You didn't become a language tutor to spend your evenings switching between six browser tabs, chasing unpaid invoices, copy-pasting vocabulary lists, and trying to remember whether it was your 3pm or your 4pm student whose subjunctive was "getting there." And yet — here we are.
If you run an independent tutoring business, your tech stack probably looks something like this: Zoom for lessons. Calendly for booking. Stripe or FreshBooks for invoicing. Quizlet for vocabulary. ChatGPT for lesson prep. Notion for everything the other five apps forgot to handle. It works, in the same way that duct-taping six appliances together technically counts as a kitchen. Functional? Sure. Serene? Absolutely not.
The worst part isn't the monthly cost (though $66+ a month stings). It's the invisible overhead — the context-switching, the "wait, which student was that again?" before every session, the invoice you forgot to send three weeks ago that you now have to awkwardly raise. That's the real price of the fragmented stack. And it's coming out of your pocket every single day.
The 6-App Tutoring Stack (And Its Hidden Costs)
Let's name the culprits. You know them well — they're already open in your browser right now, probably.
Zoom — $15.99/month
The gold standard for video calls. Zero lesson notes. Zero student history. No materials storage. No memory of the fact that Ana has been struggling with the subjunctive for six weeks. Just a grid of faces, a mute button, and the occasional "you're on mute" from the student who definitely could have un-muted themselves.
Calendly — $10/month
Beautifully simple booking. Completely isolated from everything else. When a student cancels at 11pm, Calendly knows. Your Google Calendar knows. You know (via a notification at midnight). Nobody connected to the actual lesson does anything about it automatically. You'll get to it in the morning. Probably.
Stripe or FreshBooks — $17/month
Invoicing that works — if you remember to do it. Did you charge Ana for that make-up session? Did you update Carlos's rate last month? Is that overdue invoice for the student who "just needs to check their bank"? Your accounting software knows what you told it. It does not know what you forgot to tell it.
Quizlet — $3/month
Great flashcards. No awareness whatsoever that your student has been stuck on the same ten words for three weeks and perhaps, just perhaps, it's time to consolidate before adding thirty more. Quizlet does not care. Quizlet does not remember. Quizlet will keep serving those flashcards until the end of time.
ChatGPT Plus — $20/month
Your lesson planning co-pilot. Genuinely brilliant for generating exercises, explaining grammar, inventing roleplay scenarios. Memory: none. Context: whatever you type right now. Every single session, you're re-explaining who your student is, what level they're at, and what you covered last week. It's like hiring a genius who gets full amnesia between every meeting.
Notion — free (in theory)
The glue holding the entire operation together. Student databases, lesson notes, progress trackers, homework logs — all the things the other five apps simply don't do. Powerful. Flexible. Also: another tab, another login, another system to maintain, and a blank page staring at you every time you start a new student.
The Monthly Damage
| Tool | What It Does | What It Doesn't Do | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zoom | Video calls | Lesson history, student context | $15.99 |
| Calendly | Scheduling | Talk to any other tool | $10.00 |
| FreshBooks / Stripe | Invoicing | Remember to send itself | $17.00 |
| Quizlet | Flashcards | Know what student actually needs | $3.00 |
| ChatGPT Plus | Lesson planning | Remember anyone's name | $20.00 |
| Notion | Everything else | Integrate with any of the above | $0 (+ your time) |
| Total | A heroic attempt at running a business | ~$66+/mo | |
The Problem Isn't the Apps — It's That They Don't Talk to Each Other
Here's what a typical Tuesday looks like. Your student books via Calendly. You jump into Notion to pull up their notes from last week. You open Zoom and start the call. Halfway through the lesson you want to quiz them on vocabulary from two sessions ago — which lives in Quizlet, which you now need to open in a separate tab while maintaining convincing eye contact. After the lesson, you write up notes in Notion, manually copy the new vocabulary into Quizlet, and open FreshBooks to raise an invoice you'll probably forget to follow up on.
Then you prep for next week using ChatGPT. You type: "Help me plan a B1 Spanish lesson for a student struggling with the subjunctive." ChatGPT says: "Absolutely! Here's a fantastic lesson plan." And it is a fantastic lesson plan. But it doesn't know your student's name. It doesn't know they have a grammar exam on Friday. It doesn't know they find roleplay exercises embarrassing and prefer written exercises. You know all of that — but it's scattered across four apps and your own increasingly-strained short-term memory.
The apps are fine in isolation. The problem is the gap between them. That gap is filled by you — manually copying data, switching context, holding the complete picture of twelve students in your head simultaneously while also trying to conjugate verbs. Every handoff between tools is a place where information gets lost. And when information gets lost, students feel it.
What Running Your Business From One Platform Feels Like
Let's try a different Tuesday.
Your student — let's call her Ana — finds your public tutor profile on Tuton. She can see your specialisms, your rates, and your availability, and books directly. No emails back and forth. No "does 3pm Thursday work for you?" She books herself, gets a confirmation, and you see it instantly — no Calendly, no Google Calendar sync, no midnight notification.
When the lesson starts, you're already in context. Ana's profile shows you her current level, the vocabulary she's been working through, notes from your last three sessions, and her progress over time. The video classroom is built right into Tuton — you click one button and you're live with Ana. No new tab. No "let me just find that Zoom link I definitely sent you."
During the lesson, you add vocabulary words directly to Ana's tracker. You jot a lesson note. You flag a grammar point to revisit next week. Everything in one place, in real time, without breaking the flow of the actual conversation you're meant to be having.
When the lesson ends, an invoice goes out automatically. You don't have to remember. You don't have to log in to FreshBooks. You certainly don't have to chase it two weeks later. It just happens.
Before next week's session, your AI Teaching Assistant already knows Ana's history. You ask it to plan a follow-up on the subjunctive and it can reference what you covered, what she found difficult, and what topics are overdue for review. It's not just a chatbot that forgot everything since breakfast — it's a co-teacher that's been paying attention so you don't have to carry it all alone.
That's not a product demo fantasy. That's just what it looks like when your tools actually talk to each other.
The All-in-One Cost Comparison
| Fragmented Stack | Tuton Solo | |
|---|---|---|
| Video Classroom | Zoom ($15.99/mo) | ✅ Included |
| Scheduling | Calendly ($10/mo) | ✅ Included |
| Invoicing | FreshBooks ($17/mo) | ✅ Included |
| Vocabulary Tracking | Quizlet ($3/mo) | ✅ Included |
| AI Teaching Assistant | ChatGPT Plus ($20/mo) | ✅ Included |
| Student CRM & Notes | Notion (free + your time) | ✅ Included |
| Public Tutor Profile | ❌ Not included anywhere | ✅ Included |
| Total | ~$66+/mo | $29/mo |
But the money is almost the smaller story here. If you spend 20 minutes per student per week on admin — invoicing, note-taking, lesson prep, scheduling — and you have 15 students, that's 5 hours of unpaid administrative work every single week. Cut that in half and you've either reclaimed 2.5 hours to teach more students or, genuinely radical concept, to finish your coffee while it's still warm.
Common Objections (Answered Honestly)
"I'm used to my current tools. This feels like a lot of change."
Fair. Switching one tool feels like effort. Switching six feels like a relocation. But here's the honest reframe: you're not switching six tools — you're retiring them. One migration, one learning curve, one login from here on out. Tutors who've made the move typically say the adjustment took about a week, and then they can't explain why they waited so long.
"Will I lose my student data?"
Your Notion notes, your Quizlet sets, your FreshBooks history — none of that vanishes. You bring over what matters, leave behind what you don't need, and start fresh with everything connected. We'll help you get set up; you won't be doing it alone at midnight with a spreadsheet.
"What if Tuton doesn't have a feature I rely on?"
Honest answer: Tuton might not replicate every niche capability of every specialist app on day one. If there's something you genuinely cannot live without, it's worth checking before you commit — that's exactly what the free trial is for. But for the vast majority of independent tutors, Tuton covers everything in the stack above and, crucially, connects it all so it actually works as a system rather than six islands of information.
"What if the platform goes down? At least with six apps I have redundancy."
Also a fair point, and we respect the logic. Though we'd gently observe that six apps each going down for six different reasons on six different days is its own category of chaos. Your data in Tuton is always exportable, uptime is taken seriously, and you're not one "Zoom is having issues" email away from cancelling your afternoon sessions.
Time to Close Some Tabs
You became a language tutor because you're good at it — because you love watching someone go from stumbling through a conversation to actually having one. Not because you wanted a second career as an unpaid SaaS administrator.
The six-app stack made sense as a bootstrapped starting point. Each tool was the best at one specific thing, and the price of zero platform lock-in was worth paying when you had three students and a dream. But "six best-in-class tools duct-taped together" is not the same as "a platform designed for you." It's more expensive. It's more fragmented. And every week, it quietly costs you time and energy you don't need to be spending.
Tuton was built specifically for independent language tutors. Not adapted from a generic freelancer platform with a tutoring skin. Not a scheduling tool that added a few features. Built from the ground up for the way you actually work.
Start your free trial at tuton.io/register. Bring your students. Close some tabs. Get back to the part where you're actually good at your job.