Frequently asked.

Browse tutor profiles for free. Send unlimited messages, also free, while you and the tutor figure out whether you're a fit. When you've agreed you want to work together, pay a one-off £20 finder's fee — that lets you and the tutor swap contact details in messages without the auto-redaction filter. After that, you arrange lessons directly with them — frequency, cost, location, anything else.

It's a one-off finder's fee that lets you and that tutor exchange contact details in messages — the auto-redaction filter steps aside, and you take things off-platform from there. We earn that fee once per introduction and never again. It's per-tutor — if you want to unlock a second tutor later, that's another £20 — and there's no per-lesson cost, no subscription, no upsell.

If you and the tutor never end up agreeing a lesson — they're unresponsive, the contact details turn out to be wrong, you can't agree on times — email us and we'll refund the £20. If you DID arrange lessons and then cancel, or you have a problem with lesson quality, that's between you and the tutor (we don't sit in the middle of off-platform lessons).

Read the full refund policy

Often yes, sometimes the same. Commission platforms add 15-35% on top of the tutor's rate to fund the platform; we don't. Tutors who list on us AND on a commission site frequently quote a lower rate here because they keep all of it — but we can't enforce that, and individual rates depend on the tutor.

See the worked example

Directly — bank transfer, cash, whatever you both agree on. Tutorperch never handles lesson payments. We don't take a cut, we don't process the money, we don't see the transaction.

On Cloudflare's UK infrastructure. We collect only what's needed to run the service, retain it per UK GDPR, and never sell it. You can export your data or close your account from your settings at any time.

Nothing. Free to list, free to message, free DBS verification. We never charge tutors a fee — the only money on the platform is the £20 unlock fee, paid by the student.

No. We never see lesson payments. Once a student unlocks your contact details, you and they arrange everything off-platform. We take no commission, no per-lesson cut, no booking fee.

Reviews from real students drive ranking, with secondary signals from DBS-Verified status, profile depth, and recent activity. We don't use response time, we don't have a pay-to-rank tier, and we don't put admin thumbs on the scale.

Read the full ranking transparency page

No. Tutors aren't 24/7 chat agents — you might be teaching, on holiday, or just choosy about who you take on. None of that should drop you in rankings. We track no SLA on tutor replies.

There isn't a hidden one — the model is the model. The honest ask: we tell parents on the homepage that booking via us is cheaper than via a commission site, which is only true if tutors actually price fairly here. If you list with us AND on a commission site, we'd ask you to consider a slightly lower rate here knowing your take-home is the same or higher (since we don't skim 25%). It's a deal, not a rule — we have no way to enforce it.

Nothing — they're yours. Once contact details are unlocked, the relationship is yours. The student doesn't pay £20 again to keep working with you, and we don't charge you when they book another lesson. The introduction is the only thing we earn on.

It means a member of our team personally reviewed the tutor's Enhanced DBS certificate within the last three years and confirmed it was clear at that point. The badge is good for three years from the cert's issue date — the tutor has to submit a fresh certificate to keep it. We don't auto-recheck, so the badge is a strong baseline rather than a real-time status check. If you'd like extra peace of mind on a specific tutor before booking lessons, you can verify independently.

How to run your own DBS check

Three layers: (1) manual DBS verification for tutors who choose it; (2) phone numbers, emails, and chat handles are stripped from messages until the £20 unlock — anyone scraping the platform for contact details is wasting their time; (3) every profile, photo, and bio is reviewed by a member of our team before going live. If something concerns you, every profile and message has a Report link that goes straight to us.

Every public profile has a 'Report' link in the footer area. Every message thread has a 'Report this conversation' link at the bottom. Reports go directly to admin and are reviewed within 1 working day. We don't share your identity with the reported user.

Commission scales with usage — every lesson you book through a commission platform earns it another cut, indefinitely. That's lucrative when it works but it distorts incentives: the platform has reasons to lock you in, push extra messages, hide contact details, manipulate ranking. We'd rather earn once on a useful introduction and step out of the way.

A directory that takes from both sides distorts incentives twice over. We've chosen to earn from the introduction only — once, paid by the student — and stay out of the lesson relationship altogether.

No. The £20 unlock fee is the only money on the platform, paid by the student, paid once per tutor. There's no boosted listings, no monthly membership, no priority queue.

Our T&Cs commit us to 30 days' notice and an automatic data export for every user. You'd have your full account history (conversations, unlocks, reviews) in machine-readable form, and 30 days to act on it.