Leaving Preply and italki: What Their Cut Actually Buys

I was on italki and Preply for about half a year, just like a regular teacher, and the reason I left wasn’t really the money. It was that I didn’t feel like I was in control. I wanted my autonomy and my independence.

Good tutors will understand this feeling. You’re good at what you do, and then you go and browse the teacher list for whatever subject you’re teaching, and you see yourself as just another one of the teachers. I don’t know how you feel when you see that, but I really felt like I was worth way more. I wanted to be seen, and I wanted to justify my value on my own terms and at the price I deserve.

The money part is real too, just not in the way people usually complain about it. Most of the time the students who chose me on those platforms were paying the full price. I just wasn’t getting that full package.

I get why they do it, because I run a tutoring agency myself now. But there’s a difference between being part of somebody’s business model and owning one. That difference is most of what this article is about, and so is the thing I had completely wrong about why those platforms paid me so little.

The part I got wrong about their cut

I didn’t quite understand why those agencies paid me so little until I got out and started doing it myself. There’s all kinds of hidden costs that aren’t obvious to a non business person.

If the agency is in real life, there’s the rental cost, there’s electricity bills, there’s marketing. If it’s online, there’s the tech stack, server hosting, admin work, employees for other departments, salespeople. Companies like Preply and italki also hire creators or actors, video editors and writers for their content marketing and the blog posts on their website for SEO, and software engineers to update and maintain features and improve the student experience overall. The list just goes on and on.

And then after all of that, they still need to make a profit. And then it comes to you, for whatever money is left.

It’s just business. They’re not evil to take teachers’ money. But as a teacher it’s very hard to imagine what it’s like for a business to grow and work, and you need to understand that.

The published numbers are not a secret either. italki’s commission on single lessons is widely reported to have gone from 15 percent up to around 21 percent. Preply starts new tutors at 33 percent and brings it down as your hours build up, 28 percent after twenty hours, and 18 percent once you’ve taught four hundred, which is somewhere around twenty months at twenty hours a month. Preply also keeps 100 percent of every trial lesson with a new student.

So is the commission just the cost of marketing?

No. It’s far more than that, and this is coming from experience. Marketing is one line in that list.

None of that makes it a bad deal, and it’s why I say they’re not evil. What it doesn’t tell you is whether you want to keep paying for all of it.

What actually changed the month I left

I quit all at once.

After I left I didn’t necessarily charge more. I just got the whole package, and the students now pay me and communicate with me directly. Within the first month my cash flow went up ten times, measured against both the ESL company I used to work for and the platforms.

I’m not telling you that number as a prediction of yours. I’m telling you so you can see what it is and what it isn’t. It’s cash flow and it isn’t my rate, because I didn’t raise my price. And it doesn’t mean the platforms were keeping ninety percent of anything, because their published numbers are right there above. What changed is that the whole thing came to me, and it came directly. If you want to go deeper on that side of it, that’s how to price your tutoring.

The part I completely underestimated

Advertising and marketing. Realizing that getting students, and letting your ideal customers know you, is the part I underestimated.

At first I tried to copy what the agencies did, just to learn. I got some students. But I didn’t know how to sell them as an independent tutor, so a lot of them saw me as unprofessional. It took ten failed trial lessons before I’d learned enough from the iteration.

And what changed after those ten wasn’t a technique. It was the fear. The fear of being your own business and of them actually paying you, that mindset just goes away after a couple of tries. It’s really like a practice thing. The trial lesson itself is worth its own article, and that one is how to teach a trial lesson.

So there were two clocks running at the same time in that first month. The money side got better immediately. The getting-new-students side fell apart, and it took much longer to fix. Those two do not move together, and if you’re only watching the first one you’ll think everything is fine for a while. For the half of the job I underestimated, start with how to market yourself as a tutor.

Don’t take their students with you

Don’t take students from them. Don’t even mention this to your students from there unless they ask.

You can do this again. You have the skills, and it can apply everywhere.

What I’d do differently

If I had to do it again, I’d watch and do more research on my own company first, on how they work as a business as a whole. Not just the part of it I could see from inside my own lessons, which was the only part I ever really looked at.

That’s the preparation I skipped, and how to start an online tutoring business goes through what to watch for while you’re still inside one.

Who should stay, and who shouldn’t

Not everyone should leave.

If you’re really a teacher at heart and you don’t want to bother with running a business, or you’re genuinely fine with the platforms, then it’s good. There’s nothing wrong with staying.

But if you ever felt that there’s more to you than just teaching every single day, or you feel like because you chose to walk on this path you can help and teach more people that need your help, then go do it.