How to Leave Preply: A Step-by-Step Migration Guide for Tutors

How to leave Preply comes down to sequencing, not confrontation: you build your independent setup — a booking page, a payment processor, a video classroom — before you say a word to a single student, you finish whatever lesson packages or notice period your current agreement obligates you to, and only once you're actually free to do so do you invite students to follow you. The reason most tutors even consider this move is Preply's sliding commission, which runs roughly 18% to 33% depending on how many hours you've taught a given student over your lifetime on the platform, with Preply keeping 100% of the trial lesson regardless of how the ongoing relationship shakes out. That's real money stacked on top of an already competitive hourly rate, and it doesn't shrink just because you and a student have worked together for a year. But leaving isn't just closing a browser tab. It means replacing Preply's scheduling, video classroom, payment processing, and reminder emails with your own stack, and doing all of it without violating the terms you agreed to when you signed up. This guide walks through that transition step by step — what to check first, what to build before you announce anything, how to time the handoff, and what actually changes financially once you're on your own.

Before you do anything: read your Preply agreement

Before you build anything or talk to anyone, open your actual current Preply Tutor Agreement and read the sections covering non-solicitation, notice periods, and account closure — not a summary you remember from when you first signed up, since marketplaces revise these terms periodically and the version you agreed to a year ago may not match what's live today.

Most marketplace agreements — Preply's included, and this holds broadly across iTalki, Cambly, Verbling, Wyzant, and Superprof too — include some version of a non-solicitation clause. In plain terms, this usually restricts you from directly inviting a student you met through the platform to pay you outside it while that specific relationship originated there and is still active on their system. Some agreements attach a time window to this; others are looser or tied to whether the student is still actively booking through you. Separately, most platforms specify a notice period or process for closing or pausing your profile, and rules about what happens to in-progress packages, pending payouts, and your review history if you leave abruptly. None of this is standardized across the industry, and none of it is something we can responsibly summarize on your behalf — the specifics matter, and they change.

• Log into Preply and locate the current Tutor Agreement in your account settings — not an old confirmation email from when you joined.
• Note any explicit non-solicitation or off-platform arrangement language and how long, if at all, it applies after a student relationship starts.
• Check the required notice period, if any, before you can close, pause, or step back from your profile.
• Check what happens to pending payouts, in-progress lesson packages, and your accumulated reviews if you leave mid-cycle versus at a natural break point.
• If anything is ambiguous, ask Preply support directly and keep the written answer — don't rely on forum posts or what another tutor told you.

Step 1: build your independent setup first

Step 1 is entirely about infrastructure, not students: before you tell anyone you're moving, you need a booking page, a payment processor, and a video classroom that all work independently of Preply, because building this after you've already announced the move puts you in a rush, and a rushed setup is exactly what makes a transition look chaotic to the students you're trying to keep.

Your booking page and calendar

On Preply, lesson slots get assigned to you inside their system and students book around whatever availability you've entered there. Independently, you need a booking link that does the equivalent job on your own domain — one with timezone auto-detection, since a student in Manila booking a lesson with a tutor in Lisbon should never have to do the math themselves, and syncing to Google Calendar so you're not double-booking across two separate systems during the overlap period. This is the single most important piece to get right first, because it's the thing every other tool depends on.

Payments that land in your account

Preply handles payment collection, currency conversion, and payout scheduling for you — and takes its commission before any of it reaches you. Independently, you connect Stripe and/or PayPal directly, and the money goes straight to your account on your own payout timeline instead of a marketplace's schedule. This is also the point where you start thinking in terms of your own monthly recurring revenue, or MRR, the same way any small service business would, rather than a per-lesson payout that already had a cut taken out of it.

Video classroom you control

You don't have to replicate Preply's in-browser classroom exactly — Zoom and Google Meet both work fine, and plenty of independent tutors just use whichever one their students are already comfortable with. A built-in video classroom tied to your booking page removes one extra step for students (no separate link to dig up before each lesson), which matters more than it sounds like once you're managing dozens of recurring lessons a week without a marketplace's infrastructure behind you.

• Set up a booking page with timezone auto-detection so students in different time zones don't double-book or show up an hour off.
• Connect Stripe and/or PayPal so payments land directly in your account, not through a marketplace's internal payout schedule.
• Pick a video tool — Zoom, Google Meet, or a built-in classroom tied to your booking page — and test it with a dummy lesson before relying on it.
• Turn on automatic email/SMS reminders so no-shows don't spike the moment you're managing scheduling yourself.
• Set up lesson packages or prepaid credits so returning students can pay ahead, the same way they may already be used to doing on Preply.

Step 2: decide your pricing on your own platform

Step 2 is where you set your own hourly rate free of Preply's commission math — because once you're not losing roughly 18% to 33% of every lesson, you can lower your price for students, raise your own take-home, or land somewhere in between, and that decision needs to happen before you talk to a single student about switching.

Match, discount, or hold your rate

Say you charge $30 an hour and you're at a 20% commission tier with a given student on Preply — you're keeping roughly $24 of that. Independently, at 0% commission, you keep the full $30. You could stop there and simply pocket the difference, or you could offer that student $27 as a "moving with me" rate, which still nets you more than Preply ever paid you while genuinely rewarding the student for following you. Neither choice is wrong; the mistake is not deciding deliberately and instead just defaulting to whatever number was on your Preply profile.

Account for the tools you now pay for yourself

Independence isn't free — you're trading a percentage-based commission for a flat subscription. Tutafy's Pro plan is $12/month for unlimited students plus AI lesson tools, and Academy is $29/month if you're running a small team of tutors and need payroll on top of scheduling. Even at Academy pricing, that's a fixed cost that doesn't scale with your hours the way a commission does — teach 5 hours a week or 35, the subscription stays the same.

• Calculate what you actually keep per hour today after Preply's commission tier for that specific student, not a rough guess.
• Decide whether to pass some of the savings to students as a lower rate, keep it all as extra income, or split the difference.
• Price lesson packages and prepaid credits at a modest discount to encourage upfront commitment — the same behavior Preply's package pricing likely already trained your students to expect.
• Factor in your new tool cost — Free at $0, Pro at $12/month, or Academy at $29/month — against a single commission cut, which is usually larger.
• Set a clear cancellation policy and no-show fee now, since Preply's dispute process no longer applies once you're independent.

Step 3: finish your commitments and time the transition well

Step 3 is about protecting your reputation while you still have one foot on Preply: finish the lesson packages, recurring lesson series, and any notice period you owe before you make your independent move visible to a current student, because disappearing mid-package costs you the reviews, referrals, and repeat bookings you're trying to carry with you into the next chapter.

Timing matters more here than almost anywhere else in this process. If a student has 6 lessons left on a 10-lesson package, finishing that package on Preply — rather than trying to migrate them mid-way — keeps the relationship clean and avoids any awkward conversation about a partially-used prepaid balance. The same logic applies to recurring lessons: let an existing weekly series either complete naturally or formally close per your agreement, then rebuild that same recurring schedule independently once you're both ready.

Don't leave active students stranded

Nothing undermines an independent tutoring business faster than a reputation for disappearing on students. If you're managing more than a handful of learners, treat this the way agencies using tools like TutorCruncher, Teachworks, or TutorBird treat staffing transitions — with an actual list, not memory. Know exactly which students are mid-package, which are on a recurring series, and which are close to a natural stopping point, and sequence your exit around that list rather than a single calendar date that ignores it.

Pick a clean cutover date

Choose a specific date after which new bookings happen on your independent platform and keep both your Preply calendar and your Google Calendar-synced booking page open in parallel until that date passes cleanly. This overlap period is exactly when double-booking risk is highest, so block matching availability windows in both systems rather than trusting yourself to remember which calendar is authoritative on a given day.

• List every current student and where they stand in their Preply lesson package or recurring series.
• Finish or clearly close out packages that are almost done rather than restarting them independently mid-way through.
• Choose a specific cutover date and keep both calendars open in parallel until it passes without conflict.
• Block matching availability windows in both systems during the overlap period to avoid double-booking.
• Only mention your independent move to existing Preply students once your agreement's notice period and any non-solicitation window have actually elapsed.

Step 4: bring students over the right way

Step 4 only starts once your Preply agreement actually allows it — and even then, the right way to bring students over is through referrals from people who already trust you and through your own marketing, not through scraping contact details or mass-messaging people you found through the platform's search or messaging tools.

Let happy students refer you

Word of mouth does most of the work here. A student who's had a good year of IELTS prep or CELTA-aligned lessons with you is often glad to mention your independent booking page to a friend, a sibling working toward TOEFL, or a WhatsApp group of classmates — you generally don't need to engineer this beyond simply having a clean, professional page to point people to and, if it fits your style, a small referral coupon for the first lesson booked independently.

Build your own marketing instead of poaching

This is the part that actually takes ongoing effort: your own website, a presence wherever your ideal students already look for tutors, and enough search visibility that new people can find you without a marketplace's algorithm doing it for you. Tutors across iTalki, Cambly, Wyzant, Verbling, and Superprof all eventually run into the same trade-off — the platform's traffic is convenient, but it's not yours, and it disappears the day you leave. Building a personal brand alongside your teaching (a CELTA or TESOL credential displayed clearly, a CEFR level breakdown of who you teach, honest specifics about your IELTS or TOEFL results process) is slower than marketplace placement but it's an asset you actually own.

What never to do

Never export or scrape contact details from students you only know through Preply's messaging system, and never mass-message people you found via the platform's internal search before an independent relationship with them existed. This isn't just a terms-of-service risk — it's the specific behavior that gets tutor accounts suspended, and it damages trust with students who reasonably expected their contact information to stay inside the platform they signed up for.

• Wait until your current agreement's notice period and any non-solicitation language have actually run their course before reaching out about switching platforms.
• Ask happy students for referrals — don't harvest contact details; a message from you once you're free to send it is fundamentally different from exporting a list.
• Offer a small welcome coupon on your own booking page for the first lesson booked independently, if that fits how you already work with students.
• Point new inquiries to your own booking link instead of your Preply profile once your independent setup is fully live.
• Never message students you found only through Preply's search or messaging tools before an independent relationship with them existed — that's the line platforms actually enforce.

Step 5: what changes operationally once you're independent

Step 5 is the operational reality check: once you leave, reminders, cancellation policy, and payment collection are entirely on you instead of running through Preply's system, and each of those needs a working replacement before your first fully independent lesson, not sometime after.

Reminders and no-shows

Preply sends its own lesson reminders and mediates no-show disputes to some degree. Independently, that job is yours — automatic email and SMS reminders need to be switched on before your first lesson, not added later once you notice attendance slipping. You'll also need your own no-show policy written down somewhere a student can actually read it, since there's no marketplace support ticket to fall back on if a disagreement comes up.

Payments now go through you

Stripe and PayPal replace Preply's payout system, which means you're also now responsible for issuing refunds, handling a declined card, and understanding your own payout timing rather than a marketplace's fixed schedule. This is more control, but it's also more exposure — a chargeback or a failed payment is now something you resolve directly rather than something a platform's support team handles on your behalf.

Student and parent communication

A student portal (and a parent portal, if you teach minors) replaces the messaging and lesson-history features built into Preply's dashboard. For quick day-to-day communication, plenty of independent tutors just use WhatsApp, and if you want new bookings or reminders routed into other tools you already rely on, Zapier can connect your booking system to almost anything else in your workflow without custom development.

• Turn on automatic email/SMS lesson reminders before your first independent lesson, not after you notice attendance slipping.
• Publish a clear cancellation policy — for example, 24-hour notice — since disputes are now between you and the student directly.
• Set up direct Stripe/PayPal payouts and understand your own payout timing instead of a marketplace's fixed schedule.
• Give students (and parents, if you teach minors) access to a portal for lesson history, homework, and payment records.
• Connect WhatsApp for quick messaging or Zapier if you want booking and reminder alerts routed into tools you already use.

The real financial picture of leaving

The real financial picture of leaving comes down to one comparison: what a marketplace's commission costs you every month versus what an independent platform costs you as a flat subscription — and for almost any tutor teaching more than a handful of hours a week, that math tips independent fast.

Take a concrete example. If you teach 15 hours a week at $30/hour on Preply at a 20% commission tier, that's roughly $360 a month going to commission alone — before accounting for the fact that some students may still be at a higher tier closer to 33%. On Tutafy's Pro plan, the equivalent cost is a flat $12/month no matter how many hours or students you have, and on Free it's $0 for up to 10 students. The gap only widens as your hours grow, because commission scales with your income and a flat subscription doesn't.

That said, leaving doesn't erase the cost of finding students in the first place — it just moves that cost from a percentage of every lesson to your own time and effort spent on marketing. The table below lays out the actual trade-offs side by side, not just the commission line.

Why some tutors keep a marketplace profile even after going independent

Why some tutors keep a marketplace profile even after going independent comes down to one thing: Preply's own marketing and search traffic keeps sending them brand-new students they'd never have found on their own, and that lead-generation value doesn't disappear just because they also run an independent practice on the side.

When the hybrid model makes sense

This is genuinely the honest case for Preply, and we're not going to pretend otherwise: if you're brand new to tutoring with no existing audience, no website traffic, and no referral network yet, a marketplace's built-in discovery is worth the commission while you build that foundation. The same logic applies if you're adding a new credential or subject — say you just finished a CELTA or TESOL certification and want to test demand for exam prep across CEFR levels A1 through C2 before committing your own marketing budget to it. A trickle of new students through Preply, run alongside a growing independent base on your own platform, isn't a contradiction; it's a reasonable way to diversify where your next student comes from while your independent brand is still young.

• Keep your Preply profile active only for students who found you organically through the marketplace, not for anyone already working with you independently.
• Keep Preply-sourced lessons fully within Preply's system — don't mix an independent invoice into a relationship that started on the marketplace.
• Reassess every few months whether the trickle of new students from a marketplace is worth its commission versus investing that same time in your own marketing.