How much does an online language tutor cost?

The price bands, and what sets them

At the lower end — roughly £9 to £13 an hour — you'll find tutors early in their teaching career, often native speakers without a teaching qualification. For conversation they're excellent: if your problem is that you understand but don't speak, this is the best value there is.

In the middle — £13 to £21 — sit tutors with a few years behind them and a structured method. That's the right band when you need to move from one level to the next, because what you're buying is someone who knows what order to teach things in, not just someone to talk to.

Above £21 you're paying for specialisation: exam preparation with a date in the diary, professional language for a specific field, correction of academic writing. Those hours are worth the money only when your goal is equally specific — paying for specialisation to do general conversation is throwing away the difference.

What barely matters is the language. An hour of English and an hour of Italian cost roughly the same: the variable is the person, not the tongue.

How the figure you pay is put together

The rate is set by the tutor, not the platform. On top of that rate we take a commission: students see a price 8% above the tutor's rate, and tutors receive 82% of their own rate. Those two parts together are what keeps the service running — the video classroom, payments, the calendar, the materials, support.

We spell this out because it's the part of the market that's most opaque, and opacity is what produces the furious reviews: not the cost, but the cost that appears later. Here, the figure in the summary before you confirm is the figure we charge, with nothing added at checkout.

The other source of surprises is currency conversion. Your currency is fixed at your first purchase and stays for every purchase after it: no conversions that change the total from one month to the next.

What reaching a level actually costs

The useful question isn't what an hour costs, it's what the result costs. Going from A2 to B1 takes roughly 150–200 hours of study in total — but only part of that needs to be one-to-one teaching. The rest is exercises, reading and practice on your own, which costs nothing.

A rhythm that works for most people is one lesson a week plus twenty or thirty minutes a day alone. At a £13 rate that's around £52 a month in lessons, plus your time. Over a year that usually covers a full level.

People in a hurry double the lessons, not the exercises: the part you can't speed up alone is the part where someone hears you speak and corrects you. People on a tight budget do the opposite — a lesson every fortnight and plenty of practice in between — and still get there, more slowly.

What you can do without spending anything

On this platform everything written — grammar, readings, vocabulary, verbs, exercises that regenerate each time — is open and free, with no quantity limit and no card required. You only pay for a person's time and for the features that use artificial intelligence.

The first trial lesson is 25 minutes and free, once. It exists for exactly one purpose: to find out whether that person is right for you before you commit money. It's worth spending it on the tutor who convinced you most, not the first one on the list.