Cambly

Many people teach English online part time while devoting their full time attention to a creative endeavor, such as writing a novel or designing an invention. If this is you, then don't sign a contract with Cambly! Section #7 refers to "developments," and agreement with this item compels you to give Cambly your "rights, title, and interest" in "all inventions creations, improvements, discoveries, methods, developments, software, and works of authorship, whether patentable or not, that are created, made, conceived, or reduced to practice by him or under his direction or jointly with others during the Service Period, whether or not during normal working hours or on the premises of the Company." It goes on to say that if you refuse to sign a document that they want you to sign, "Tutor hereby irrevocably designates and appoints each executive officer of the Company as his agent and attorney-in-fact to execute any such papers on his behalf to take any and all actions as the Company may deem necessary or desirable in order to protect its rights and interests." So by signing the contract, you give them the proxy power to sign any document using your signature, forcing your legal compliance. I've taught ESL abroad for 6 years but this contract is on another level. It's normal for your employer to own the rights to things that you create at work. It's another thing for them to own EVERYTHING you create in your free time, too. Cambly could legally pursue any royalties you may earn from any creative projects that you complete while under contract with them.

TL; DR: tutors don't show up on time; servers are laggy; customer service is virtually non-existent. Avoid.

Very frequently, and I mean more than 50% of the time, lessons did not take place at all due to reasons like the server being laggy (definitely not on my end), teachers not showing up at all and virtual classroom 'technical issues'. Every time I reached out to the support team, all they could say was 'sorry' -- period.

Worse still, when I contacted them with a refund request, they replied with a generic template that clearly showed they couldn't even be bothered to read my message -- they got the starting and ending date and lesson package type wrong. After all, what Cambly is trying to convey is **refund? Impossible!**.

With this kind of attitude towards users as a platform, I highly doubt if you, a prospective tutor/learner, would ever be happy with their service. Avoid at all costs. There are other better companies out there.

Cambly customer service is just about the worst customer service I have ever experienced. Somehow, my tutor account was totally deleted. I'm not even sure if I was fired or what, if anything, I did wrong. This month was my 3-year anniversary on Cambly. I had logged over 18,000 chats earning more than $47,000. As far as I knew everything was fine. I had about 3 weeks of Priority Hours booked and many reservations scheduled. I had a small and loyal following of regular students, many of whom I had known for years. It would have been nice to at least say goodbye. I guess I'll never get that chance.

I worked for Cambly for 4 and a half years and was welcomed with a goodbye email today. The reason was that some students complained about me but no details were ever given. When asked for details they refused to give them. Do not waste your time working on this site.

Teachers' quality is not good. They are not willing to help with students' personal goals. Especially after I booked lessons with a few teachers, one told me that it's her 8-year professional experience that she won't prepare for my class, "the most exciting topics come from students' hobbies so pre-planned topics are impossible". Another said, "Unfortunately I do have many students so I am not able to prepare ahead of class." Most of the teachers claim that they will help students to achieve language goals in the video and seem so passionate about teaching, but at the end, the students have no right to decide the lesson, or they said "yes, sure! No problem! Sure thing!" to my requests, but ended up never fulfilling them in my lessons. No trial class so my money always goes down the drain. 4 months, what an exhausting journey in finding the right teacher in Cambly. Perhaps never will I be able to do so, so quitting is the only choice.

Another problem is NO SHOW. To avoid this problem, I actually always message tutors the day before the lesson to confirm their availability. However, tutors are really irresponsible that even if they promised to show up, they can end up never doing so and don't receive any punishment and I cannot leave a comment. Cambly explained that "something unexpected can happen". But isn't that "something" too frequent?

Oh! And customer service. Because my location is Hong Kong, they always arrange people from Taiwan to answer my inquiries in Chinese! However, my language setting is English. I'm not a native speaker of Chinese, so it can be very confusing for me, I write you in English, so why can't just write me back in English?

I taught on the platform for over a year as I traveled the world, and it was $#*!ty pay and a platform that didn't always work well. But I really enjoyed the students. Unlike others in the reviews, I had wonderful experience with the students and formed some lovely friendships. I created my own curriculum and saw students gain knowledge, get into English speaking universities, and secure jobs under my instruction. It was rewarding from that perspective. But the company's tutor agreement, which they've amended, is abusive. And they're asking for the rights to ANY and ALL creative things tutors design or develop while working for them (novels, apps, screenplays, etc) although the contract specifically says tutors are independent contractors. They can also use tutors' likenesses for advertisement without permission or compensation. They can sign tutors'names to legal documentation (I'm not sure this is even legal!). They forbid tutors from engaging in class action law suits. The list goes on. I'm not a disgruntled worker writing a revenge review. I was a tutor with an 8.84 rating out of a possible 9.0 I had planned on quitting the platform when the new agreement was to take place on May 17,2021 but I went on the platform two weeks before that date to log in and I was being forced to sign the new agreement early or I could not log in. I had 20 or so hours already scheduled that I couldn't undo because I couldn't get onto the platform, which means I looked AWOL to my students who'd scheduled those hours. This is the kind of thing Cambly does. There is no regard for tutors or students. It's a money grab.

I worked for Cambly for several years, mostly on the CamblyKids side. Things were fine for awhile, but I had introduced a book & film approach to some of my regulars and was kicked for playing too much video, even though the parents knew what I was doing and appreciated the more interesting literary content. They said I had 2 warnings, but the first one was 8 months pror and unrelated. You'd think they would balance the performance against errors, but nope.

After that, my ratings started to drop even when I only had regular students who liked me. The rating system is a joke and a scam. I'm certain Cambly manipulates the numbers when they want to drive new teachers to the front.

The best thing about Cambly is meeting the people, but it's a slave job. The pay is so bad. I suppose I will leave soon since I have a new, high paying job. I will miss my friends from around the world, though.

This website is unable to deal with the serious issues that affect their teachers. I worked on Cambly as a freelancer for just over a year as a side gig whilst travelling and I can only describe it as the most horrendous site for freelance teachers. Middle Eastern students REGULARLY flash their penises on camera during their 15-minute free trials - this has happened to plenty of teachers that made it known on Cambly's Facebook Corner page.

Personally, I had a South Korean complete nutter/buffoon that decided to go on a mission to try to make outrageously offensive remarks towards me using my own website (once he start stalking me outside Cambly), in a futile attempt to gain something out if it. I immediately reported it to Cambly and the ONLY action they took was to remove me from the site without notice or justification. An easy way to make the problem go away quickly? Well... This has been reported to the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission and a class action lawsuit is coming their way.

On 2 April 2018, I was told by Cambly that, and I quote from their email, "based on your great work tutoring on Cambly, we've selected you for the Cambly IELTS tutor list (...)". On 2 May 2018 (a month later), and within hours of reporting this incident with 'Mr Gangnam Style on steroids' to them, I received their standard BS email stating that my account was deactivated because I suddenly no longer met their "standards" as a tutor. They've never bothered to respond to the actual complaint I made against the student. My rating on the site was 4.89 out of 5.0.

It is common practice for them to deactivate accounts without notice or justification as you can see from the attached photo of one of their tutors on Cambly Corner (their Facebook private group page). It is also common for them to remove you from their page so that they can censor you (communist style censorship).

Independent Contractor status: Tutors are required to sign an agreement that states that you're an independent contractor. You're not a Cambly employee, you work for yourself and they give you access to the platform, is the short version of the contract you sign. YET... if you miss too many calls, your rating drops or if you cancel a PH within 12 hours of booking it, they'll sometimes issue a warning but they also will sometimes suspend your account for 3 days or worst yet, take access to PH away completely. HOW do they get away with this? You're either an independent contractor OR you work for them and if they can do things like take away access to PH, which is essentially punishment, then by nature this means they're acting in the same way as an employer.

Technical issues: The site went completely down once. There are frequent issues with sound, the ringer turning off and passing the internet test required before you can start tutoring.

The five minute trials: I can't begin to explain how stressful the five minute trial calls are. There's obviously NO vetting of not only teachers but students also. Teachers are subjected to having students expose themselves, being openly flirted with, cursed at, laughed at and overall abuse by some of the "students" that call in. Tutors can choose the level of students they want to teach. I chose intermediate and up, which would supposedly eliminate beginners, however I still got calls from beginners, a lot of them. Imagine being connected with someone who can only say, "No English" and/or "what?". That's all they say!

Tutor Support: In reality, there almost isn't any. There's no one to call or even e-mail with issues. You have to go to the support tab, send in a ticket and wait for them to get back to you. This can take anywhere from hours to a couple of days. Other than the tutor guide that they ask you to read and go by, you're pretty much on your own, and learn as you go.

Cambly was naively using a "Chinese student" (AKA infiltrated agent) living in Australia, whose name is "GRACE', as bait, in order to obtain / misappropriate more information and materials on IELTS writing so that they could place them on their websites (as their own copyright). I knew all along what she was doing... They simply can't come up with any materials of their own because they're trained to steal everything from other countries.

Most of the information in their "library" isn't Cambly's original material - it comes from other sites. If you look at the "class" materials, you can see that they're using articles from other sites they put in their library for tutors to use. I have NO idea how they get around copyright infringement issues.

The limited number of "glowing reviews" for Cambly online are from tutors that are desperate to increment their income. Cambly PAYS $20 PER REFERRAL.

If you like working for nothing while being treated unfairly by clueless management on a system that has constant technical problems and abusive students, then this is the job for you.