Lessons

Lessons review:

Lessons is a teaching and tutoring platform that claims instructors can sign up for free and set their own rates and terms.

How it works

You sign up, saying what you teach or tutor and what you charge. The site will send you “leads” whenever it has a customer looking for a service similar to what you provide. But if you want to respond to that customer, you’ll need to purchase site credits and spend them on your “quote.”

Disconcerting details

The problem? Lessons estimates that the cost of sending each quote will amount to 5% to 10% of your session rate. It also estimates that you’ll to send an average of 10 quotes to get a single job.

In other words, on average, you’ll earn 0 – 50% of the rate you set, after accounting for the site’s marketing expenses.

More troubling terms

And if that didn’t discourage you enough, Lessons will require you to add a credit card to your file before you respond to a single customer.

It may also require you to “set a budget” saying how how much you’re willing to spend each month to market your services. Once you set a budget and plug in your credit card information, Lessons gives itself the right to tap your credit card up to — and past — your budgeted amount. 

Worse, instructors say that the leads are often worthless, if not completely bogus.

Charging freelancers for leads is the same business model used by Thumbtack and HomeAdvisor. Those sites are also panned by freelancers for charging copious fees for bogus leads.

Recommendations:

Don’t give this site your credit card. If you want to find jobs teaching and tutoring, there are a lot of good options. Lessons is not one of them.

We recommend Wyzant, Athletes Untapped, LessonFace and these 12 tutoring platforms.

What their users say (from Indeed)

Lessons.com charges you for leads, which is expected, but the leads are not qualified in any way. I would say at least 80% of leads are scams. Wasted so much time working on signing people up who were ultimately just trying to scam you. The leads that are not scams are of very low quality. I would never encourage anyone to sign up them

From TrustPilot

I’ve had lessons for several years and have never had a legitimate lead actually contact me. They just keep reloading my first round of tokens for fake leads. I quit wasting my time after the first two years.

Scam. The people who message you are not real and either paid/made this site.I could tell after the first request. Now I laugh cuz I read the names they use and they’re the gnarliest. “Yohan” “Samuel”Scam

Definitely a scam. I am a yoga instructor and I have been using lessons for months. I get at least 3-4 inquiries a week about my services and the ONLY replies I receive are “I’m interested, what’s next,” even to questions that require a specific answer. Delete your account with lessons ASAP.

Fake leads

Lessons is a fake company and there are no students. You give Lessons $40.00 to get these fake reply’s from “interested” students and it cost $1 every time a teacher would like to reply to that student but you never receive the students contact information. I have just filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau.

I’m only giving it one star because I can’t give LESS. This apparently is a useless service. I teach scrapbooking, paper crafting, card making, stamping. What I got were ‘referrals’ (that I’m guessing could’ve been written by their own employees) looking for painting classes, pottery classes, leather working classes – you name it, they got referred to me. I wasted more time trying to write polite responses (in case they WERE real prospects). THEN try to get them to cancel! Impossible.

12/12/2022