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How Tutors Get Paid
Every Koydo Lingua tutor picks one of two billing flows during Stripe Connect onboarding. You see the math before you sign. Both honor 0% Koydo commission on the lesson revenue itself — the only money Koydo earns is the $19/month Pro Educator subscription and, on one of the two flows, a 1% operational margin + 1% reconciled-back chargeback reserve on parent payments we handle for you. Compare that to italki's 15-21%, Preply's 18-33%, Cambly's ~59%, Wyzant's 25%. Below is exactly what you'd see during signup.
Flow A — Default
0% Koydo · Stripe handles everything else
Monthly math at $1,600 in lesson revenue:
$1,600 − Stripe ($47) − Pro Educator ($19) =$1,534 you keep
Flow B — Recommended
5.9% + 30¢ all-in · Koydo handles billing end-to-end
Monthly math at $1,600 in lesson revenue:
$1,600 − Koydo Payments fee ($78) − Pro Educator ($19) =$1,503 you keep(plus typical reserve refund at year-end)
Why a 1% reserve protects you, not us.
A single bad chargeback can wipe out a small tutor's whole month.A parent disputes a $500 lesson package — Stripe takes the $500 back from us, plus a $15 network fee, plus our time defending the dispute. If we just absorbed that out of our 1% operational margin, we'd lose money on dozens of perfectly clean tutors to make up for one bad one. We'd have to raise everyone's rate to cover it.
The reserve is your individual buffer.1% of every parent transaction sits in a per-tutor ledger. When the eventual chargeback shows up — and they do, randomly, across the whole tutor base — the reserve absorbs it. The other 99% of your payment goes to your running balance for payout, no surprise deductions.
At year-end (January 31), we reconcile.If your reserve grew faster than your actual chargebacks (which it does for almost every tutor — chargeback rates above 0.4% of volume are very rare), the excess returns to your running balance. Itemized on your January statement as aRESERVE_RELEASEline.
Sixty days after you cancel,the remaining reserve returns to you. We hold it 60 days because that's roughly the window during which a dispute could still be filed by a parent for a lesson that already happened. After that window, it's yours.
If your chargebacks ever exceed both the reserve and your running balance,we cover the shortfall and then collect it from the card you used to sign up for Pro Educator — same mechanic as if your gym membership autopay fails. If we can't collect, your subscription pauses until you settle the balance. Your gradebook and student records remain exportable regardless.
Their fee math vs ours.
| Platform | Per-lesson cut | Published in plain English? | Chargeback policy? |
|---|---|---|---|
| italki | 15–21% | Vague rate page | Buried in support FAQ |
| Preply | 18–33% (first 400 hours) | No public table | Tutor-bears-all, no notice |
| Cambly | ~59% (set rate, $0.17/min) | Not published | N/A — Cambly holds all funds |
| Wyzant | 25% | Brief mention | Buried |
| Koydo Lingua | 0% (Direct) OR 5.9% + 30¢ (Payments tier) | This page + gated signup acknowledgment | TOS Section 14, 9 sub-clauses |
Most tutors start on Koydo Payments. Some never leave.
Direct Stripe is the right flow for tutors who already have a multi-year clean payment history, who run their own accountant relationship, and who view managing a single chargeback per year as routine paperwork rather than a disruption. The margin advantage is roughly 3 percentage points on parent payments versus Koydo Payments — at $1,600 a month in lesson revenue, that is $48 a month, $576 a year, real money for a part-time tutor. The trade is that you carry the chargeback risk yourself. Stripe gives you the dispute notification, the evidence-upload window, and the standard $15 network fee per chargeback. You write the response. You eat the loss when you lose.
Koydo Payments is the right flow for new tutors, for tutors who hate paperwork, and for any tutor whose monthly revenue is small enough that a single $500 chargeback would be catastrophic. The 5.9% + 30¢ rate is structurally the Stripe pass-through plus a 2% Koydo operational margin plus a 1% per-tutor rolling reserve. The reserve smooths chargeback variance across the tutor base — a single bad month does not wipe your margin. The reconciliation on January 31 returns the excess. For a tutor with normal chargeback rates (under 0.4% of volume — the vast majority of tutors), the reconciliation usually credits money back, not the other way around.
What counts as a chargeback in this business is worth knowing before you choose. A parent who disputes a single $40 lesson because their kid forgot the appointment is rare — most parents who want a refund just ask, and most tutors just refund. A parent who disputes a $480 package because a teenager went through a rough month and missed five lessons is the chargeback that actually shows up. So is the parent whose credit card got stolen and who disputes every charge in the past 60 days, including yours. So is the divorce-and-custody dispute where one parent pays for lessons and the other parent contests the charge as unauthorized. These are the rare-but-painful events the rolling reserve absorbs.
International tutors get the same two-flow choice with one footnote: Stripe Connect is available in 40+ countries, the 1099-K is US-only (non-US tutors get a year-end income summary suitable for local filing), and EU SaaS VAT on the $19 Pro Educator subscription is added at checkout per local rate. UK, EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Japan are first-class. A tutor in Lisbon teaching Portuguese to a student in Boston runs the same dashboard, the same booking page, the same Stripe Connect deposit — Stripe handles the cross-border money movement, Lingua handles the software on top, and the chargeback mechanics work identically. The only thing you cannot do internationally is opt for US-specific 1099-K issuance — but you would not want to.
You pick during Stripe Connect onboarding — the gated acknowledgment screen makes you select one of the two flows and click 'I understand' before money can move. You can switch flows once per 90 days from the dashboard after signup. Most tutors start on Koydo Payments for the hands-off billing and switch to Direct Stripe later if they're confident handling their own chargebacks.
On Koydo Payments, the 1% rolling reserve smooths the variance of chargebacks. A single bad chargeback on a $500 transaction is $500 + a $15 network fee — that could wipe out a small tutor's monthly margin. The reserve absorbs that shock. At year-end (January 31) and again 60 days after you cancel, we reconcile: if the reserve outpaced your actual chargebacks, the excess returns to you. For a typical tutor with normal chargeback rates (under 0.4% of volume), reconciliation usually returns money — the reserve is net wealth-protecting, not wealth-extracting.
Section 14.1(c) of the Pro Educator TOS gives Koydo the right to recoup the shortfall by collecting against your Pro Educator subscription billing method (the card you signed up with). If we can't collect, your subscription pauses until you settle. Your gradebook + student records remain exportable as CSV regardless — no data lock-in.
On Direct Stripe you handle the dispute yourself through your own Stripe Dashboard. Stripe notifies you within 24 hours of receiving the dispute. You upload lesson logs, attendance records, and your narrative response directly to Stripe. If you lose the dispute, Stripe debits the chargeback amount + the $15 network fee from your next payout. Koydo never touches it. You keep 100% of the work and 100% of the risk.
Yes. On Koydo Payments, your monthly statement itemizes every Stripe fee, every refund, every chargeback, every reserve contribution, every reserve release. Each line shows the original transaction ID + redacted student name + reason code + amount. Statements are downloadable as PDF and persist in your dashboard for 7 years for tax-record purposes. On Direct Stripe, Stripe's own dashboard shows the same data — you just see it in their UI, not ours.
On Direct Stripe, Stripe issues your 1099-K directly (US tutors). On Koydo Payments, Koydo prepares and issues your 1099-K covering all parent transactions we processed for you. Both routes hit the same federal $600 income threshold. State thresholds vary; Koydo Payments handles state filing where required. For non-US tutors, both flows produce a year-end income summary suitable for your local tax filing — Stripe Connect handles the local tax compliance layer.
italki, Preply, Cambly, Verbling, and Wyzant don't publish a page like this because publishing the math would make their 15-59% take rates look bad next to a flat $19/mo + transparent 0% or 5.9% choice. We publish it because the transparency is itself a selling point — tutors who've been burned by hidden marketplace fees should know exactly what they're getting before they sign.
14 days free, no credit card. You'll see this same comparison + the full TOS + an "I understand" acknowledgment before any money moves.