I started this company because I was angry about commission.
I had been tutoring on other platforms since 2022, watching a slice of every lesson disappear, and I genuinely could not see what I was paying for. The technology was mediocre. The last straw was a student who messaged me and I only found out more than a day later, because no notification arrived by SMS or by email, and when the email finally turned up the formatting was broken. That was the moment I decided to build something better, knowing I could with my background.
Then I built it, and found out I had been confidently wrong about the exact thing that made me angry.
Quick answer: Commission does not pay for servers, it pays for finding students. Hosting is cheap; advertising, search visibility and the years of work before a parent has heard of you are not. That does not make every commission fair, but it does mean the honest comparison is the all-in cost a student pays and the all-in amount a tutor keeps, never the headline percentage.
Why do tutoring platforms charge commission at all?
My assumption was that commission paid for infrastructure. Servers, a video call, a payment processor, a database. I had a game development degree and I had built things before, so I knew roughly what that costs, and it is not much.
That part was right. The infrastructure genuinely is cheap.
What I had not counted, at all, was the cost of finding a single student. A platform's real product is not the software. It is the fact that a parent in Ghent who has never heard your name types something into Google at nine in the evening and ends up looking at your profile. That does not happen for free. It takes advertising, it takes years of writing and ranking, and most of it fails before any of it works.
What was I wrong about?
I thought platforms were charging a lot for something cheap. They are charging a lot for something expensive, and I only learned which was which by paying for it myself.
That has not entirely changed my mind. I still think education is too important to sit behind a large cut, and I still think a lot of the rates in this industry are higher than they need to be. But the version of me who was angry in 2022 was angry about the wrong line item.
How much commission do tutoring platforms take?
Tutor-side commissions across the industry commonly run from around 15% to over 30%. That range on its own tells you very little, because platforms structure the rest differently. Some charge students a monthly subscription simply to contact a tutor. Some add a booking fee. Some quote you a tutor's hourly rate that nobody actually pays.
This is why a headline percentage is close to useless as a comparison. Two questions do the real work:
- What does a student pay per hour, all in, including every fee and subscription?
- What does the tutor actually keep from that hour?
Everything else is presentation.
What does iTutorOnline charge?
Tutors keep 85% of their rate. Students pay a flat 5 euro per hour on top of the tutor's rate, with no subscription, no contact fee and nothing to pay before a lesson is booked.
That is the entire fee structure. There is no second page where it changes, and no number that appears only once you have signed up. Against the traditional agencies here, which list between 37 and 40 euro an hour compared with a median of about 27 all-in on our side, a family keeps a real part of the difference. I am not going to claim we beat every online platform, because that depends entirely on how the other side builds its fees.
Where does the commission actually go?
Back into finding students, which is the expensive part I did not understand in 2022.
I do not take a salary out of the platform. What it earns goes into reaching families who have not heard of us yet, and into the tooling that makes a lesson actually work, which is the thing that made me start this in the first place. As that gets more efficient, the aim is to bring the cost down rather than to keep the difference.
Does a lower commission mean parents pay less?
Not automatically, and I want to be careful here because this is the exact place where tutoring companies get slippery.
Commission is a share of the tutor's rate. It affects what the tutor keeps. What a parent pays is the tutor's rate plus whatever the platform adds on top, so a platform can advertise a low commission to tutors and still be expensive for families, or the reverse. The two numbers are related, but one does not prove the other.
The only comparison worth making is the all-in hourly cost. If a platform will not show you that number before you sign up, treat that as the answer.
What should a tutor look for in a platform's commission?
Ask what the commission is buying you.
If the platform is bringing you students you could never have found on your own, then the commission is paying for something real, and 15% or 25% of a lesson that would not otherwise exist is still better than 100% of nothing. If you found the student yourself and the platform is only moving the money, you are paying a lot for a payment processor.
That is the whole test. It is also why I am comfortable telling tutors to leave if we stop earning it.
Where this leaves you
If you are a parent comparing options, ignore commission entirely. It is a number about somebody else's income. Ask for the all-in hourly price, then look at whether the tutor is any good, which is the thing that actually decides whether the money was worth spending. You can browse tutors and see what each one charges all in without creating an account.
If you are a tutor, ask harder questions than I did in 2022. I was right that something was wrong on those platforms, and wrong about what it was. It took building one to tell the difference.