What is Take lessons?

Take Lessons is an online marketplace connecting learners with music teachers, academic tutors, language teachers, and more. They offer online and in-person lessons in your local city, and you can pay for lesson packages which will vary in pricing for each teacher.

The company is venture-backed and was founded in 2006 in San Diego, California. It was initially launched with music lessons and they have now expanded into many different topics and products, including Take Lessons Live which offers live group lessons.

Who is Take lessons For?

The target audience for Take Lessons will depend on which topic you’re looking to learn. If it’s Algebra or Calculus, it may be a parent signing up for lessons for their kid. If it’s learning how to speak Spanish, then it may be a younger working adult who’s planning to travel to South America this year.

Unlike targeted marketplaces, say just for language lessons, diversified marketplaces with many different topics can vary in who their target market is.

How Take Lessons Works

1. Search for your topic

To get started on Takelessons, you can search for the topic that you’re looking for. For this situation, let’s say we are looking for Math teachers near New York.

2. Select a teacher in the results

Now we’ll be shown a list of teachers that are available in Brooklyn. You can use their filtering system to choose location, time availability (date and time), and the price you’re looking for. There are also more advanced filters you can choose from if needed.

3. Learn more about your teacher

If you want to get to know your teacher a little bit first, you can view their description, reviews, and photos.

4. Choose lesson length

Once you’ve decided that this is the teacher you want (Tamar in this case), you can choose your lesson lengths. Take Lessons offers:

• 30 minute lessons
• 45 minute lessons
• 60 minute lessons
• 90 minute lessons

The longer your lesson time, the better price you will get from your teacher.

5. Choose lesson package

The last step before entering your payment details is to choose how many lessons you want to book (based on the lesson length) you’ve selected. Like the previous step, you will often get a better price for choosing to purchase more lessons upfront.

Once you have completed these pre-requisite steps, you will be asked to enter your billing details so you can pay upfront. For the example we shared above, the total came to around ~$600+ USD.

How much does take lessons cost?

From a pricing perspective, Take Lessons does seem to be on the higher end. We believe the reason for this is two-folds:

• Teachers are including costs involved for in-person lessons
• This may include commuting time, gas, studio rent (for music), and overall additional time spent
• Take Lessons commision (40%)
• While teachers can choose their own pricing, they are aware that Take Lessons will take around 40% commission for teaching on the platform. That’s why it’s in the interest of teachers to raise their pricing in order to justify the commission taken.

For this reason, lessons on Take Lessons can often average out to $100 USD/hour.

Price comparison of similar tutoring and lessons websites to Takelessons.com:

• Rype: ~$25-$30/hour
• Varsity Tutors: $70-90/hour

Alternative to TakeLessons.com

If you’re looking for flexible, quality, and truly affordable ways to learn a language, find academic tutors, and more, there are better options than TakeLessons.com.

Rype offers a simple and easy-to-use platform where we have handselected the top professional teachers to teach you a new language, help you with homework or test prep, and more. Best of all, we charge nearly 1/5th of what TakeLessons.com charges you because we take 0% commission from our teachers.

How is Rype different from Take Lessons?

There are certainly similarities that Rype and Take Lessons share. For one, we both offer one-on-one private lessons online. But when you dig deeper, our service is comparably different and unique when you put it side-by-side.

The core 3 pillars of our offering focuses on giving you:

• Access to handpicked professional tutors
• Ability to book on-the-go and around your busy schedule
• All of this at a fair price with an all-access membership (one membership, dozens of subjects)

1. Pay Per Lesson (Take Lessons) vs. Flat Price (Rype)

At Rype, you pay a flat simple membership price with no hidden costs. We don’t take any commission from our tutors and we pay a competitive price that keeps everyone happy.

There are a few reasons why we believe this is the most sustainable model:

1. Just like a drop-in gym, there’s a lack of incentive for students to continue their lessons after the first lesson experience. This motivates students who are learning Math or Spanish to continue their lessons, just like a gym membership.

2. There is a massive premium that tutoring marketplaces like Take Lessons charge. This can be great for the business because it gives them the profits to reinvest into growth, but it is a bad deal for parents and students like you paying for the service.

3. On Rype, you get access to not just academic lessons but language lessons (and much more soon). That means, you’re not just limited to taking academic lessons, and you can branch out your curiousity and therefore gain value without paying more.

Rype, like Netflix, has introduced a new model to language lessons. It’s a simple, flat fee where you don’t have to think about pulling out your credit card for each lesson. You can focus on what matters, which is consistent learning, and finding teachers that are fit to meet your needs.

2. Rype Teachers are Handpicked

Around 1-3% of applicants on Rype are interviewed and accepted. Every tutor that joins our network are handpicked personally by us and are required to go through a rigorous interview process, including a live 1-on-1 interview where we have a high-standard criteria for not just experience, but personality, professionality, and more.

3. Rype is Free to try

We feel confident in our offer to allow you to experience for free. No need to get on a sales call which takes up more of your time to sell you on our offering. Just sign up by yourself, and browse around the platform by yourself or with your child, and book a lesson with one of our teachers. 100% risk-free.

Take Lessons Review: Summary

We hope this overview review of Take Lessons was useful in making a wiser decision. At this point, it’s fully up to you to decide which platform is going to be more suitable for your needs.

Whichever avenue you decide to go on, we do encourage you to try out Rype for free first before deciding. You pay $0 for 7 days, and it’s 100% risk-free to explore our teachers, book a few free lessons, and see how our service works. It’s about the best value you can get without any risk on your end.

‍