It depends on how much you write — and on what a resit would cost you in time, stress and a capped mark. For roughly the price of one meal deal a month, a checker that catches referencing errors and AI-looking passages before you submit can be worth it.
If you only need an occasional look, the free scan may be all you ever need. Start there, and only upgrade if the free tier runs out before your essays do.
Be honest about volume
This is the whole decision, and it takes about ten seconds.
- One or two essays this term? Use the free scan. Keep your money. Genuinely.
- Writing most weeks, plus a dissertation? Then you're the person a subscription is actually for — ten deep scans a month, referencing and grammar checks, and an advisor that knows your course.
- Somewhere in between? Subscribe for the month your deadlines cluster, and cancel. Nobody at SafeGrade will be offended.
The number it's actually competing against
£3.99 is not the figure to weigh. The figure to weigh is what goes wrong without it.
A capped resit mark. A module retaken over the summer. A misconduct meeting you spend three weeks dreading. A reference list that quietly drops you a grade band because the punctuation was wrong in forty places.
Referencing is the unglamorous one, and it's where the money usually pays for itself. It rarely fails an essay outright; it just shaves marks off every submission you make, all year, invisibly. A checker that catches a systematically wrong citation format in October is worth more than one that catches an AI flag in May.
What you're not buying
Be clear-eyed about this too. No checker guarantees a grade, and no checker can promise your university's detector will agree with it — different tools, different thresholds, and as we cover in can Turnitin be wrong about AI?, the whole category is less reliable than it markets itself as. What you're buying is sight: knowing what your essay looks like while you can still change it, instead of finding out afterwards.
If that's worth a meal deal a month to you, it's worth it. If it isn't, the free scan is still yours and always will be.
The first scan costs nothing and needs no card. Pro is £3.99/month for ten deep scans, referencing, grammar and Sage — cancel whenever your deadlines ease off.
Run one free scan →No card for the free scan. Cancel Pro any time.