Seven rows,
because one of them hides inside another.
The first two rows look identical on a pricing page and are not. "Per student" can mean students currently enrolled in a running class, or every student record that has ever existed on the system. A school with three years of history and a seasonal intake can have twice as many registered students as active ones, so the same headline price produces two very different invoices. Ask which, and ask what happens to a student who takes a term off.
The per-lesson row is the one that catches tutoring centres and intensive language schools. A fee per taught session is invisible at two sessions a week per student and doubles at four; it charges you for teaching more, which is an odd incentive for an education product. If you are quoted one, model it at your actual session frequency rather than an average.
Identical at forty students.
Not at three hundred.
The last row is the one nobody models. Raise your fees by twenty percent — because you should, periodically — and a percentage-based platform fee rises twenty percent with them, for the same students, the same classes and the same software. A per-student price does not move. Over a decade of ordinary price rises that difference compounds into something substantial, and it is invisible in every evaluation because evaluations compare a single moment.
The practical instruction: build a four-row table like the one above with your own numbers — today, and your best guess at one, three and five years — and price every shortlisted product in all four rows. It takes twenty minutes and it is the highest-value twenty minutes in the entire evaluation.
Cheapest when you are small.
That is the design.
Revenue-share pricing is genuinely attractive for a new school: almost nothing to pay while you have almost no students, and the vendor only earns when you do. It is a fair bargain at the start and a poor one later, because the fee keeps scaling with your success and never with the cost of serving you. A platform does not do more work when a school raises its prices.
Three specifics to establish before signing. What percentage, and on what base — card payments only, or all recorded payments including bank transfers and cash? Is there a second, lower percentage on payments the platform did not process, which several products in this market apply and few advertise? And is the percentage in the contract, or in a fee schedule that can be revised? The 0% commission article covers the question set, and the comparison pages carry the published figures for each vendor with the date each was checked.
Most vendors use two
and quote one.
In practice, pricing pages combine models: a monthly plan plus a per-lesson fee; a subscription plus a percentage of payments; a flat price plus a charge per additional branch; a base tier plus per-seat pricing above a threshold. The quoted headline is nearly always the smaller component, and the variable one is where the growth lives.
So the question to ask is never "what does it cost?" but "what are all the components of what we will pay, and what does each one scale with?" Written down as a formula — base plus X per student plus Y percent of tuition plus Z per branch — it becomes something you can evaluate at any size. Vendors who price transparently will help you write it. Vendors who resist writing it down are telling you which component they would rather you did not model.
There is no universally
best model.
A solo tutor with eight students is genuinely better off on a percentage or a very low flat fee, and would be mad to pay a per-student price designed for an institution. A school with many part-time teachers should avoid per-seat pricing at almost any headline. A multi-site academy should treat per-site pricing as a strategic constraint rather than a line item. An intensive exam-prep centre teaching four sessions a week per student should run from per-lesson pricing. And a school expecting to raise fees over the next five years should weight percentage models down accordingly.
For the record, SprintUp is priced per active student — free for one educator and ten students, €29 a month for Pro, and Academy from €99 covering the first 25 active students, then €4 each to 100 and €3 beyond, with unlimited teachers — and takes 0% of what students pay you. That is a good fit for a growing school with staff and a poor fit for a solo tutor with a handful of students, who should stay on the free plan or use something cheaper. We would rather say that than sell an Academy plan to someone who does not need one.