April 11, 2024
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Experts in this article:
Jodi is an English teacher with 17 years of experience. She’s been a Cambly English tutor for 3 years and has taught 2,600+...
Holly is a freelance writer with 8 years of experience and six-figure yearly earnings. Her client base includes major...
Cambly is an English tutoring platform that helps kids and adults all around the globe learn English from native English speakers. As a Cambly tutor, you get the flexibility of working from your laptop, anywhere and anytime.
But how good is Cambly, and is it the best English tutoring platform out there? Here’s a breakdown to help you decide whether Cambly is worth it for you.
Cambly is an online English teaching platform that connects native speakers with students of all ages from over 190 countries around the world. Students choose tutors based on their needs, and they pay a monthly fee for Cambly’s suite of services.
As a tutor, you can provide one-on-one lessons or group classes to students learning English as a second language (ESL). Cambly provides learning curricula, so you don’t need to create your own lesson plans for students who are enrolled in a Cambly course.
Cambly does not require tutors to commit to a certain number of tutoring hours or appointments, and the work is very flexible. You can tutor anytime, anywhere, as long as you have a solid internet connection.
There are actually two Cambly English tutoring platforms: Cambly and Cambly Kids. There are a few notable differences between the two platforms:
One tutor we spoke to, Jodi Wade, said that the majority of her bookings are on Cambly Kids (CK). She noted that although kids can be easier to teach in some ways, you need a lot more energy to teach them than to teach adults.
If you’re approved as a tutor for both Cambly and Cambly Kids, you’ll have just one reservation calendar, where you can specify whether you want to accept bookings from Cambly Kids only, Cambly only, regulars, or anyone.
After you sign up to start tutoring for Cambly, you’ll begin getting requests from students. Here’s a summary of what you can generally expect to do on Cambly:
Once you receive more than 700 ratings and an overall rating of 4.9 stars or more, you’ll be ranked a “Supertutor,” giving you greater control over which students you work with and making your profile more visible to students.
When you’re available and ready to tutor, you have a few options. Cambly offers three ways to book tutoring gigs with students:
Once you’ve gotten a few returning students, you can prioritize them in your schedule by marking these students as “Regulars” and setting your schedule to “Regulars Only.”
There are no fees or costs for tutors who choose to work with Cambly. This is partially because you cannot set your own rates on the platform. Instead, Cambly makes money by charging membership fees for students.
Compared to other teaching apps and sites, Cambly is pretty lax when it comes to who can be a tutor. You don’t need a degree, teaching experience, or a certification to tutor on Cambly, and you don’t need to undergo a background check.
To be eligible for Cambly, you really only need to meet three requirements:
Cambly defines a strong internet connection as a minimum download speed of 10 mbps and a minimum upload speed of 3 mbps.
In addition to meeting these hard requirements, you also need certain soft skills and personality traits to succeed and find the work enjoyable. Wade said that a core job responsibility for Cambly tutors is giving students the chance to practice their speaking and refraining from doing too much of the talking. “To be a successful tutor I think you have to be a good listener,” she said.
Signing up as a Cambly tutor is pretty simple, and the application process is all online. Just follow the steps below:
It only takes around 10–15 minutes to complete the Cambly tutor application form and just a little longer to create the rest of your profile. However, it can take days, weeks, or even months to get your profile approved so you can start tutoring on Cambly.
For more details on tutor requirements, the application process, and how to get tutoring jobs, check out our guide on how to become a Cambly tutor, where a real Cambly user breaks down everything you need to know to get started.
As a Cambly tutor, you’ll earn $0.17 per minute ($10.20 per hour) for teaching adult students. As a Cambly Kids tutor, you’ll earn $0.20 per minute ($12 per hour). These are relatively low rates for English tutoring, but the upsides are the low entry requirements and lack of fees.
If a student is late for a scheduled call, you’re expected to wait for 10 minutes, but you’ll be paid for those 10 minutes if your student is a no-show. You’ll also be paid for up to 5 minutes after a student ends a call prematurely.
You’ll likewise receive payment if a student cancels close to a scheduled session’s start time. You’ll get $2 if a student cancels within 8 hours (Cambly) or 12 hours (Cambly Kids).
However, one Cambly tutor we spoke to, Ryan Wolf, told us that it’s incredibly rare for students to leave a session early. It’s more likely that they’ll lose their internet connection, in which case you’ll need to stay online in the classroom for 5 minutes (with pay). But after those 5 minutes, you’ll stop getting paid, and you’ll be able to leave the classroom.
In addition to standard hourly pay, Cambly tutors have several additional ways to earn money:
Cambly offers tutors the following payment options:
Payments are processed every Tuesday. Tutors can choose to be paid every week, every 2 weeks, or every 4 weeks.
For a video-based platform like Cambly where you’re meeting strangers online, it’s natural to be worried about safety. Does Cambly vet students? What are the risks involved? We’ll tell you everything you need to know before you sign up.
One of Cambly’s most notable protection features is the option to immediately block or report a student and be assured that you’ll never see them again. Some other competing English teaching platforms require you to go through a review process first, which can take time.
With that said, there’s no screening process for students. Anybody can sign up and instantly hop on a call with you during your priority hour.
This used to cause bigger issues back when Cambly offered free trials to students, which would allow them to sign up and connect with a tutor in a matter of minutes, without the risk of losing money from being banned. This meant that just about anyone in the world could use the platform illegitimately—with the aim of harassing tutors rather than learning English.
Now, free trials are only available in select regions. On top of that, Cambly offers tutors the option to avoid free trials and have the video blurred.
While Cambly does have some protection measures in place for teachers, there’s still a chance you’ll encounter inappropriate students at some point. Specifically, Wade compared priority hour sessions on Cambly (where anyone can call you) to Chatroulette—you never know what you’re going to get.
When we asked her how safe she felt using the site, she said she’s had a few “creepy” experiences with students on Cambly. The main issues she mentioned are people sending her sexual chat messages, asking deeply personal/inappropriate questions, and doing inappropriate things off-screen.
However, the worst class she had was actually with a kid, who talked about how they wanted to travel to a neighboring country and set off a bomb and kill everyone there. “It was so chilling hearing all this hate coming from a child,” she said.
She’s also had students who are just using Cambly to get content for their YouTube channels. “I’ve had my videos posted on Youtube maybe 4 times without my permission (that I know of at least),” she added. For your own safety and comfort, it’s important to always set boundaries and deal with problems as soon as they arise.
Before you commit to becoming a Cambly tutor, you should get an idea of what it’s like. We asked Wade a few questions about her experience as a Cambly tutor to give you a sneak peak into what you can expect working for Cambly.
Cambly seems to only approve tutor profiles when they have a shortage of tutors or are expecting lots of students to sign up in the near future. “I’ve heard that for some people, like me, it took months to be approved,” Wade told us. For others, it may take only days. It’s really the luck of the draw.
It only took about a week for Wade to be approved for Cambly Kids back in 2021. But with that said, she also got a big bonus when she signed up, so it’s possible there was a high demand for tutors at that time.
Even though Cambly automatically provides you with lesson materials when you start a session with a student, they often get it wrong.
“Sometimes students have only half done a previous lesson and it has advanced them to the next one, or they have completed it, but it hasn’t advanced them,” Wade said. “Half of the time when a student pops up with a lesson, they do not actually want to do that lesson, but they don’t know how to unenroll.”
According to Wade, you don’t really need to be a native English speaker—you just have to sound like one. This can be an advantage if you’re a fluent English speaker but you don’t technically meet the criteria for being considered “native.”
With that said, you’ll likely experience backlash from students if you appear to be a nonnative English speaker. After all, they’re paying for Cambly with the expectation that they’ll get tutoring lessons from a native English speaker.
The tutor referral bonus is just about the only reliable bonus you can get on Cambly. Wade says you really can’t count on the others, and she hasn’t encountered one of Cambly’s bonuses in a long time.
“I haven’t seen a priority hour bonus in MONTHS. They are very rare these days,” she added. “I haven’t seen the CK peak bonus in maybe a year, or a year and a half. It was a very long time ago.”
Even with the new student bonus, Wade says you can’t count on it. She’s taken on several students who were completely new to Cambly during the bonus period and never got the bonus with them.
Every so often, Cambly will come out with new bonuses, but it really depends on supply and demand. And Wade says that right now, there seem to be far more tutors than there are students.
There are no minimum required teaching hours on Cambly. Your Cambly tutor profile will stay active regardless of whether you work 1 hour or 30 hours per week. Because of Cambly’s lack of minimum hours, Wade was able to wait a few months after she got approved before she actually started tutoring.
This is a nice bit of flexibility that would be valuable if you want to experiment with an ESL teaching side hustle but you’re not sure if you’re ready to fully commit.
Even if you have a schedule full of bookings, you aren’t guaranteed to be paid for them. If a student cancels late or doesn’t show up, you only get paid for 10 minutes—regardless of whether they’d booked you for 15 minutes or 60 minutes.
To give an idea of how often this happens, Wade told us that just the day before, she’d had three late cancellations and one no show. “Plus,” she added, “you can’t always count on getting bookings.” Students are sometimes sick, on vacation, or in school.
Wolf’s experience is pretty similar. “To be honest, it can be a coin toss whether everything goes as planned this week, or if half of your students cancel or don’t show up,” he said.
We asked Wade whether she thought Cambly was worth it, and she said it’s not as worthwhile as it used to be. “There has been so much inflation,” she said, “and yet Cambly hasn’t increased the tutor pay.” Low pay rates may seem like a small sacrifice to make if you’re just looking to gain some teaching experience, but it could be a dealbreaker if you’re an experienced or highly qualified tutor.
Wade told us that she thinks Cambly is best for full-time workers looking for a side gig to fill up a few hours in their schedule and people who don’t want to or can’t commit to certain hours. She said it’s not a good choice if you can’t handle unpredictability.
For Wolf, Cambly’s biggest advantages are how easy it is to get started and gain teaching experience. “My favorite thing about Cambly is that I have been able to practice my ability to lead a conversation and communicate in a way that anyone at any level can understand,” he said.
Before you decide whether working for Cambly is a good option for you, take a look at Cambly reviews and feedback from real tutors. Here’s a summary of what real Cambly tutors are saying.
Cambly is one of the top English teaching apps and sites, but it has a few competitors that are also worth considering. Here are a few examples you may want to look into:
Alternatively, you could try becoming a tutor in another subject altogether. Apart from teaching skills, you just need knowledge or expertise in a particular subject.
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