Amazing Talker reviews - is it the best tutoring platform? (Updated Jan 2024)
Did you know that when you search 'Amazing Talker reviews', most of the articles you'll see are created by bloggers who are paid every time someone goes to Amazing Talker and buys lessons? This is known as affiliate marketing, a practice that makes identifying genuine reviews somewhat difficult.
From time to time, our team hears about Amazing Talker from both students and tutors, so we decided to investigate the company's practices. We analysed Amazing Talker reviews written by lots of language learners and tutors, as well as checked online forums. And of course, we tried the website ourselves.
Click the links below to skip to each section:
Pricing, ethics & tutoring quality: 2/5 ⭐⭐
Using the website: 3/5 ⭐⭐⭐
If you want to try a platform that treats tutors and learners with respect, take a look at LanguaTalk instead. Many tutors offer a free trial session for new users, and the website is much easier to use.
Pricing, ethics & tutoring quality
On Amazing Talker, tutors set their own rates and deliver lessons without input from the company. Given this, you would expect the platform to charge a relatively low commission rate, so...
How much commission does Amazing Talker charge?
Despite tutors independently delivering lessons, after all the fees, they're typically left with only around half of what you pay. Amazing Talker's fee breakdown is:
- Commission starting at 30%
- A 10% 'student fee' (seems no different to commission and just a sneaky way to add more)
- 8% in other fees related to taxes and payment processing
On top of this, one tutor told us the platform was charging her 4.5% just to withdraw money, and forcing her to apply discounts to student's purchases.
Aside from seeming unethical, charging such high fees has two consequences:
1) Tutors have to charge more to make enough money. So students pay more. On the platform, prices are typically shown for 25-minute lessons. This makes it feel cheaper, but any good tutor will tell you that 25 minutes is not enough for structured lessons.
2) The best tutors will work elsewhere. At LanguaTalk, we receive lots of applications but only accept a small percentage of these as we aim to build a reputation for higher quality tutoring. We sometimes receive applications from tutors who work via Amazing Talker, and unfortunately they're often badly written and unprofessional.
You can get a sense for how talented and professional a tutor is just by watching their video and reading their intro/reviews. If you view the profiles on Amazing Talker, and compare them with profiles on LanguaTalk, you should see a big difference.
Using the website
We signed up for an account and started browsing tutor profiles. We were able to filter by price and where the tutor is from. Unfortunately, there is no availability filter, so we wasted time checking profiles of tutors who didn't have any time slots that fitted my schedule. LanguaTalk has this filter, which students find incredibly useful as they can immediately see which tutors are free when they are.
The profiles are packed full of information and oddly, emojis. We found it somewhat overwhelming. After browsing some profiles, we were automatically deluged with messages from tutors, both via live chat and email (presumably tutors get notified when you browse their profile). Not ideal.
Summary
Whether you're a student or a teacher, we hope that this Amazing Talker review has given you a sense of what the platform has to offer. Having browsed around the platform and read many other reviews of Amazing Talker, we were not impressed.
We believe the best alternative to Amazing Talker is LanguaTalk. We built it to offer a fairer, easier-to-use platform with higher teaching standards.
If you're learning a language, tutors on LanguaTalk offer a 30-minute trial session either for free or for a reduced rate. No card is required for free trial sessions, so you can meet a tutor without any commitment. Click here to see tutors' videos, reviews and prices.
If you're a tutor, you can find out more and apply here.
P.S. we mentioned above that we were told Amazing Talker automatically sends discounts to students without the tutor agreeing to this. Below is a screenshot of this. You can see the message offering the discount looks like it comes from the tutor, but in fact it says 'sent by system'. We're all for offering discounts, but not forcing tutors to reduce their rates below what they find acceptable in order to do this. 😕
Topic: Amazing Talker Review. Overall Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5.
