Yangyang Xi, born in China and raised in Japan, conceived of Lang-8.com when he was 23 years old.

In return, his friends wrote entries in Yangyang's primary language (Japanese) for him to correct.

Between April and August 2007 the website was restructured and on June 29, 2007 YangYang Xi established the Lang-8 Inc. company.

According to their blog post, this suspension was due to the fact that they were a small company and therefore did not have the resources to deal with spammers and bots that had been abusing the platform, and to work on the Lang-8 app and its sister service HiNative simultaneously.

The correction feature included things such as color coding, bold, and strikethrough.

Entries posted by premium account members were given priority display which increased the likelihood of receiving a correction.

Other premium account features included the ability to add images to entries, download PDF versions of entries/corrections, add an unlimited number of learning languages, hide advertisements, perform personal journal searches, customize the background with images, and make suggestions to improve correction entry.