Yup: Alternatives to This Defunct Tutoring Platform

What was Yup?

Yup was a math tutoring app that bragged that its tutors are teachers and graduate students who meet the highest standards in mathematics. Only 5% of applicants were accepted, according to the site. However, if you have a college degree and great math skills, it’s hard to understand why you’d work for $10 an hour.

And, this may be why the site now appears to be long gone.

RIP Yup

While Yup Technology still has a Wikipedia page and a profile on X, the website cannot be reached.

And, that’s not much of a loss for math tutors, who can find better work with more than a dozen other sites.

Recommendations

Our best advice: Sign up with Wyzant, one of the industry leaders in tutoring, where you can set your own pay, schedule and simply pay a commission on your bookings. (You can read our detailed review on Wyzant through the link above.)

How Yup worked

However, for those of you interested in side gig history, here’s how Yup used to work:

The job was flexible and you were paid for every minute that you logged in to teach — not just the minutes spent teaching. However, the tutor pay was far lower here than other tutoring sites. And it’s particularly dismal pay for teaching higher math. Tutors were paid once a month via PayPal.

Poor pay for tutors

Yup’s tutoring rates were likely low because of the way Yup charged parents. Parents bought tutoring plans for as little as $87 a month for “unlimited, 24/7” math tutoring. Yup’s students connect with tutors via cell phone.

We see two problems with this approach. It demands that tutors be available at all hours. And it creates the perception that Yup’s tutors have nothing better to do with their time. Remember the Doritos advertisement: “Eat all you want; we’ll make more”? Yup has created the tutoring equivalent.

If you’re great at math, you can do better.

Recommendations

Better sites to ply your tutoring skills? Almost all of them, including Juni Learning, Chelsea International Education, Wyzant, Varsity Tutors and TutorMe.

Notably tutors at Wyzant set their own rates and many of the site’s higher math tutors earn more than $100 an hour. Yep, that’s 10 times more than you get at Yup.

What their users say: (from Glassdoor)

The quality and speed demanded is extremely high for such a low pay rate. There is a complicated system of levels, bonuses, and “pay multipliers” made to encourage quality and make it seem like a game. But these have little effect and ultimately max-out at around $14-15/hr

Low pay

Pay is low — $11/hour for tutors, $15/hour for Tutor Quality Managers. And you’re an independent contractor so you pay extra taxes and get no benefits. When a tutor makes certain mistakes, like not asking to see a student’s work on part of a problem, the whole session is refunded. That means that the student gets their money back, and the tutor is not paid for the time they spent.