Before Kevin Chen helped people find language teachers, he helped build a website for family history. Think family trees with a social network attached. The team spent more than a year developing it. Then Chen took the product to prospective customers in San Francisco and Miami, including funeral homes. Their response was, in his later account, very negative. The customers had arrived rather late in the design process.
- Choose an independent teacher, a price and a time.
- Book individual lessons without a tutoring subscription.
- Use optional AI tools to review and practice between lessons.
A funeral home, then a language lesson
That earlier company failed. Chen’s explanation is refreshingly unheroic: they had taken too long to understand customers’ needs. His interest in social networks survived, alongside another discovery. After moving to China and studying Mandarin, he experienced how different learning felt when speakers of the language were all around him. The opportunity was to put some of that contact within reach of people who could not relocate.
Chen and Yongyue Jiang co-founded italki. The company’s own history dates its language-exchange network to late 2006 and its expansion into a teacher marketplace to 2008. Free help and paid instruction could inhabit the same community. Someone willing to correct a sentence was useful; someone paid to devote a lesson to your particular difficulties offered a different relationship.
“We believe our users should choose their own learning (or teaching) methodology.”
Kevin Chen · 2009
The distinction still matters. italki organizes access to instruction without prescribing one method for every student. A learner looking for conversation can find a different offer from someone preparing for an exam. The platform brings them to the same marketplace; the teacher supplies the expertise and the lesson.
The teacher is the choice
The basic transaction is straightforward. Browse teachers, inspect their profiles and introduction videos, compare prices and availability, and book. Professional teachers and community tutors sit alongside one another. The professional category requires qualifying teaching credentials or experience; community tutors offer another route to practice. The categories help orient a search, but a badge cannot tell you whether you will enjoy talking to someone.
That makes italki useful for travelers, professionals, exam candidates and people who simply want to keep a language alive. Its corporate site reports more than ten million learners and over 150 languages. Those are company-reported totals, rather than a count of people studying this morning. Breadth matters because a student’s goal may be narrower than “learn Spanish”: a particular accent, a business conversation, or the vocabulary of a family visit.
Preply is a close marketplace alternative, with a subscription approach to ongoing lessons. italki lets students purchase tutoring lesson by lesson, with packages also available. Its freedom is appealing if your calendar changes frequently. It puts more of the responsibility for maintaining a routine on you, however. A recurring payment and a recurring appointment can be useful forms of discipline.
Where the lesson money goes
Teachers set their prices and schedules. italki handles the marketplace and takes a commission. Its current schedule charges 21 percent for a single lesson, dropping to 19 percent for five-lesson packages, 17 percent for ten, and 15 percent for fifteen or twenty. Trials carry no commission; group classes carry 30 percent. A longer teaching relationship changes the economics of the platform’s cut.
For the learner, there is no universal hourly price. Duration, teacher, course and package affect the bill. For the teacher, the advertised price is not take-home pay: withdrawal providers can charge fees, and preparation takes time. This is a marketplace for independent work. The company benefits when it helps teachers attract students who return.
In June 2016, Chinese education company Hujiang invested $3 million. Contemporary reporting said the money would support expansion and mobile development. In 2019, italki acquired Spain-based Lingbe, an app for instant language practice. More recently, italki Business has added employee management and reporting for employers buying language training. The business has grown outward from the conversation in several directions.
Assessment is another paid offering. The Emmersion-powered italki Language Test currently costs $30 for four attempts, with speaking tests in seven languages and additional grammar tests in some. It gives students a way to check their level. It should be treated as an assessment offered by the platform, rather than a substitute for an admissions or immigration exam.
AI gets the homework
The newest wrinkle is italki Plus, which the company says launched in January 2025. The optional subscription offers automated lesson summaries, error corrections, flashcards, AI roleplay and progress insights. Its current web offer is $5.99 monthly or $59.99 annually. Human lessons remain a separate purchase. A person can therefore use pay-per-lesson tutoring and subscribe to the software around it.
The useful question is what happens after the call ends. A summary can preserve vocabulary that would otherwise vanish into a notebook. Roleplay can provide another occasion to use it. italki also lists promotional access to learning apps including LingQ, Glossika and Tandem. These additions may help make practice continuous, although their presence does not establish that every learner progresses faster.
The human side also extends beyond purchased lessons. The free community includes posts, questions, podcasts and quizzes. That gives learners ways to participate before choosing a teacher. italki’s published values emphasize listening across cultures and applying what people learn. Those values describe an ambition; the everyday test is whether a teacher and a student can turn an unfamiliar conversation into something worth repeating.
Bring a task, not a wish
A sensible way to try the marketplace is to arrive with a concrete brief: rehearse an interview, explain your work, or tell a story without retreating into English. Watch introductions, try a lesson where available, and check whether the teacher can support that task regularly. Consider a package after establishing the fit. The choice of teacher deserves more attention than the number beside the language.
This approach needs a workable internet connection, a shared appointment and money for repeated instruction. It is less convenient for someone who wants only unscheduled, solitary practice. A learner who needs a fixed syllabus should ask explicitly for one. The lesson from Chen’s earlier venture applies neatly here: understand the need before committing. With italki, you can start by explaining it to another person.