Why I Created Natively

My name is Stepan Mikhailyuk. I'm a developer and Product Owner, and for over 10 years I've been communicating with people around the world — mostly through text.

Russian is my native language. Despite communicating with colleagues from different countries in English, I never fully mastered it. I often struggle to write clear, concise responses. Sometimes I can't recall the right word and have to look it up in a translator, only to find that particular translation doesn't fit the context.

To be honest, it's not all bad. But there are moments when it's hard to think on the spot, and I just want to get the text done quickly.

The Wake-Up Call

I also have mild dyslexia, which causes me to swap letters around without noticing — unless I read the text character by character.

One day at work, I had a task that required me to read my own old Slack messages from 2-3 years ago. I was horrified by how many obvious mistakes I had made in every short message. At first, I thought maybe my English was just worse back then, so I decided to check my recent messages.

I was shocked. I still make the same small mistakes to this day. The thing is, I know the rules. I can review an English text and tell you whether it was written by a native speaker or not. But when I write quickly, the mistakes slip through.

The Problem with Existing Tools

I've tried many paid and free tools for text correction.

Most of them highlight a bunch of errors. I understand all these errors, but when I'm writing quickly — say, replying to a message in a chat — of course I make mistakes and typos. I just want those typos to be fixed automatically. Instead, most tools make me go through corrections word by word, letter by letter, sometimes through multiple iterations. That's fine for learning, but when I need results, I just want the text to be correct and sound like a native speaker wrote it.

The best solution I found was ChatGPT. But for me, the problem is that this tool requires constantly switching between tabs, copying text back and forth. It's distracting. Also, ChatGPT is conversational — sometimes it writes something and asks a question, and you accidentally copy everything including the question.

Other tools like Grammarly are designed for grammar checking, not for making text sound like a native speaker wrote it. While recent versions added text correction features, I wasn't always happy with the results — and the subscription costs $12/month.

Building the Solution

With my app, I wanted to solve all these problems. I wanted to add the ability to fix text with one click. That's how Natively was born.

I used Natively on my own computer for several months to improve my messages in Slack, Jira, Gmail. I even used it for Russian texts (I make plenty of typos and miss commas there too).

At some point, I thought: why not share my tool with others? There are many languages in the world, many workers who communicate in a foreign language. Why not make their communication with colleagues easier?

Try It Yourself

And now you can use Natively too.

The free version performs the core function well. The only issue with the free version is that text analysis and "nativization" requires large language models, which costs money for computation. Unlike simple grammar, syntax, and punctuation checks, which aren't very intelligent and can be computed on your old laptop in less than a millisecond — making text sound native requires real AI processing power.

That's why I can't provide the service for free without limits. But I've made the prices 2-3 times lower than competitors. When I have more users, I'll be able to offer even cheaper plans.