What are Platform fees?
Platform Fees represent the charges Spires applies to students for the services we offer, including access to our platform, its features, and our tutor database. Students are both legally and contractually obligated to pay these fees.
The platform fee is paid by the student as part of the charge issued by the tutor. Tutors, however, are not subject to any platform fees and incur no charges for using Spires. Tutors access Spires under the terms of the Tutor Licence and they are not required to make any payments for utilising the platform. For the sake of transparency, we openly disclose the nature of the platform fee charged to clients to tutors and have provided this article to clarify its purpose.
What percentage is Spires' platform fee?*
*** This information is only applicable to Spires Marketplace jobs. Platform fees may vary for other agencies that operate on the Spires platform. ***
All jobs will start on a 35% platform fee.
After this, the platform fee drops by 1% for every 5 hours of tuition you complete on that same job, down to a minimum of 20%.
The fee reduction is passed on to the tutor, increasing the tutor's earnings with time.
If you are bringing your students to Spires, we will add a platform fee of 5% to your rate. To qualify for this reduced fee, you must share your unique dedicated tutor URL with the student and ensure they sign up using this URL correctly. If a student creates an account independently without using your URL, the standard 35% fee will apply. This reduced fee covers the costs of payment processing and the technology infrastructure we have to pay for. It may be changed in the future, for example, if our costs increase.
How does this work in practice?
For this example- Imagine that a student has hired you at £50 per hour. Every five hours, the platform fee is reduced by 1% and your earnings increase as follows:
Hours | Platform fee | Your Earnings per hour |
1-5 | 35% | £32.50 |
6-10 | 34% | £33.00 |
11-15 | 33% | £33.50 |
16-20 | 32% | £34.00 |
21-25 | 31% | £34.50 |
What does the platform fee cover?
There are considerable costs to running a platform like Spires including but not limited to VAT, payment fees, marketing costs, wages, software, office, and legal costs.
In a case where the platform fee is 35%, we are first immediately hit with VAT, leaving us 27.5%. Payment fees, the cost of taking a credit card payment and then paying a tutor, can be as much as 5% for international clients and tutors, which leaves us with 22.5%. With this, we need to cover the cost of marketing to clients, which can be as much as £100, as well as paying Spires staff and covering our other costs.
See below an example breakdown of spending distribution*:
* This is correct as of January 2023.
The platform fee explained
Our platform fee is in line with our competitors.
Our main USPs are:
Spires is not a budget-focused platform. We designed Spires as a platform for professional online tutors. We do not give licenses to either recent graduates or people without considerable experience as professional educators.
We have worked tirelessly to promote online tutoring as a premium medium, rather than the race to the bottom in quality and prices that many of our online competitors offer.
We facilitate independent, well-paid, and flexible work. Many tutors work full-time on Spires and some of the top ones earn £100k+, with many earning £50k+. We offer very fast payments and a payment success rate of 99.98%.
We are also one of the few truly global platforms, with students and tutors working together from all over the world. 40% of our students and 40% of tutors are now outside the UK.
The majority of our platform fee is spent on marketing (client acquisition costs in the above diagram), which means we are heavily re-investing in the platform. The overall feedback from tutors is that they are surprised at the number of students we bring in, which they say is far more than other platforms tend to average.
The platform is incredibly reliable and stable, our tutors never have to worry about it not being operational or the payment system failing. This comes at a cost and we invest in premium software tools, that run behind the scenes, which make all this possible.
We hope any tutor reading this understands that we are not looking to profiteer, but simply balance the finances of Spires to allow a healthier operating margin to continue to invest in the platform. Whilst many other platforms come and go, we will stand the test of time and these changes will allow us to continue to promote your collective work and talents to students worldwide.
What if I feel the platform fee is too high?
Unfortunately, we are unable to operate without them. Platform fees are the equivalent of taxes. If people did not pay taxes, we would not be able to live in stable countries and then civil society would stop and everything would fall over.
Tutors must refrain from any actions that would prevent or interfere with Spires' collection of Platform Fees. Such actions violate the terms of the Tutor Licence and will result in the immediate and permanent termination of the Tutor's licence and account.
Like you, we provide a service and it is paid for through platform fees. Like you expect to be paid for your services, we do for ours. We work on getting you clients and providing well-functioning technology at a reasonable cost, tutors then work on educating the students. It's a mutually beneficial relationship.
How to resolve platform fee discrepancies
If you notice that the incorrect platform fee has been applied to your student connection, please follow these steps:
Identify the possible issue (e.g., improper use of the tutor URL or errors during sign-up).
Contact the Spires support team to explain the situation.
Provide valid evidence if applicable (such as proof of a prior relationship with the student). In exceptional cases, Spires may adjust the platform fee percentage manually where clear evidence of a prior connection can be established. Please note that manual adjustments are discretionary and cannot be guaranteed for all cases.
Providing evidence for prior student relationships
If your student did not use your dedicated tutor URL and you need to prove a prior relationship to qualify for the 5% fee, you can submit documentation such as:
Screenshots or records of previous lessons completed with the student on another tutoring platform. This documentation confirms your established relationship and will be reviewed by our team to determine eligibility for fee adjustments.
Confirming fee adjustments
If the platform fee has been adjusted based on your request and provided evidence:
Refresh your account or browser session.
Check your student connection details to confirm the correct fee has been applied. Our support team will typically notify you once the adjustment has been completed.