Preply favors tutor specific subscriptions
Preply
An all you can learn subscription would push Preply away from being a simple booking marketplace and toward being a managed learning bundle. That matters because Preply today is built around a student choosing one tutor, buying a set cadence of lessons, and paying tutor specific rates, while Udemy and Coursera style subscriptions work best when the platform can freely route demand across a standardized catalog. Preply already uses tutor specific subscriptions, which shows the lower retooling path it has taken so far.
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Preply now sells recurring plans tied to one tutor, not a global pass across many tutors. After a trial lesson, the student chooses how many lessons per week to book with that tutor and pays every 28 days. This fits Preply’s existing one to one workflow and avoids having to normalize pricing across thousands of tutors who set their own rates.
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The closest live tutoring analogue is Cambly, not Udemy. Cambly gives students a subscription and then pays tutors fixed hourly rates, which works because tutor pricing is controlled centrally. Preply does the opposite, tutors set prices and Preply takes commission, including 100% of the first lesson and 18% to 33% after that, so an unlimited cross tutor pass would require a very different payout system.
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The upside of a bundle is better retention and better utilization of tutor supply. In course marketplaces, subscriptions improved economics because the platform can sell more learning without creating new content, and Udemy consumer gross margin rose from 55% in 2020 to 66% in 2021 as subscriptions scaled. For Preply, the same logic would come from steering learners into additional subjects or replacement tutors instead of losing them when one package ends.
The likely direction is more packaging around recurring tutor relationships first, then broader bundles later as Preply adds more standardized learning layers. The more Preply can combine live lessons with clearer plans, progress tracking, and cross subject discovery, the closer it gets to subscription economics without giving up the marketplace liquidity that comes from tutor choice and flexible pricing.