What online language teachers actually keep
If you teach languages online, the number on the pricing page is not the number in your bank account. Between the two sit trial-lesson rules, commission tiers, payout processors, currency spreads, and — on at least one platform — a markup added to your price that you never see.
This is a fee comparison written by a platform that charges a fee. That is a conflict of interest, so here is the method. Every figure in the table below links to that company’s own page and was re-read on 21 August 2026. Anything we could only find through teacher reporting is not in the table at all — it is in a list further down, with the reason. One section is the comparison that does not favour us, and the last section is what we are worse at. If a number here goes out of date, tell us and we will correct it with the date visible.
The four places money leaves
Commission. The headline percentage. Usually the smallest surprise.
Trial lessons. Preply’s own commission page states that the commission for every trial lesson with a new student is 100% —the tutor earns nothing on it (source). If a third of your first contacts are trials, your effective rate in your first months is nowhere near your headline rate.
The payout leg. Getting the money out is a separate cost from earning it. Payoneer and PayPal add processor fees, and converting to your local currency typically lands a few percent off the mid-market rate. On $1,000 of monthly earnings that is real money no commission table shows you.
Fees charged to your student. Wyzant adds a 9% service fee to every lesson on top of your rate (their fee page). It does not come out of your commission, but it comes out of the same student’s pocket, so it is part of what your price has to absorb.
The table
One lesson, teacher-set price $30, a teacher’s first month on the platform.
| Platform | Commission | You keep on $30 | Trial lessons |
|---|---|---|---|
| PreplyPreply commission model | Starts at 33%, drops to 28% after 20 hours taught; the published range is 18–33%. | $20.10 in your first 20 hours · $21.60 after them | 100% commission on every trial lesson with a new student — the tutor earns nothing. |
| WyzantFee structureSSN required to be paid | 25% platform fee — you keep 75%. Students pay a further 9% service fee on every lesson. 0% on students you refer yourself. | $22.50 — or $30.00 on a student you referred | No trial mechanic. |
| KoloLingothat’s usEarnings calculator | 15% standard, and your tier never changes your rate. 5% on students you bring yourself, fixed at the moment of booking. | $25.50 — or $28.50 on your own students | No trial mechanic. The first lesson pays like the fiftieth. |
Preply deserves one note in its favour: the bottom of its published range is a real number, and a teacher who lives on one platform for years will get there. The question is what the first hundreds of hours cost, and what the trials cost on the way.
The row that costs us
Wyzant charges nothing on students a tutor brings in themselves — in their words, that tutor “receives 100% of their rate, with no fee percentage deducted” (their own fee page). We charge 5% on the same thing. On a $30 lesson that is $1.50 a lesson in Wyzant’s favour, every lesson, indefinitely.
Two other things are true, and you should weigh all three together rather than take our word for any one of them. Wyzant requires a Social Security Number to be paid, and keeps a separate policy for tutors who do not live in the US — so if you teach from Kyiv, Oslo or Berlin, their 0% is not an offer you can accept. And their students pay that 9% service fee on every lesson, referred ones included.
If you are a US-resident tutor who only ever teaches your own students, Wyzant’s economics beat ours. We would rather say so here than have you find it out later.
Platforms deliberately left out of the table
The table contains only figures we could re-read on the platform’s own page. These are the ones we could not. We would rather leave a hole than publish a number we cannot stand behind.
- italki — Commission is widely reported by teachers as roughly 21% on single lessons, sliding down on packages. We could not find a commission page italki publishes itself, so we are not putting a number in a table on that basis.
- AmazingTalker — A commission tier starting at 30% plus a fixed 8%, plus a markup added on top of the price the teacher set. The figures come from a third-party teardown rather than their own page.
- Cambly — Teachers do not set a price. The widely-reported figure is $0.17 per talk-minute — about $10.20 an hour, paid only for minutes actually spoken. No official page found.
- Lingoda — A flat hourly rate reported at roughly €8–11 depending on country of residence. It is a school rather than a marketplace, and the rate is not teacher-set.
- Superprof — Tutors keep 100%, but students pay a monthly pass simply to make contact. Their pricing page refused our check, so the current amount is not stated here.
- Verbling — Reported at a flat 15%, the same as our standard rate. We could not confirm it on their own tutor terms.
If you teach on one of these and can point us at the official page, we will add the row and say who corrected us.
italki is the one people ask about most, and its absence here is not an oversight — its own Teacher Policy states no rate at all. What that means for a teacher, and the seven things worth checking before moving platform, are on italki alternatives for teachers.
The part the table cannot show: where you live
Wyzant requires a Social Security Number to be paid. That is not a fee — it is a whole pool of teachers who cannot be paid at all.
Stripe does not support Ukraine (their own country list). For a Ukrainian teacher, most “we pay out via Stripe” promises are not a worse rate; they are a wall. That is why we pay out through either your own Stripe Connect account or USDT/USDC on Polygon — the crypto leg exists because the bank leg does not reach everyone.
And what should you charge in the first place?
This page is about the share a platform takes. The other half of your income is the rate you set, and the market prices that far more by where you live than most teachers expect: across eight languages, the premium a native speaker commands runs from +39% to −34%, and inside a single language it still moves — Russian tutors are listed at $22/hr in Belarus and $38/hr in the United States.
We put the figures, the sources and the one row that contradicts the pattern on a separate page you are free to reuse. And if you want the two halves multiplied together — what a platform’s own average price leaves you after its own commission, language by language — that is here. An average Arabic lesson on Preply is $10; a new tutor keeps $6.70 of it.
Do this arithmetic on your own numbers
Take your real rate and your real week. Multiply by your platform’s rate. Then subtract the trials you give away, the payout fee and the currency spread. The number you get is your actual hourly wage, and on most platforms it sits well below the one on the fees page.
If you want ours run for you, the calculator on the teaching page does it for any rate.
What KoloLingo charges, stated the way we stated theirs
- 15% is the standard commission, and your tier never changes your rate. Moving up the tiers changes what students see — not what you keep, what you charge, or where you rank.
- 5% on students you bring yourself. That rate is fixed at the moment of booking and cannot be revised upward later.
- No trial mechanic at all. There is no lesson type we take 100% of.
- Payouts to your own Stripe Connect Express account, or USDT/USDC on Polygon.
- You set the rest: lesson lengths from 15 to 240 minutes in 5-minute steps, packages of 2 to 50 lessons with the validity you choose, and terms that lock in at purchase so a price change never rewrites a package someone already bought.
What we are worse at
A fee table published by a vendor is only worth reading if it costs the vendor something. So:
We just launched. If you need a platform that fills your calendar this month, we are not it — and the 5% own-student rate exists precisely because we know that.
The reputation you build here starts from nothing. We deleted our demo data rather than let invented students stand in for real ones, so there is no history here for anyone to read about you until you make it.
The crypto payout leg is settled by hand by us, with a transaction hash. It works; it is not instant.
We have no track record. Every platform above has one, including the ones with the worst complaint files. We have a commission number and a promise, and you have no particular reason to believe the second one yet.
Figures checked 21 August 2026. Found something out of date? Tell us and we will fix it with the correction visible.