Yesterday a small, solo-built tool popped up in my feed, and I got genuinely excited, because it fixes something that’s bugged me for months. Every AI writing assistant dumps its suggestions into a side chat, so you’re stuck copying and pasting between two windows while you lose your place in the actual document. You ask for a rewrite, the answer shows up three inches away from the paragraph it’s supposed to fix, and by the time you’ve pasted it back in you’ve forgotten why you asked in the first place. This one skips that whole dance. The build, “HandWrought,” puts AI suggestions directly inline as proper track changes, and it turns out the real twist here isn’t the editor at all. u/manishpamnani169, a solo builder on Reddit, spent about five weeks putting it together, launched on Product Hunt and Hacker News a bit over a week ago, and the story he shared about what happened right after launch is the part worth reading closely.
What’s New
HandWrought is an AI writing editor built around one idea: suggestions should show up exactly where your text already lives. Instead of a chat panel you bounce between, edits land inline, so you read them in context and accept or reject them the way you’d handle a human editor’s redlines. It’s a different approach than the usual pattern of asking a chatbot to rewrite a paragraph and then manually pasting the result back in, and it’s closer to how Google Docs suggestions or a real copyeditor’s markup already work, just with an AI doing the marking. Think about the difference between a reviewer scribbling in the margin of your draft versus a reviewer emailing you a completely separate document with their notes. One keeps your flow intact, the other breaks it every single time. Billing went fully live just a few days after the public launch too, so this isn’t a demo sitting on a landing page, it’s a running product with real users and real payments already attached, which matters because it means the pricing decisions below were made under actual pressure, not in a vacuum.
The Twist
Here’s the part that got me. The twist isn’t a hidden feature, it’s a business decision the creator almost made and didn’t. He considered running a cheaper, weaker model on the free tier to cut inference costs, then realized that would hurt exactly the users most likely to leave the first reviews. Think about it from a launch-week perspective: your free users are the ones writing the reviews that decide whether anyone else tries the tool, so serving them a watered-down model is the fastest way to sabotage your own launch. So free users get the same quality as paying ones, even though it costs more to run.
He also spent way too long, in his own words, going back and forth between a subscription and one-time credit packs that never expire. He landed on the credits. It’s less standard, but he figured it was the more honest structure for a solo, unproven product where nobody wants to hand over a recurring charge before they trust the thing. A subscription assumes ongoing trust you haven’t earned yet, a credit pack just asks someone to try it once and pay for what they actually use.
The last lesson is one every solo builder skips until it bites them: rate-limiting and abuse protection on the free tier. He said it mattered more than expected, because free-tier cost exposure is real the moment you don’t gate it early. A handful of accounts hammering an unguarded free tier can burn through a week of inference budget in a day. Worth remembering if you’re shipping anything with a free inference tier of your own.
Try It: A Mini Workflow
If you want to see how the inline approach actually feels, here’s the fast path:
- Open a document and paste or write a draft.
- 🤖 Ask the AI to tighten a paragraph, fix tone, or restructure a section.
- ✏️ Watch the suggestion land inline as a tracked change instead of a chat bubble.
- Accept or reject changes line by line, the way you would with a human editor.
- 💳 Spend from a one-time credit pack instead of watching a subscription clock.
Pro Tip
Because pricing is credit-based with no expiry, this setup rewards occasional heavy editing sessions more than daily light touch-ups. Buy a pack before a big writing push instead of topping up in tiny amounts, and you’ll get a better per-word rate out of it too.
And if you’re weighing free-tier decisions on your own AI tool, borrow the test this creator used: would a worse free experience specifically hurt the users most likely to leave your first reviews? If yes, don’t cut that corner just to save on inference cost. It’s a small rule, but it’s the kind of thing that decides whether your launch week reviews read as “rough but promising” or just “cheap.”
Go Check It Out 🚀
This one’s worth the five minutes it takes to try. Head to the original Reddit thread for the link and the creator’s full breakdown, he mentioned he’s happy to go deeper on any of it if people ask. Go see if track changes finally makes AI editing feel less like babysitting a chatbot 👀
An editor where AI edits show up as track-changes, not chat
by u/manishpamnani169 in PromptEngineering