Online tutoring
Platform or direct clients, the rates each one pays in practice, and how to get from the first student to a full week.
A €30 lesson does not pay €30 an hour. It pays about €20. That gap is where most expectations of tutoring quietly die, and closing it is the whole job.
Count a realistic month. Ten lessons a week is 40 booked slots, which is the ceiling for someone with a day job. Two of them will be cancelled late or not attended. Thirty-eight paid lessons at €30 is €1,140. The forty hours were occupied either way. Preparation takes twenty minutes a lesson once the material exists: 12.67 hours. Messaging, rescheduling and invoices add five minutes a slot, 3.33 hours. That is fifty-six hours for €1,140, or €20.36 an hour.
Still a decent side income. Just not the number on your profile.
The only raise a customer does not have to approve
In month one nothing is reusable. Thirty minutes of preparation per lesson turns the same 40 slots into 62.33 hours and the same €1,140 into €18.29 an hour.
By month three the worksheets exist. Twenty minutes: 56 hours, €20.36. Month six, with a folder of explanations you have given often enough to shorten: twelve minutes, 50.93 hours, €22.38. Month twelve, eight minutes for a lesson you have taught forty times: 48.4 hours, €23.55.
| Month 1 | Month 3 | Month 6 | Month 12 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Effective hourly rate | €18 | €20 | €22 | €24 |
Your price never moved. The job got faster, and speed is the only raise available to a tutor who cannot add hours to the week.
Illustrative. 40 booked slots a month, 38 paid at €30, five minutes of admin per slot, preparation falling from 30 to 8 minutes a lesson.
€25 an hour or €45 an hour
Both prices work. They produce different months.
At €25 the diary fills itself. Forty slots, thirty-eight paid lessons, €950, and the same 56 hours: €16.96 an hour. At €45 you will not fill forty slots in your first year, and the parents who shop on price will not come. Say you fill twenty-six, with one no-show: twenty-five paid lessons, €1,125, and 36.5 hours once preparation and admin are counted. That is €30.82 an hour.
Same subject, same teaching, €175 more in twenty fewer hours.
The €25 month needs forty filled slots and still earns less than the €45 month, which needs twenty-six. The cheap price is not a lower price. It is a longer week.
Illustrative. No-shows of roughly one slot in twenty at the lower prices and one in twenty-six at €45, with preparation and admin counted as working time.
The first three students
Nobody's first student comes from a marketplace. The first three come from people who already know what you do: the colleague whose daughter is four months from her Abitur, the neighbour whose son has given up on physics, the friend of a friend retaking a statistics exam.
Ask them directly. Name a price in the first message rather than the third. Charge half for the first lesson if you must, never nothing, because a free lesson teaches the parent what your time is worth. The first session is diagnostic: find the exact topic where the student stopped understanding, and say so afterwards in three lines.
Three students is a timetable you can hold while working full time. It is also where the fourth comes from, because a parent who has watched a grade move tells other parents. For most of what you will teach, the qualification is being one chapter ahead of the student rather than holding a doctorate. A second-year undergraduate can teach school maths. An intermediate Spanish speaker can teach the first two years.
A platform that brings demand, and one that rents you your students
These are different businesses wearing similar websites.
| Model | Who finds the student | What it costs you | Who owns the relationship |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marketplace | The platform | A commission starting near a third and falling as you teach more | The platform |
| Listing platform | You | Nothing per lesson; the student pays the platform a subscription | You |
| Direct | You | Roughly 1.5% plus a small fixed fee per payment | You |
The commission is not a detail you can absorb. On that €1,140 month, a cut of roughly a third leaves €764, which is €13.64 for each of your 56 hours. Once the commission falls towards a fifth, the same month pays €935. Booked and paid directly, after payment fees, it is €1,113.
Identical teaching, identical hours. The only variable is who introduced you to the student and who takes a share of every lesson afterwards.
Illustrative. Commission of roughly 33% and 18% respectively, and payment fees of roughly 1.5% plus €0.25 per lesson on direct bookings.
Marketplaces earn their cut at the start. You have no students and they have demand, and paying a third of your first year for that is a fair trade. The problem arrives at month six, when the students return every week because of you, and the platform still takes its share of a relationship it no longer does anything to maintain. Most marketplaces forbid moving students off the platform, and they enforce it. Read the terms before you plan around them.
A listing platform inverts this. The student pays for access, you keep the full lesson fee, and nobody hands you students. You answer enquiries yourself, which is real work, but every student you win is yours permanently.
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