italki alternatives for teachers: the seven questions to ask before you move

This page is written by a platform that would like you to teach on it. So it is not a ranked list of rivals with our logo at the top. It is the check we would run if we were the ones leaving, and the last two sections are the ones that cost us.

Start with the thing that is easy to verify and rarely mentioned: italki’s own Teacher Policy does not state a commission rate anywhere.

Section 2.1 of italki’s Teacher Policy — the document a teacher agrees to — says the Platform Service Fee is deducted when credits move into the Teacher Wallet, and that the fees “may vary based on the type of Lesson or Lessons, the number of Lessons in a package, and the Teacher’s overall performance”. It adds that italki may modify those fees at any time, with notice before the new fees take effect. Read on 25 August 2026.

No percentage appears. For the calculation itself the policy points to a support article, and that article refused our automated request on the day we checked, so we are not quoting it either — we would rather leave the hole visible than fill it from somewhere else.

You will find a figure around 21% quoted confidently across the internet. That figure comes from teachers, not from italki, and we are not going to print it as fact on a page that is arguing you should distrust unsourced numbers. Ask any platform for its rate in writing before you move, ours included.

The point is not that the rate is secret — teachers see what lands in the wallet. The point is that a fee that varies with your “overall performance” is not a rate, it is a decision. You cannot model next year’s income on it, you cannot tell a student why your price went up, and you find out it moved after it moved.

Section 2.2 of the same policy is headed “No Circumvention of Platform Service Fees”. It covers suggesting, soliciting or accepting payment outside the platform, and listing a lesson price that differs from what is actually charged.

That is an ordinary marketplace clause and we are not calling it sinister — every platform including ours needs some version of it, or the marketplace is a directory that gets paid nothing. What matters is the interaction with the previous section: a student you introduced yourself is charged on the same terms as a student the platform found for you, and moving them off is a policy breach rather than a negotiation.

If you brought no students, that is a fair deal — the platform did the expensive part. If you arrived with a channel, a mailing list or a waiting list, you are paying an acquisition fee on acquisition you did yourself, indefinitely. That is the single biggest reason teachers ask this question, and it is why the fourth item on the checklist below is the one to read twice.

Preply. Its own commission page states the commission on every trial lesson with a new student is 100%, and that subsequent lessons are charged between 18% and 33%, starting at 33% and dropping to 28% after 20 hours taught. Preply’s own worked example on that page: a new tutor charging $10 an hour receives $6.70, and a tutor past 400 hours receives $8.20 (Preply commission model, dated 19 September 2024, re-read 25 August 2026 and again on 10 September 2026).

One detail about that page worth knowing before you plan around it. Preply gives the two ends of the scale and the first step in prose — 33%, and 28% after 20 hours — and then publishes the full table of steps as an image. So the numbers quoted above are the ones stated in words, and the thresholds between 20 hours and 400 are not quoted here because they are not in the text of the page. If you are deciding whether another fifty hours moves your rate, the answer exists but not in a form you can search, copy or cite— open the article and read the picture. Checked 10 September 2026.

Wyzant. A 25% platform fee, a 9% service fee charged to the student on top, and nothing at all on students a tutor refers themselves (their fee page).

KoloLingo. 15% standard, and your tier never changes your rate — moving up the ladder changes what students see, not what you keep or where you rank. 5% on students you bring yourself, fixed at the moment of booking so a later change cannot rewrite it. No trial mechanic of any kind. Payouts to your own Stripe Connect Express account or USDT/USDC on Polygon.

The full table, with the payout leg and the platforms we deliberately left out of it, is on the fee comparison.

Wyzant charges nothing on self-referred students. We charge 5%. On a $30 lesson that is $1.50 in Wyzant’s favour, every lesson, for as long as you teach that student. If you are a US-resident tutor who only ever teaches people you found yourself, their economics beat ours and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.

The qualifier is not a rate but a wall: Wyzant requires a US Social Security Number to pay you. If you teach from Kyiv, Oslo or São Paulo, 0% is not an offer you are able to accept — which is exactly the fifth question on the checklist, and the reason it is on there.

A better percentage of the wrong price is not a raise. Across the sixteen languages we sourced, the premium a native speaker commands runs from about +40% to −34% depending on the language — it changes sign — and inside a single language the price still moves with geography: tutors of Russian are listed around $22/hr in Belarus and $38/hr in the United States, the same language and the same nativeness.

Every figure, its source and the one row that contradicts the pattern are on the price dataset, published under CC0 so you can reuse it without asking. What a platform’s own average price leaves you after its own commission, language by language, is on the earnings page.

And the rate is not only what you earn — it is who sees you. Benjamin Hessler, who taught on italki and Preply and now runs his own school, describes the mechanism from the inside. A new profile is pushed up for a short period (on italki, in his experience, roughly two weeks), because it has nothing else to speak for it yet: no reviews, no hours taught. After that, price acts as a filter before ranking does: je höher der Stundenpreis, desto häufiger fällt man durch den Filter der Interessenten. Es gibt also automatisch weniger Anfragen. The higher the hourly price, the more often you fall out of a student’s filter, so the enquiries stop before any ranking gets a say. He started as a tutor at 11 euros an hour, gained students quickly, and raised his price step by step, testing where the sweet spot between ranking, enquiries and actual bookings lay.

That is his experience of two platforms, not a rule either of them publishes, and we have no way to verify it from the outside. We are naming it because the same trap exists here: a rate set where nobody filters for it earns a better percentage of nothing.

We just launched. italki has demand you can walk into. We do not. If what you need is a full calendar next month, no fee structure on this page fixes that, and you should stay where the students are.

Your reputation here starts at zero. We deleted our demo data rather than let invented reviews stand in for real ones, so there is no history for a student to read about you until you make it. On a platform where you already have two hundred reviews, that is a real cost of moving, and the reviews do not travel.

The crypto payout leg is settled by hand by us, with a transaction hash. It works, and it reaches teachers the bank rails do not. It is not instant.

We have no track record. Every platform named on this page has one. We have a published rate, a policy you can read, and no particular claim on your trust yet. The most sensible version of moving is not moving: keep the platform that fills your calendar, and bring your own students somewhere that charges you 5% for the privilege of serving people you already had.