Jacob J.

You'll create a profile and then see a bunch of others. Most of them are lame, no surprise, but some people put real effort into creating them. If you want to read messages or reply to them you have to pay. I paid $10/mo and have now messaged about 50 people. I wondered why nobody replied, but then I realized they would have to pay to reply. It's basically a scummy scam of a website. This pricing model sucks, and it makes it nearly impossible to actually use the site. They should at least give paying users a way to filter to only see other paying users, if those are the 1% we'll actually be able to contact.

It works; I got some business through the site. In fact, finding students through the site was a little easier than without it. However, I still had to work very hard for those students and only about 1 out of 14 correspondences ever lead to a lesson. Most of the students I was in contact with were not even valid because the WyzAnt system is all about students placing their credit card info on file, which they're understandably cautious about. Then the site has the nerve to ask for up to 40% of my income!

WyzAnt has a strange business model. They take a significant cut of your hourly rates, but set you up to meet in person. Considering this, I suspect tutors and students cutting the site out of the deal is a huge problem, at least in part justifying their apparent neurosis. They could make it a little better by at least offering tutors a more reasonable cut of the income they generate. To make matters worse, the vast majority of students I connected with through the site did not have billing info on file and were thus off limits. I ended up spending substantial time explaining the billing system to weary customers and easing their concerns only to find that most of those cautious customers found a tutor elsewhere.

With all these students with no billing info badgering me to meet them anyway, I had my work cut out for me just fending them off. One day a very professional and respectful young man started with his concerns about the billing system and asking me to meet him at his school and cut the site out. I tried and tried to ease his concerns but he insisted I meet him and gave me a location. I said I'd come talk with him in person about the billing system and help ease his concerns. Within hours of this, my profile was disabled. After all those countless hours laboring for the company trying to get students to do as WyzAnt wanted, put billing info on file, this one little incident got me zapped out of the system. Talk about institutional neurosis.