Language teaching online has a platform problem. The big lesson marketplaces bring students, but they set the terms: commissions that climb with your success, pricing pressure from teachers charging a few dollars an hour, review systems that punish you for enforcing your own cancellation policy, and rules against taking students off-platform — because the platform, not you, owns the relationship. If you've built your own audience instead — a TikTok explaining false cognates, a YouTube channel on listening practice, an Instagram of daily idioms — you have the opposite problem: thousands of motivated learners and no clean way to turn one of them into a paying student.
What language teachers sell on Cheddify
Cheddify is one link that handles the payment, the booking, and the live video or audio call. You set your per-minute rate and minimum duration; students pay as guests in the browser and connect.
- Per-minute conversation practice — the core product. A learner taps your link while you're available and gets live speaking practice for exactly as long as they want. Twenty minutes of real conversation beats another app streak.
- Booked structured lessons — 45- or 60-minute prepaid slots for grammar instruction, exam prep (DELE, JLPT, IELTS, TOPIK), or a weekly curriculum with your regulars.
- Fixed-price blocks — a 30-minute pronunciation audit, a mock oral exam, an interview-prep session at a flat price.
- Paid DM corrections — learners send a paragraph of writing or a voice memo; you reply with corrections and notes. Asynchronous, priced, no call required. See how paid DMs work.
What language teachers charge
Language teaching is price-competitive, and honest benchmarks reflect that: teachers in this niche commonly charge $1 to $3 per minute. Pure conversation practice sits near $1–$1.50 per minute; structured lessons with a qualified teacher run $1.50–$2.50; and specialized coaching — exam prep, business-language coaching, accent reduction — supports $2.50–$3. Around $1.50 per minute with a 20-minute minimum is a sensible start. Note that per-minute pricing changes the psychology: a learner who'd hesitate at a $60 lesson will happily pay $15 for ten minutes of speaking practice on their commute, and those small sessions compound.
The math on a real session
Say a student books a 60-minute conversation session at $1.50 per minute: $90 total. The student also covers about 3% card processing on top of that — it never comes out of your side. Cheddify takes 20% plus $2 per call: 20% of $90 is $18, plus $2, so $20. You keep $70. Payouts go through Stripe. Full fee breakdown on the pricing page.
Compare that to a marketplace commission tier — and remember the bigger difference: on Cheddify the student is your student. Their booking, their payment history, and the relationship live on your link, not a platform profile the marketplace can algorithm you out of.
The honest part
Cheddify brings you zero students. There is no search, no browse, no discovery feed. It converts the audience you already have — your language-content followers, your newsletter, your word-of-mouth referrals. If you're starting from nothing and need student flow today, a marketplace that supplies learners is genuinely the better choice despite its commission. The playbook many teachers land on: use marketplaces for lead flow, build an audience with content, and run your owned audience through your own link. When you're ready to see the whole flow, start with how it works or what Cheddify is.