$10/month, however is very expensive if this service delivers no business. How about if you charge $2 per inquiry up to $20/month. If your tutors cannot convert 10 inquiries into at least $100 of new revenues, they shouldn’t be tutoring to begin with. If transaction costs are going to kill you, give tutors 3 free inquiries to start with, and then require them to keep their “inquiry” reserve topped up (minimum $20, refundable pro-rated) if they wish to receive more inquiries. Ding the reserve $2 for every inquiry. The up side is that you don’t have to pay anybody except tutors closing out their accounts. The other nice thing is that tutors who don’t want new inquiries can simply let their reserve dwindle to $0, and then top it up when they want new business. This lets you advertise the tutor as “fully occupied”.

From the viewpoint of your hosting costs, I’m going to guess that hosting a tutor profile probably costs less than $0.10 per month, and can be rolled into the “mud” of your other fixed hosting costs.

An online payment with a 15% cut is asking parents and tutors to cut side deals. That hurts your site because it tacitly encourages students and parents to work against you.

Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to find a way to enforce this yet. I think it’s too easy to get paid offline so people (even it’s not intentional) end up avoiding the fee.

How would you feel about something like $5/month or $45/year to keep up a tutor profile – and no percentage fee for payments (tutor gets paid by student directly in any way they’d like)?

Thanks for the comment. I just saw it after leaving a comment below, but something to keep in mind: the monthly subscription would not come into effect until you’d gotten 3 free contacts to try it out. Hopefully this allows students to see if it will be profitable before deciding whether to subscribe or not.

You’re right that another problem is getting more students to the site so tutors get more contacts. It is summer right now, but for this we could definitely use more marketing budget you’re right.

Also, the 5% is not just for billing a credit card which is around 2.x%. It’s also for the direct deposit and monthly fees. Thanks for the feedback! If there is anything else just let me know.

This was a way to try out the site and see if it was profitable before deciding whether to subscribe. We would of course use something like this again so it’s wouldn’t be required up front.

Also, thanks for the thoughts on amounts. I like the idea of adding a yearly option in addition to a monthly so tutors can get some sort of discount.