For the past 5 years, I have been teaching on Preply and they market themselves as the leading market place which connect online language learners with potential online language tutors. However, I would like to share my experiences and offer an honest review of Preply for current and prospective tutors.
In this post, I will draw upon personal experiences and provide some more information about why I consider Preply is now placing profit above their tutors and students as well as the worrying trend that there are not as many paying students that has been claimed.
Brace yourself, this is a long read.
Online Teaching & Preply
I first started online teaching around 2014, possibly earlier, when I was working full time at a language school in Eastbourne and was needing to supplement my full time income. I came across an advert for teaching Chinese students online and dived straight into online education in the evenings and most weekends.
I continued teaching online to Chinese adult and young learners each week for years. It was essentially an opportunity to save some money and to invest in some hobbies, such as music or videography. However, I learnt a lot from teaching online during those early years, especially when online teaching was considered not real teaching.
Around 2021, China decided to review the English education market and overnight they changed their policy. Many physical schools closed down and online platforms lost a lot of their students, due to this policy change. At the time, I was working on the side with iTutorGroup, and they were removing language tutors. During this time, I decided to make a video about it and share my thoughts on why teaching for iTutorGroup was no longer a possibility.
My Preply profile went live in April 2021, when I realised that the Chinese market for language learners would no longer be viable and I needed an alternative online platform. I also expected many Chinese language learners to shift away from their in-country online platforms to those that were not being unfairly punished by the nationwide policy in China.
The Initial Years with Preply
When I first started teaching English through the Preply platform, I was rather pleased with the result. I actually gained my first student in a few days of my profile being activated. I also recall that the first two weeks seemed like a period when I was working essentially for free and delivering trial lessons with those that were seeking a professional English tutor.
Within my third week, money was slowly starting come in but I was paying up to 33% for all lessons after the trial lesson, which itself was unpaid with 100% commission to Preply. However, after 20 hours of lessons, my lesson commission reduced to 28%. After a month teaching through the Preply platform, I decided to review them with the following video below.
In the video, I highlighted the pros and cons of teaching through this platform, and the major advantage for me was I could set an hourly rate that I felt was commensurate to my experience and qualifications. However, the major drawback for the platform was the 100% commission for the 50 trial lesson. Back then, I suggested that Preply could consider offering a bonus for successful trial lessons – even 50% of the hourly rate.
In September 2021 I wanted to share with other Preply tutors how to go about delivering a successful trial lesson. I enlisted the help with another Preply tutor and recorded this lesson for others to see how I would go about teaching the first lesson.
I truly enjoyed my time teaching through the Preply platform and it was convenient as they dealt with all the necessary admin such as invoicing, billing, scheduling lessons, and marketing. Their explanation for the commission with each lesson was that it would support the platform and they would market your profile for you on social media.
Preply Five Years Later
The past few years, as well as more recently, I noticed a number of things changing with Preply – some of which were good and some which raised some red flags. The platform invested into some areas such as updating the online whiteboard, lesson material (not that I used any of their inhouse lessons), as well as AI. They also updated their classroom last year and I made a whole video about it.
On top of the new Preply Classroom, they also had Tutor Insights running in the background which offered some potential for teaching reactively to what had been picked up by AI.
All these were interesting developments that Preply was working on, and they also dabbled with group lessons but soon realised that it was perhaps too complicated to manage so quickly shelved this. These were all
Personal Concerns About Preply
More recently, Preply has been attempting to persuade their tutors to market their profile on social media and to create video content about their platform which obviously prompts a few queries from potential students. On top of that, the updated achievements to get a ‘Super Tutor’ badge, which has been targeted as recognition for ones online teaching, just raises some suspicion.
The first concern about marketing revolves around tutor self promotion on social media and the 100% commission rate for trial lessons. If the whole purpose of the commission by Preply is to market your profile but you are doing much of the work (unpaid of course), what is the point? You are doing more of the work that Preply should be doing and they are merely reaping the potential rewards. I just wonder whether their marketing department has been replaced by AI.
Secondly, there are a lot metrics placed upon Preply tutors to achieve so that there is perceived success. Each tutor on the platform will offer something unique but the standardised metrics push tutors to offer something which is all the same, and interesting point about the metrics is that they are assessed without any consideration by a person – either by data that is automatically included or by AI. And the one thing we know about AI is that it offers much of the same results for analysing data, rather than offering something unique. It’s a stretch I know, but where is the unique service offered when tutors are being pushed towards a result that is standardised.
I obviously like to ask myself why Preply is pushing their tutors to market themselves, achieve perceived success on the platform based upon their own metrics, and to convert students into a monthly subscription, and the best answer I can give is that there are less and less students using the platform. Here me out for a moment, as this is merely speculation but as we say, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire”.
A number of years ago, Preply had a payment model where students would purchase a block of lessons that could be used by the student with common blocks being 5, 10, or 20 lessons. There was no time restriction and there was much flexibility for students and tutors. However, in March 2022, Preply decided that new student accounts would be placed into a new subscription pricing model.
Now if we consider the number of subscriptions that are offered by different services and we have Apple, Disney +, Netflix, Spotify, and a whole range more. There reason why subscription pricing models are popular is that they are highly lucrative – there is a guaranteed amount of money that regularly comes in. These are great when the subscription is low enough to justify paying as a customer, but when it is converted towards education, it can become rather expensive and unjustified. Nonetheless, Preply pushed the subscription payment model, despite their claims that they can be helpful for both students and tutors, all for the goal of profit.
One of the key disadvantages for Preply students, should they be unaware, is that the subscription model is automatically renewed every 28 days. However, current Preply students are now unable to book a block of lessons with potential tutors and there is also a ‘Processing Fee’ added when students are paying. What is this processing fee and why do students pay it? I can only find little information about this on the Preply website from a Community post stating that it is related to EU VAT rules and capped at $15. Interestingly, there is threshold for EU based tutors before VAT is required and most tutors are unlikely to earn more than this, yet Preply is applying VAT named as a ‘processing fee’ to subscriptions when invoicing students. It seems rather vague and more like a chance for Preply to yet again earn more from their customers with little recourse from those that actually run their business – the tutors.
Preply shared an update to the processing fee as a community post and many tutors were quick to highlight that the tutors are indeed the ones that are eligible to pay VAT when earning above a certain threshold in their home country. Furthermore, the VAT rate at 13% is strange as the general rate in the EU is 15%, with the aforementioned rate being only for certain goods and services in Corsica, France. And why cap the processing fee at $15? And we haven’t even considered the commission rate that Preply have when they are paying their tutors for lessons, which interestingly is 18% at the lower commission total. Thus, Preply are potentially clawing back more when their VAT rate and the lower commission rate is almost a third of the tutor’s hourly rate.
The screenshot from this individual replying to Preply does incapsulate much of the concern. Furthermore, most Preply students are based in the EU so are in line to be charged with this extra processing fee. There just seems to be more questions raised and Preply has not yet responded to any of the questions asked by tutors.
Where are all the Preply students?
As I explained earlier, I have been a tutor on Preply since April 2021 and this is the first time that I have experienced a decline in student numbers. At the time of writing this, I have taught just over 1800 lessons on the platform, had a total of 288 students and earned $31,378.
Here is a breakdown of my earnings with Preply over the years, but just remember that I started teaching through this platform in April 2021 so did not complete a full year.
- 13 April 2021 to 31 December 2021: $3884.89
- 1 January 2022 to 31 December 2022: $5952.55
- 1 January 2023 to 31 December 2023: $8776.10
- 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2024: $6963.47
- 1 January 2025 to 31 December 2025: $5530.41
I earned the most in 2023 despite having to suspend online tutoring for a brief period while I relocated to South Korea from the UK. Nonetheless, since 2023, my earnings on Preply having slowly been decreasing and I actually earned less than 2022.
So far this month, I have made only $270.60 for four week’s worth of work and if this continues, I am likely to hit around $3000.00 for the year – the worst in all five years of teaching on this platform and possibly lower than 2021 when I first started out midway through the year.
This raises a few questions in my mind, with the most pressing being, “Where are all the students?” particularly in the New Year. Most individuals have renewed aims and objectives, with language learning being one such endeavour. I had one twenty five minute trial lesson last Sunday but the student didn’t even show up. They read my messages and didn’t even reply to my suggestion that we have an informal discussion to replace the missed trial.
When I first started on this platform, there were probably around 12,000-15,000 English tutors, but this has potentially doubled since 2021. Have English learners doubled since? The lack of transparency regarding student numbers does raise a flag on the platform as this is hidden.
With all the investment going on into the teaching platform, the 100% commission taken from trial lessons, as well as the lack of published profit and loss accounts, I do have a few questions.
- Where are all the new students?
- How many English students are actively taking lessons?
- Does the subscription pricing model truly benefit tutors and students or does it benefit the company? (I don’t know about you but I have subscription payment fatigue)
- Will the pricing model revert to a package or better yet, will Preply offer both subscription as well as packaging pricing for students?
- Can you kindly publish the full accounts so that all involved in Preply one way or another can make an informed decision about the company being a going concern?
However, I should remind everyone that Preply has tripled in value to $1.2 billion (not million) but I have not seen such an increase with my earnings as a tutor. Yet, someone is getting very very rich … and it is not us tutors nor our students, and they are claiming more with their processing fees while wrapping it up as a VAT requirement.
Moving Forwards
I have therefore decided to move forwards and run my own online tutoring business as I can no longer rely upon Preply to offer me regular students – I suspect that there are not many students on the platform with the absurd processing fees. We may witness the collapse of Preply this year or next, and I would urge those teaching on this platform to have the contact details of all their students as you never know when it ceases to function.
Personally, I have created my own teacher profile on this website and am now in the process of approaching past and potential students to register for personal online lessons. Furthermore, I have started to create video content to help others make the transition to become an independent online teacher with a course available on YouTube.
Despite the concerns that I have attempted to highlight in this post, I must say that I do appreciate the experience that I gained as an online tutor on Preply. There are many skills that one does achieve but there does reach a point when you can no longer support a product that is working actively to place profit over the service.
Thank you ever so much for making it to the end and I would appreciate your opinion regarding Preply. It would be interesting to hear from other Preply tutors as well as previous students as I can only vouch for my own experience and personal observations.
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