SuperProf: International Marketplace for Students & Tutors

SuperProf, a tutoring platform headquartered in France, is making inroads in the U.S. market, encouraging freelance tutors to sign up to meet students. But the site presents some challenges for both tutors and students. Here’s why.

What is SuperProf?

SuperProf is an online tutoring platform that offers lessons in everything from academics to confidence-building, sewing to organic gardening. The site enlists freelance tutors to provide these classes.

How it works

Tutors sign up and create an “advertisement” of their lessons. If you want to teach more than one subject, you create separate advertisements for each subject or class that you want to teach. But each ad must be separate and original, using different keywords, the site says. You set your own rates and schedule. However, most tutors charge between $20 and $80 per hour.

Once accepted to the platform, SuperProf will send clients your way when the client needs services that match your profile. The student gets to choose between several tutors, if more than one meets their criteria.

SmartProf review (for tutors):

But there’s a catch. New tutors must agree to provide the first lesson — for each and every new client — for free.

Only tutors who have reached “Super Tutor” status can opt out. Super Tutor status requires at least 4 recommendations and 1 review, an uploaded diploma or other qualification. And you must respond to tutor requests in less than 24 hours.

The free lesson is automatically scheduled as an hour, but can be manually changed to a half-hour, if you so choose. It also doesn’t have to be a teaching lesson. You could simply be gathering information about what the student needs and explaining your tutoring style, availability and whether you tutor online or in person.

Customer side

But, from the customer’s side, you advertisement says that you provide a first lesson for free. (That’s a site requirement.) So they may be expecting an actual lesson. Worse, while you are not charging them anything, the site is exacting a $49 membership fee on the student that’s processed the moment you accept their lesson.

That leaves many clients thinking they paid for the free lesson. And, the membership fee is automatically billed each month until the customer cancels it. Some students say they were blindsided by the automatic charges.

To be fair, SuperProf does disclose the $49 membership fee and makes it clear that this is a site fee. It’s not for tutoring. But, unless customers read all of the disclosures, they’re likely to miss that.

Paid lessons

If the student from your free lesson decides to keep at it and hires you to tutor them, they can buy tutoring packages from the site. These are priced at your rate. And, the student might buy 5 or 10 at a time. (Usually, a small discount is offered on these packages. It’s unclear whether the discount is shouldered by the site or the tutor. Either way, the discount usually amounts to just 5% to 10% of the tutoring cost.)

When students buy a package of lessons through SuperProf, they’re charged for the entire package upfront. You receive 50% of the payment immediately and 50% after you complete the lessons, minus a 10% site fee.

SuperProf pays tutors via PayPal.

Free introduction

However, some tutors say that they use that free lesson as a marketing tool. They’ll tell students about their tutoring and how to get tutored from them directly. That allows the student to “unsubscribe” from the monthly membership after just one $49 charge. And it allows the tutor to collect payment from the student directly, avoiding the site’s 10% commission.

SuperProf does not discourage this. In fact, the site says in a blog post that its goal is to provide introductions in exchange for its student membership fee. Once you’ve been introduced to the tutor you like, you’re welcome to cancel that subscription.

By and large, tutors who use the site this way pay nothing. And they consider the free lesson/introduction to potential clients a great value.

Premium

Outside of the 10% site fee on paid student lessons, SuperProf doesn’t charge tutors for signing up or posting profiles/advertisements for their services.

However, the site encourages tutors to buy a “Premium Subscription” that will give your tutoring ads higher visibility on the site. This premium subscription costs $99 a year and is automatically renewed (like customer subscriptions).

Getting students

Are you likely to find students here? That’s tough to say. The site gets about 1 million page views in any given month, according to Similar Web. But the site says it has 32 million tutors signed up from 56 different countries and that it has some 35,000 students.

If you take the site at its word, 35,000 students and 32 million tutors means the site has about one student per 1,000 tutors. Not good odds.

That said, there’s no cost to sign up and a 10% commission on sales is not unreasonable, if you do tutor clients through the site.

Recommendations

If you don’t have a problem using the site’s free lesson as a loss-leader to meet new tutoring students, we see no reason not to sign up. But, we do not recommend buying a premium membership. You can sign up with SuperProf here.

However, if you want to tutor regularly, we recommend you also sign up with Wyzant, which lets you set your own rates and terms. Wyzant gets about 6 times the web traffic as SuperProf.  And, it doesn’t expect you to provide any service for free.

Other good tutoring platforms include Tutor Ocean, LessonFace and Juni Learning.

From Glassdoor

The pros are that it’s easy to post ads; minimum experience is not required; the profile is easy to set up and tutors can rearrange time schedules. But my students complaint to me time and time again that the subscription thing is not exactly ideal, as the parents are frustrated that in order to contact the tutor freely, they’d ought to see about 40 quid going to the website and not the tutor, and henceforth me and my new students will always need to start from the website first, and slowly move out of it.

Very part-time

It’s hard to get enough hours to pay bills, so probably can’t make a living off of it. Also, it seems to be a French site, so you don’t get as much business as an American tutor, maybe due to the time zone difference. The first lesson is free, even if someone comes back for a second lesson. Plenty of people just come for the free first lesson so you work unpaid hours.

You can set your own hours and how many hours you are willing to work every week. You can also not accept a student if not convenient (because of distance, or other reasons) without being punished. But you don’t really get that many students, many students cancel sessions last minute and don’t understand you can’t fill that slot anymore. You have to drive from place to place, and it really is just some extra money. Can’t live of the few students you get to tutor per week.

What their tutors say (from Reddit)

I have a cello student who had been paying this membership fee, thinking that it’s my hourly fee per lesson. I got paid eventually for one lesson, but doesn’t justify her being charged a monthly fee she didn’t sign up for. And pay is through PayPal. It’s a pain and I have gotten blocked for security reasons (as always). What a hassle! Once my student and I sort everything out, I’m deleting my account.