Your studio,
in every student's living room.

4:30 PM — You park outside Lucas's apartment. On the iPad, Lingua already shows his profile: 8-year-old beginner Spanish, last visit's error pattern (ñ + ll), today's planned 25-minute session built around the playground vocabulary unit + 2 minutes of music karaoke.

4:45 PM — The kitchen WiFi is on but flaky. Doesn't matter — Lingua's running on-device. Lucas reads the conversation prompt aloud; you tap the word he stumbles on and the native-pronunciation TTS plays.

5:05 PM — He writes the vocabulary in his notebook. You snap a photo. Lingua's tracing engine attaches it to his gradebook with a note ("ñ stroke order improving").

5:15 PM — You walk to the car. The visit syncs. His mom gets a push notification at 5:16: "This week with Lucas — 3-min audio clip + new mastered words." She doesn't have to install anything; it's a tutor-branded share link.

5:20 PM — Stripe Connect deposits the parent's auto-pay into your bank account. Koydo takes nothing.

Marketplaces (italki, Preply, Cambly, Wyzant) optimize for one workflow: a video lesson in a browser tab. In-home tutoring breaks every assumption. You drive 20 minutes between houses. The kitchen WiFi cuts out the moment you open a video. The parent does not want a fourteenth app on their phone. The child writes the new vocabulary in a paper notebook. A six-year-old's attention span is 22 minutes, not 50. You bill by the package (eight lessons for $320) and need a way to mark attendance without paperwork. The marketplace UI assumes none of this.

Lingua's traveling-tutor surface is the inverse. The iPad app opens to today's route — three students, three pre-loaded lesson plans tuned to each child's last error pattern. Each lesson runs on-device via Apple Foundation Models, so the kitchen WiFi outage is irrelevant. After the session you snap a photo of the child's handwritten work; the tracing engine plus OCR plus optional Whisper alignment (if the student recorded reading aloud) all run on-device, attach to the gradebook, and queue for sync. By the time you reach your car, the parent has a push notification with a tutor-branded share-link: "This week with Sofia — 3-min audio + 12 new mastered words." No install required for the parent.

The economic math is where the marketplace tax becomes obvious. A tutor running 10 lessons a week at $40 grosses $1,600 a month. italki at 18% takes $288. Preply at a new-tutor 33% takes $528. Wyzant at 25% takes $400. Cambly's set rate of about $0.17 a minute pays you roughly 41 cents on every dollar a parent spends — at full-time 40-hour weeks the tutor keeps about $656 of a $1,600 economic value. Koydo Lingua takes $19 flat and a 2.9% + 30¢ Stripe pass-through you would have paid on any payment processor anyway. The first month on Lingua pays for the iPad you might not own yet; every month after is pure recovered margin.

What you do not lose by leaving the marketplace is the part most tutors over-weight. The marketplace's discovery does not actually feed steady-state tutors — repeat students come from referrals, parent word-of-mouth, and the school playground, not from a Preply search box. The marketplace's lesson room is a Zoom-grade video call; LiveKit is the same underlying technology. The marketplace's payment system is Stripe Connect under the hood. What you do lose by staying on the marketplace is the per-lesson commission — forever, on every lesson, even for students you brought yourself. The break-even versus italki is roughly four hours per week of teaching. Above that, leaving is strictly cheaper.