If your towels have gone stiff and scratchy no matter what detergent you use, it's not the towels. It's the water. Hard water minerals bind with detergent instead of rinsing clean, and that residue builds into fabric over time — leaving it rough, less absorbent, and duller-looking than it should be.
The fix isn't buying new towels. It's changing how you wash the ones you have:
Add a half cup of white vinegar to the rinse cycle to help break up mineral buildup
Use less detergent, not more — excess soap has nothing to bind to except your fabric
Run an occasional hot wash with just vinegar, no detergent at all, to reset towels that have already gone stiff
Give it two or three washes before you judge the result. Mineral buildup doesn't release in a single cycle.
Small adjustments like this are the kind of thing we talk through with clients often — real fixes, not another product to buy. Sometimes the answer is genuinely just doing the same load differently.