What: Preply is an online tutoring platform that expects you to do a lot of work for free.
Expected pay: you set your rates
Husl$core: $
Commissions & fees: 18% to 100%
Where: Nationwide
Requirements: 18 or older; verify ID and any claimed credentials
Review:
Online tutoring jobs are usually pretty great. The jobs provided by Preply are the exception to this rule. The reason: The site demands that tutors provide their first session with each and every new student for free. The session is not free to the student, mind you. Preply simply takes 100% commission on those first sessions. That’s a great deal for Preply and a miserable deal for you.
After the first session, Preply’s commission rate drops to 33%. Eventually– after 400 hours of tutoring on this platform — the commission rate drops to the more normal 18%. SideHusl considers this commission structure to be exploitative and outrageous.
Worse, users complain that the platform itself is unstable, forcing tutors to go off-platform to complete their sessions after a site crash. Whether or not you get paid when going offsite is another question.
Recommendations:
Fortunately, jobs in tutoring are plentiful. And most of them offer decent pay and excellent working conditions. To find a better tutoring job, check out our blog post on a dozen highly-rated tutoring platforms. Some of these platforms specialize in specific areas, such as math, programing or English as a Foreign Language. But many offer hundreds of subjects, including art, music and dance.
We also recommend Outschool, an online teaching platform where you design the curriculum. Although each class must be approved by the site, they’re looking for appropriateness for the age group, not whether you follow a set curriculum.
What their users say: (from Indeed)
“After my first few classes, I realized several negative things:
– as teacher you earn nothing of first class of every new student!
– of every further class, 33% commission stays with Preply
– that’s why I had to raise my price/ hour, and it was a huge mess.
– Students just can book classes, without a confirmation of my side.
– payout is not correct! And support just doesn’t answer for days. A payout history is only available on demand
– the virtual classroom broke down several times, so I had to meet my students at Skype anyway. No technical support available.”
From Glassdoor:
“NO support or poor support. When the platform has technical issues that require the use of Skype to communicate with the students or some other functional video conferencing any attempts at communication with the support will be met with silence and then more silence. Thus resolution of normal issues are left to the teacher AND this change of video platform due to technical issues with Preply will be held against the teacher as your “TIME ON” the Preply Space is all that is important.”
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I worked for Preply- It was a disaster. Their commission rates they take off teachers means the fee has to go up a lot. The platform they use for teaching crashes frequently and they will not allow any other platform to be used.
They provide some lesson materials which seem to have been written very poorly, and with the intention of getting as much money out of the student as possible.
When students have a problem -which is frequently with their platform- their response is to reschedule the lesson but the student needs to pay a further fee.
When I tried to help a student, I was sacked.
I suggest for students and teachers alike, this is one to avoid- As someone pointed out, there are teachers on this site that charge $5.00 and under- (WOW- They must be good).Yet, with 25 years experience, a BA, an MA and PhD, I was told I did not have the experience nor the qualifications to continue. Knee-jerk reaction to being criticized.