If you're an independent language tutor, there's a good chance your "teaching setup" is Zoom plus a browser with sixteen tabs open — one for your calendar, one for the invoice you haven't sent yet, one for that vocabulary list you made in Google Docs, and one very guilty tab of YouTube cat videos that you opened "just for a second."
Zoom became the default online tutoring tool the same way Microsoft Word became the default for everything: not because it was the best choice, but because it was the obvious one. Your students have it. Their grandparents have it. It works. So you use it — and somewhere along the way, you started teaching corporate stand-ups to your Spanish student while mentally managing a system held together with copy-paste and good intentions.
But here's the thing about defaults: they're chosen by everyone, not for you. So let's actually ask the question — is Zoom genuinely good for online tutors, or are you just used to it?
What Zoom Gets Right
Let's be fair, because Zoom absolutely deserves some credit.
- Reliability.** Zoom's call quality is consistently solid. The connection doesn't drop every time a cloud passes by, and that matters when you're mid-explanation of the subjunctive and your student's eyes are finally lighting up.
- Universal familiarity.** Your student knows how to use Zoom. Their 70-year-old mother knows how to use Zoom. You will never spend the first eight minutes of a lesson saying "have you tried clicking the camera icon?" This is not a small thing.
- Screen sharing.** Clean, stable, works on all devices. You can pull up a PDF, a grammar exercise, a YouTube clip — and your student can actually see it without it looking like it was filmed through a foggy bathroom mirror.
- Zoom Whiteboard.** For language tutors explaining grammar rules visually, the whiteboard is genuinely useful. Draw a timeline for tenses. Map a sentence structure. It's not fancy, but it does the job.
- Breakout rooms.** If you ever run small group lessons, breakout rooms are a legitimate feature that Google Meet still hasn't quite matched.
So yes — Zoom is a decent video call tool. The keyword being video call tool. Which brings us to the part where things get complicated.
The 40-Minute Problem
If you're on the free Zoom plan, you already know exactly where this section is going.
Forty minutes. That's your limit for group meetings on the free tier. Which means if your lesson runs long — which lessons always do, because a student finally starts talking and you're not about to stop that momentum — Zoom will politely end your call mid-sentence.
- So the difference between por and para is really about—"*
- [Meeting has ended. Please start a new meeting.]**
Charming.
The workaround is to restart the call, which breaks flow, confuses students who miss the rejoin notification, and burns 3–5 minutes of lesson time that you're probably going to have to make up for free because it's awkward not to.
The real fix is upgrading to Zoom Pro at $15.99 per month. Which, fair enough — that's not outrageous. But here's the thing: you're paying $15.99/month for a feature that should exist in a free tier. You're paying to remove a problem, not to gain a capability. That's a different kind of purchase.
And it's just the beginning of the costs.
What Zoom Doesn't Do
Here's where we get honest about what Zoom was actually built for.
Zoom was built for meetings. Business meetings. The kind where Karen from accounting shares her screen to show a slide deck and then everyone gets on with their day. It was not built for tutors who need to remember that Ana is working on subjunctive, prefers written exercises, hates role-play, and had a breakthrough with tenses last week that you want to build on this lesson.
- No student profiles.** Every lesson starts cold. Zoom doesn't know who your student is, what level they're at, or what you worked on last time. That knowledge lives in your head — or in that Google Doc — or in the notes app on your phone — or, honestly, you kind of vaguely remember.
- No lesson history.** There is no record of what you covered, when, or how the lesson went. If a student asks "when did we last work on the past perfect?" you are going to have a long, scrolling adventure through your email inbox.
- No vocabulary tracking.** If you're a language tutor, vocabulary is probably half your job. Zoom has no concept of a word list, a review session, or spaced repetition. You keep that in a spreadsheet, probably. And the spreadsheet lives in a different tab. Which you forgot to update last week.
- No lesson notes attached to sessions.** Anything you want to remember about a lesson, you write somewhere else. Which means it gets lost, or it doesn't get written at all because you have five minutes before your next student.
- No invoicing.** No scheduling. No reminders. Zoom is happy to connect you with another human for a video call. Everything else — the actual running of your tutoring business — is entirely your problem.
The result is what tutors quietly refer to as the tab problem. At any given moment during a lesson, you have Zoom open, plus Google Calendar, plus a spreadsheet, plus a notes document, plus maybe a vocabulary app, plus your invoicing tool. You are technically teaching, but you are also running a small, chaotic IT operation from your laptop.
The Real Cost of Zoom for Tutors
Here's where the "$15.99 a month" calculation gets interesting.
Zoom Pro solves the 40-minute problem. But it doesn't solve the rest of the problem. For that, you need other tools. And those tools add up.
| Tool | Purpose | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Zoom Pro | Video calls (no 40-min limit) | $15.99 |
| Calendly (Standard) | Booking & scheduling | $10.00 |
| A basic CRM | Student profiles & notes | $12–25 |
| Vocabulary tracking app | Word lists & review | $5–15 |
| Invoicing (FreshBooks/Wave) | Invoicing & payments | $0–19 |
| Total | A pile of tabs | $43–85+/mo |
And that's before you count the time you spend manually syncing things that should talk to each other but don't. Exporting a Calendly booking to update your CRM. Copying vocabulary from your notes into a separate app. Writing up a lesson summary and filing it somewhere you'll probably never find it.
Time is also money. If you spend 20 minutes per week on admin friction that a better system would eliminate, that's over 17 hours a year. For a tutor charging $40–80/hour, that's $680–$1,360 in invisible cost. Just from tab juggling.
Google Meet — The Free Alternative
Google Meet deserves a mention here because "just switch to Google Meet" is the advice tutors give each other constantly, and it's not entirely wrong.
- What Google Meet gets right:**
- It's free, with no 40-minute limit for 1:1 calls
- The video quality is good
- If your students have Gmail (most do), joining is frictionless
- It's integrated with Google Calendar, so scheduling is relatively smooth if you're already in the Google ecosystem
- Where it falls short:**
- No whiteboard (or a very basic one, depending on integration)
- No breakout rooms
- Still no tutoring features — no student profiles, no lesson notes, no vocab tracking
- If your student doesn't have a Google account, the experience gets clunkier
- You're handing control of your client communication to Google's infrastructure, which is fine until one day it isn't
For tutors with a small practice, a few regulars, and very low admin needs, Google Meet is a perfectly reasonable free tool. It solves the 40-minute problem without the $15.99. But it doesn't change the fundamental issue: you're still teaching in a conference call tool, and your business still lives in seventeen other places.
What a Purpose-Built Teaching Platform Feels Like
Imagine walking into your classroom each day and your whiteboard had been wiped clean, your student's folder had vanished, and you had to reconstruct the entire semester from memory before you could start the lesson.
That's the Zoom experience. Every call is a fresh start.
A purpose-built teaching platform works differently. When your student opens the session, their profile is there — their level, their goals, their lesson history, the vocabulary you've been building together. When you add a note during the lesson, it's attached to that session, not floating in a separate document. When you teach a new word, it goes into a tracked word list you can revisit next week.
Tuton's Video Classroom was built specifically for this. Notes, vocabulary, and lesson history sit in the same window as the video call — not in other tabs, not in other apps, right there. You're not toggling between tools mid-lesson; you're just teaching.
The scheduling, invoicing, and student CRM are in the same platform. A student books a lesson, it goes into your calendar, you teach it, you send the invoice — all from one place. The admin that currently lives in five browser tabs collapses into one.
It's the difference between running a lesson in a conference room you borrowed from a company that wasn't expecting you to be there, and walking into your classroom, where everything is exactly as you left it.
Should You Switch?
Honestly? It depends.
If you have one or two students, you're teaching casually alongside another income, and your current setup works — stay where you are. The friction at low volume is manageable. Zoom is fine. You'll live.
If you're running a real practice — five or more active students, regular lessons, multiple skill tracks, students at different levels — the admin overhead starts to compound. Every lesson you can't remember clearly is a lesson that felt less personal. Every invoice you have to chase is time you're not spending on things that matter. Every extra tool is another subscription, another login, another place where something can fall through the cracks.
The right time to switch isn't when you're completely overwhelmed. It's when you notice the friction starting to add up — when you find yourself reconstructing context before every lesson, or when you realise your "system" is just vibes and browser tabs.
That's when a purpose-built platform stops being a nice-to-have and starts being the thing that makes your practice feel professional rather than improvised.
The Verdict
Zoom is a perfectly good video call tool. It was designed to connect people on video, and it does that reliably. If that's all you need, it works.
But most tutors need more than a video call. They need lesson continuity, student context, organised vocabulary, scheduling, invoicing, and some kind of handle on where their business actually is. Zoom doesn't provide any of that. Neither does Google Meet. They're starting points — and for a lot of tutors, they never quite become the whole solution.
The real question isn't "is Zoom bad?" It's "is a collection of disconnected tools actually serving you, or are you just used to it?"
If you're ready to find out what teaching feels like when your tools actually work together, Tuton starts at $29/month — and there's no 40-minute limit, no tab juggling, and no explaining to your student why the call just dropped.
Your classroom. Your students. Your actual system.