very low margins, so for us we’d never be able to afford a tool like Coda if we had to pay $29 per user across the whole team.

I imagine that this is reasonably common among many of Coda’s clients, and Coda is one of the very few platforms that have a pricing model that works well for companies like ours where there’s a heck of a lot more readers than editors.

Grammarly’s growth model has always been about having a strong freemium service, so hopefully there’s a sustained effort to have a happy balance of paid and free users within an account.

[Jordan_Axani]

Wait, did the pricing structure not change dramatically around a year ago?

Coda has moved fast between Snowflake and this and it would be awesome for loyal clients (like all of us) to have a concrete a sense of where the product and business model was heading.

It goes without saying, but Coda isn’t some throwaway app for us. It’s literally core to how our businesses run. That ups the ante, and is why there’s so much concern in this thread.

Also, obviously Shashir is a visionary leader and probably a great boss, but his announcement blog really said nothing unique or reassuring to existing clients… especially since Grammarly bought Coda and not the other way around! The comms feel rushed.

[David_Knell]

Some of us like building our own tools. Just because a robot can lift more weight than me doesn’t mean I stop going to the gym. I want to make my own tools. Adding AI is fine if it doesn’t get in the way of DIY. If we didn’t want DIY we would use other tools.

[Ash_Price]

Grammarly it absolutely awful. I don’t know anybody that uses it that doesn’t complain. CEO is out of touch with its users. Coda AI is shite too. The amount of times I asked it for a Coda formula and 10 times in a row it would spit out formulas that had syntax incompatible with Coda.

Coda, your strength is in your formulas, your “canvas” type document. It’s not in your Google Doc, “writing” side of things. Majority of users don’t do note taking in your app because your mobile app is horse shit and your UI/UX team need sacking and bring in a new team. I’ve had to change the entire CSS of Coda to make it look reasonably presentable. See the photo difference. The Coda UI/UX is so bad compared to apps like Notion, plus you’ve been going for what’s got to be a decade and no decent mobile app?

The CEO needs to spend more time fixing Coda than piss arsing around with his mates selling his company to an AI company 99% of its users want nothing to do with. What’s worse is I guarantee prices will increase to cover costs of the merger and the “features” nobody wants.

[Ash_Price]

This is Coda without CSS injection:

[Tamerlan_PRO]

Lately, there has already been an air of uncertainty, and after this news, even more questions about the platform’s future have arisen. Grammarly and Coda are two entirely different universes. This leads to the unsettling thought that the situation might be much more prosaic: the platform is simply being offloaded while it’s still viable, under the guise of introducing yet another (and I’m so sick of this crap) wave of AI innovations.

This, in turn, sparks another chain of thoughts. It seems like the company’s leadership has a completely different vision compared to the platform’s users regarding what Coda truly represents and the potential it holds.

AI plays the smallest role in that potential. Honestly, AI in Coda can’t even help with formulas for Coda itself, let alone be anything close to Jarvis from the Tony Stark universe. And the idea that AI could automatically identify data patterns, determine workspace architecture, predefine the best scenarios for designing a workspace, or build a pipeline based on user needs while making it all look organic and convenient—well, those are dreams from the realm of the unreal.

Everything great we design in Coda, we design ourselves. AI can’t replicate it, and I’m confident it won’t be able to for another ten years. In all other respects, the introduction of AI from this news sounds like very loud words with very quiet results.

I even have more questions for Grammarly. If they suddenly needed an advanced text editor, there are plenty of startups with truly sophisticated text editors where Grammarly could have fit organically. All in all, so many questions and so few answers.

[Paul_Kazuwa]

So should we start looking for life jackets in readiness to jump ship? I pray they don’t mess up what they have already achieved building coda. If not handled carefully, this could be its undoing.

[Kamilla_Foler]

I’m casually optimistic as well. I already use Grammarly Pro and pay for Coda so I hope I can merge this billing. What kind of timeline are we looking at?

As others have said, I don’t use Grammarly for note taking or anything… I use it for tables and forms.

[Breno_Nunes]

Grammarly sells a far inferior product than Coda. They needed to diversify to compete with others productivity tools. They have a lot to gain with this deal.
Coda gains financial support so it can expand its business.
Shishir will be the CEO. This is the most important news here. He will not allow what he’s built from ground up to be dismantled.
I’m optimistic about the future of Coda.

[Gareth_Simpson1]

Can confirm. I do love Coda, but it’s the Doc Maker pricing that stands out for me, as it makes cross-functional collaboration seamless across teams with different login credentials and domains.

If I suddenly have to pay for every seat, the value of the actual Coda product comes under much greater scrutiny. The database not having a ‘true’ 1-to-1 and 1-to-many relationship becomes hard to justify—it’s somewhat problematic in several ways.

Suddenly, Notion is back in play, especially since younger people fresh out of education are familiar with it and are extremely vocal about it. Airtable is also very much back in play because the older ‘Excel’ crowd finds it far less intimidating.

[Maxence_Walbrou]

There are so many fields to improve before AI in Coda :

• International standards (would I simply dare thinking « internationalization » ),
• Mobile usage,
• General UX (e.g. : Do you simply use your dragNDrop system ? Did you benchmark what other actors in your industry do ?)
• API with no sync delays
• …
• COMMUNITY LISTENING (Listening without answering = 0)

@Coda : Will you handle those elements also in your roadmap ? Or continue ignoring it ?

[Bill_French2]

I get the sense that there are vastly more haters in this thread than lovers of innovation and AI.

I get it, AI-aversion is a thing and there’s no shortage of products that have been made worse because of AI. Grammarly, however, is not one of them. They’ve been applying AI to real customer needs for more than a decade and they NEVER called it AI. This is the mark of mainstream AI - when you stop calling it AI, it will have reached a maturity worthy of a product’s core competence.

Not one of the messages here mention the pervasive presence of Grammarly for it’s users. Most think it runs cutely in a browser. It does, of course, but the tens of millions of users who use Grammarly this way is just a slice of the topography where Grammarly shines.

Its presence is far more profound than the browser. Increasingly, knowledge workers (like me) use the Grammarly Desktop, which places Grammarly in EVERY app I use, including–but not limited to–Slack, email apps, note-taking apps, database apps, design apps, and every imaginable place where I write, capture, and share information.

This thread is overflowing with customers who need help understanding the presence and reach Grammarly makes possible and the vision of a combined integration and eventual blending of these tools as a cohesive platform for creating and using structured and unstructured information.

• Imagine this popup UI with the ability to tap Coda documents, tables, and even CFL inline in every app you use.
• Imagine Coda at your fingertips 24/7 in every task to influence everything you write.
• Imagine the ability to capture content and context from every place you work directly into Coda.
• Imagine not just a grammar copilot everywhere you type – but a comprehensive data and content copilot as well.

I use both Coda and Grammarly with paid Enterprise and Premium accounts for more than a half decade.

• Grammarly makes me a better writer, worker, composer of technical documents and with great communication precision.
• Coda makes be a better information consumer, creator, and productive team member.

How could anyone say they wouldn’t want these tools merged?

They are each leaders in the quest to work better, faster, smarter, and more successfuly with information.

Grammarly also addresses the interoperability paradox which I have written about here.

Let’s also realize that AI copilots for software engineering have really taken off as generative AI becomes more deterministic. Have you seen any similar products for workers who broadly deal with information every minute of every day? Microsoft has one - it is well-received by Office365 users. It’s not a great product, but it leans into this emerging segment.

Someday, everyone will have a copilot or two that knows them well, and knows their relevant information in EVERY context they encounter.

More than 18 months ago I predicted Grammarly would emerge as a copilot for information workers.

Another CoPilot: GrammarlyGO

My vision and requirements are apparently contrary to the sentiments expressed in this thread. I’m old, so sometimes I get it wrong. In this merger, I just want to know where to send my check. This is a winning combination that could change many things about information work.

[Piet_Strydom]

Thank you Bill.

Always an informed opinion.

I also believe that this a major step forward in how we utilise computers to not only access information and knowledge, but also prepare knowledge to share with other people.

P

[Marc_Fitt]

I was looking into Grammarly, and it’s not like they are so ‘special/advanced’ with ‘AI’.
They just connect to OpenAI, which Coda could have done on its own. If it was just a question of money, they could have easily fixed it.

In the end, there are no ways they will compete with a Native AI company, they simply have to offer good integration and let user build on top of that.

Security | Grammarly

[Bill_French2]

@Marc_Fitt

They just connect to OpenAI,

For general AI, correct. But that’s not the extent of Grammarly “AI”. And, like many successful products, how they help customers save time, prevent embarrassing, career-ending moments, is irrelevant.

[Aymeric_Matencio]

That said, I feel that if Coda had only turned their AI attentions on assisting with doc schemas and formulas they would have lowered the learning curve for SME’s and individual users, enough to become the dominant product in the space.

My thoughts exactly. ChatGPT can do that but Coda’s own AI cannot… Hopefully they get better with CodaBrain because so far the AI integration from Snowflake is very disappointing.

[Coda_Solutions]

The niche of coda is that it gives us the ability to custom create our own “software” with powerful tables, formulas, buttons, etc. Coda pricing is based on team members building a productivity doc for their users, yet Coda’s idea and user’s idea of what that should look like is vastly differently.

It seems Coda wants to push this AI doc route with the introduction of Coda Brain. The problem is this and Snowflake are enterprise only. So, does that mean the non-enterprise users are no longer of value? Actions (or lack of) and words are not matching @shishir -…this year was all about enterprise rollouts.

Coda gives us a unique way to integrate other SaaS that an individual or business uses in the form of tables from which we can create powerful workflows. This helps us reduce cost, especially for small/medium businesses that have budget constraints. The trade off for having free editors/viewer is that WE have to build it ourselves. (My concern is that we are going to be pushed into the Coda Brain doc/platform - Coda version ?.? - and its pricing)

I understand that this current pricing probably doesn’t work well for Coda, I mean it did get acquired by Grammarly. (Note: In 2021, Coda was valued at $1.4 billion after closing a $100 million Series D funding round). Instead why not focus on areas of revenue like:

• Creating Developer Tools as add ons that allows users to build their own UI/UX? (i.e. be able to share a doc to someone with editing/viewing permissions without them needing a Coda account or better yet have portal feature)
• Creating Powerful (in-house) Automations like make/zapier with similar features/pricing structure?
• Advanced Security & Compliance subscriptions with advanced encryption, audit logs, compliance (HIPAA), and other critical features.

… to name a few.

Coda has the ability to be a powerhouse platform to build and operate a business/organization, yet it went the route of merging with an AI-powered writing assistant tool that helps users improve their writing

The problem is other AI tools/platform will be created to compete and probably exceed Coda’s new vision.

[Jeremy_G]

Please Coda, keep supporting small businesses like mine who use Coda for EVERYTHING at a pricepoint that is accessible (Coda Team). I don’t need or want more AI. I want it switched off. Coda is for organising, processing and presenting information in a highly personalised way, automating tasks. Please don’t abandon the core use case of Coda.

Users like me got you to this point, we got here together, please stay true to the core idea of what Coda has been about. And include an ‘AI-disabled’ option, for Gods sake, please.