What a marketplace commission actually costs you

Tutoring marketplaces solve a real problem: they put students in front of a teacher who has none. That is worth paying for. The question is not whether a commission is fair — it is whether you are still paying it for something you are still receiving.

Commissions in this market commonly run somewhere between 15% and a third of the lesson price, sometimes tapering as you teach more hours on the platform. Rates and tiers change, so check the current terms of whichever platform you use rather than trusting any figure quoted in an article. What does not change is the arithmetic.

The arithmetic on one student

Take one ordinary student: a weekly lesson at your listed price, continuing for a year.

Four hundred euros, from one student, in one year. Most independent teachers have somewhere between eight and twenty regular students. The commission on a single long-running student is frequently larger than every other business cost a tutor has, combined.

That is not automatically a bad deal. It is a large enough number that it deserves to be a decision rather than a default.

The question that matters: who found whom?

The cost above is the price of acquisition. Acquisition is a one-time service, but a percentage commission charges for it every week, forever. So the useful exercise is to sort your students into two lists.

Students the platform found. They searched, they saw your profile among many, they picked you. The platform did real work and the commission is buying something.

Students you brought. A referral from an existing student. Somebody from your own network, your school, your city, your social account. A parent who was given your name. These arrive already intending to work with you — and if you routed them through a marketplace because that is where your scheduling and payments live, you are paying an acquisition fee for an acquisition you performed.

For most teachers past their first year or two, the second list is the longer one, and it grows fastest. Referrals compound; search placement does not.

What you actually buy with a commission

It helps to be precise about what the cut pays for, because the pieces are separable:

• Discovery — the profile, the search ranking, the marketplace of learners. This is the part that is genuinely hard to replace and genuinely worth money.
• Trust — reviews, a familiar brand, a dispute process. Worth a lot to a first-time student and steadily less to a returning one.
• Payments — collection, currency handling, payouts. Real work, but its market price is a payment processor's fee of a few percent, not a quarter of revenue.
• Scheduling and records — a calendar, a lesson history, somewhere to put materials. Also real, also not priced at a third of your income anywhere else.

The last two are the ones worth noticing. If you keep a marketplace mainly because it is where your calendar and your payment history live, you are paying discovery-level prices for administration.

Running both, deliberately

The answer for most teachers is not to leave. It is to stop treating the platform as the whole business.

A stable arrangement looks like this: keep the marketplace for what it is uniquely good at — finding new students, and lending credibility while you have little of your own. Run everything else yourself: your own booking link, your own schedule, your own records, your own relationship with the people who came to you directly. New students arrive through whichever door found them; the ones who came to you by name never generate a commission at all.

Two practical steps make that real:

1. Have somewhere to send a direct enquiry. When a referral asks how to book, the answer should be a link, not a conversation. Without one, every referral drifts back to the platform by default — getting students without a marketplace is largely about having that link.
2. Keep your own record of every student. If your only history of who studied what, and who paid for it, lives inside somebody else's product, then leaving is expensive for reasons that have nothing to do with commission.

The number to watch

Track one figure: the share of your income that pays commission. Not the percentage rate — the share of everything you earn.

If it is falling as your direct students accumulate, the arrangement is working. If it is flat year after year, the platform has stopped being an acquisition channel and become a tax on work you are generating yourself. That is the point at which the arithmetic above stops being interesting and starts being expensive.

memore charges nothing on your teaching — it is the record and the booking link, not a marketplace, so what a student pays is what you keep.