6) Payment & Pricing

Your earnings will be sent to your bank account on the 4th of each month. It may take anywhere between 1 and 4 days (excluding weekends) for the payment to reach you (this depends on the banks). The payment will cover all the lessons you gave during the previous month.

Setting Your Rate

When you created an account, you were asked to set your 55-minute lesson rate. This can be updated at any point via Settings.

The rate applies to single lesson purchases. To encourage students to take more lessons with you, if a student buys 5 lessons, the price per lesson will be 4% lower; if they buy 10 lessons, it will be 8% lower; and for 20 lessons it will be 12% lower. You may wish to consider this when setting your rate. You do not need to consider LanguaTalk commission as this will be added afterwards. We have a help article to help you estimate what you'll receive per lesson in your bank account given a specific rate.

You may wish to start at a slightly discounted rate and increase it gradually as you build your reputation through receiving positive reviews. The lowest rates tutors are permitted to set are as follows (in USD):

German & Swedish: $15

French, Italian, Dutch, Japanese & Chinese: $12

Spanish, Portuguese & Romanian: $10

You can also set a rate for an individual student by going to Students > Student Details, adding the rate and saving. This will override your standard rate. You could use it if you increase your standard rate but want to protect existing students from price rises to encourage them to stay with you.

If in Settings, you choose to also offer 30-minute lessons, these will cost 68% of your 55-minute lessons.

With regards to the 30-minute trial sessions, you'll get more bookings if you offer them for free to students who are new to LanguaTalk, however you can opt to charge 30% of your standard 55-minute lesson price if you select this option in your Settings.

Commission & Payment Fees

One reason we started LanguaTalk is to help tutors earn a living and not have to rely on websites that charge extremely high commission rates. Our commission is capped at 16% of the total price of each lesson. Our aim is to be able to reduce this to 15% or lower once we become less dependent on advertising.

Advertising is expensive; when someone clicks on our website from Google, we pay up to $4 per click. The commission also goes towards running and improving our technology, marketing, and providing support to students and tutors.

We send your earnings directly to your local bank account. This may be cheaper than methods other sites use like PayPal and Payoneer, which both have a lot of hidden fees.

When you receive a payment, 1.5% of the total amount sent will be deducted for fees associated with sending international payments. These fees come from Stripe and the banks involved. If your bank account is not in the US, the banks will also charge a 1% currency conversion fee.

Here is an example for tutors who are not based in the US: if your balance is $200, you should receive the equivalent of $195 in your currency ($5 is paid in fees). The exchange rate will be calculated on the day the payment is initiated.

Next up: everything you need to know about trial sessions.