Online Language School vs. Marketplace (Preply, italki): Which Is Better for Teachers?

For a language teacher deciding where to work, the choice comes down to one tradeoff. A marketplace like Preply or italki brings you students, but it takes a commission on your lessons and owns the relationship with them. Running your own online language school means you keep your students and your revenue and set your own rules, but finding learners is on you. Neither is simply better - the right answer depends on whether your bottleneck is finding students or keeping what you earn.

This guide breaks down how the marketplaces work, what they actually cost, what you give up, and where running your own school wins, so you can make the call with clear eyes.

How do language teaching marketplaces work?

Marketplaces like Preply and italki are, at their core, matchmakers. They attract large numbers of learners, list teacher profiles, and connect the two sides. When a student books a lesson, the platform handles discovery, scheduling, and payment, and in return it takes a cut of what the student pays. Both are free to sign up for and host a profile on, both cover 100+ languages, and both have very large learner bases, which is precisely their appeal: you can create a profile and start teaching paying students without building an audience of your own first.

The important structural detail is that the platform sits in the middle. It owns the student relationship, it owns the payment flow, and it sets the rules for pricing, cancellations, and conduct. That intermediation is the service you are paying for, and for a teacher who is just starting out, it can be well worth it.

What do marketplaces cost teachers?

The headline cost is commission, and the two big platforms price it differently. These figures are accurate as of 2026, but both platforms adjust their terms, so confirm the current rates before you decide.

• italki takes roughly 15% of the teacher's listed lesson price and charges no commission on free trial lessons. Teachers set their own rates, and it works on a pay-per-lesson basis, so there is no student subscription in the middle.
• Preply takes 100% of the first (trial) lesson with each new student, then 18% to 33% on the lessons that follow. The rate starts high for new tutors (around 33%) and decreases as you accumulate taught hours, dropping after roughly your first 20 hours. Preply runs on a subscription model on the student's side.

Read that carefully, because the commission is not a one-time fee. On a marketplace you pay it on every lesson, for as long as that student keeps studying with you. A student who stays for a year is a student you pay commission on for a year. That is the real long-term cost, and it is the number to weigh against any subscription alternative.

The math compounds in a way that is easy to underestimate. A teacher with a stable roster of regular students is handing over a percentage of that steady income month after month, and the more successful you are, the larger that number grows. Early on, when you have no students at all, paying a cut of something beats keeping all of nothing. Later, when you have a full calendar, the same percentage is the single biggest line item standing between you and what you actually earn. The point at which those two truths cross over is different for every teacher, and knowing roughly where you sit is what makes this decision concrete rather than abstract.

What do you give up on a marketplace?

Commission is only part of the picture. The subtler cost is control.

• The student relationship. The platform, not you, owns the connection to your learners. Their terms typically discourage moving lessons off-platform, so the audience you build is really the platform's audience.
• The payment flow. Money moves through the marketplace on its schedule and its terms, and payouts follow its rules.
• Your rates and rules. You work inside the platform's pricing structure, cancellation policies, and ranking algorithm. If the algorithm stops showing your profile, your bookings can fall through no fault of your own.
• Your materials. Lessons you prepare tend to live inside the platform's tools or get shared ad hoc, rather than becoming a private, reusable curriculum that is unmistakably yours.

None of this makes marketplaces a bad choice. It is the honest price of having someone else solve student acquisition for you.

What does running your own online school give you?

Running your own school flips the model. Instead of paying a cut on every lesson, you pay a flat subscription for the software and keep what you charge. You own your online language school: the students you invite are yours, the curriculum you build is private, and the revenue you earn is not shared with a marketplace.

With Lingocard, the pieces that a marketplace bundles - lesson delivery, scheduling of review, progress tracking, and a place for students to study - come as purpose-built language teaching tools inside a School plan. You turn lessons into decks your students review by spaced repetition on their phones, you invite them with a private link, and you watch their progress in one place. Your materials stay visible only to the students you invite, so a course you build once can be reused with every new learner and cannot be lifted by a competitor.

The honest catch is discovery. A marketplace hands you a stream of learners; your own school does not, so you take on promotion yourself. In practice that means a public school page learners can find, shareable links you can post in communities and on social media, and a free sample deck that lets people feel real progress before they commit. It is more work than switching on a marketplace profile, but every student who arrives that way is a student you keep, and every sample you share keeps working for you instead of feeding someone else's funnel.

On cost, the contrast is subscription versus commission, not free versus paid. Lingocard's school offering is a paid School subscription with a two-week free trial. Inside it, the students you invite get Premium Learning free while they study with you, and the teachers on your staff get their Teacher plans free. You still handle lesson payments with your students directly, the way you already do, so what you charge is what you keep. The tradeoff is real: you take on finding students, and in exchange you stop paying a percentage of every lesson forever.

Which should you choose?

Be honest about your bottleneck. If your problem is that you cannot find students yet, a marketplace is a genuinely good answer - it puts you in front of learners today, and the commission is the fair price for that reach. Many teachers rightly start there.

If your problem is that you are already turning students away, or you have a waitlist, a social following, a referral stream, or a niche you can reach on your own, the math changes. At that point the marketplace commission is money left on the table every single lesson, and you would rather run an independent online school where you keep your students and your margin instead of handing over a slice of every lesson.

Plenty of teachers run both at once, and that is often the smartest path: use a marketplace as a top-of-funnel to meet new learners, and move your committed, long-term students into your own school where you keep the full value of the relationship. The point is not that marketplaces are bad and independence is pure. It is that they solve different problems - acquisition versus ownership - and the better choice is whichever problem is currently costing you the most.