Live teaching · every price dated, every currency named
Somebody will teach you Spanish tonight. Nobody will tell you the price.
Live language classes, read off the sellers' own pages on 24 September 2026 — with the currency each one served us, and the two prices they would not show us at all.
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Group classes or a private tutor: which problem are you solving?
One is cheaper per hour, the other gives you all the talking. The deciding question is not price — it is whether you fail to show up or fail to speak.
Sep 24, 2026
What online language tutors cost, and why no one can tell you
Seven languages, two marketplaces, one day of reading — and the discovery that a platform's published average is the average of the ten teachers it showed us.
Sep 24, 2026
Lingoda, described honestly — including the prices we could not read
How Lingoda's group classes and credit bundles are built, in its own words, and why this page carries no Lingoda price at all.
Sep 24, 2026
Online ASL classes: the platforms do not sell them
Three sellers, three dead ends. For American Sign Language the honest answer is a free course and a local class, and we earn nothing from either.
Sep 24, 2026
Online French classes: two kinds of seller, one language
French is sold both by marketplaces and by a class provider. The difference matters more than the brand — and one of them would not show us a price.
Sep 24, 2026
Online German classes: where the filter and the average disagree
German has the widest gap we found between what a platform's filter offers and what its own summary claims — and one marketplace publishes no German price at all.
Sep 24, 2026
What this site is for
Lessonloft covers one thing: live language instruction, where a human being teaches you in real time. Tutors, group classes, the marketplaces that sell them, and every language you can be taught this way — Spanish and English most of all, because that is what most people are buying.
We do not teach anything ourselves and we do not sell lessons. We read what the platforms publish about their own prices, write down the day we read it and the currency we were handed, and then say plainly which parts we could not read at all.
The rule that shapes every page
A price we did not see is not a price. Every figure on this site was read from a platform's own page, from one machine, on a named day, and is labelled with the currency that platform actually served us — not the currency we asked for.
When a platform will not show us a figure, we print the gap and how to check it yourself rather than converting, estimating or quietly leaving it out. Two of the platforms covered here fall into that category, and both are named on the pages where they belong.
The same rule cuts the other way on outcomes. No page here tells you how long it will take to learn a language, because nobody who would know publishes an answer for you. Where an official body does publish something — the Foreign Service Institute's own course lengths, for instance — we quote it as theirs, with their caveat attached, and never turn it into a forecast about you.
Five questions, answered before you scroll
How much does an online language class cost?
There is no single answer, and the platforms themselves do not give one. On 24 September 2026 Preply's Spanish page offered us four different figures at once: a filter labelled $3 – $40+ per lesson, a sentence saying the price "starts from $3, with an average of $17", structured data in the same page's source reading $23/hr to $45/hr (avg: $34/hr), and ten teacher cards each priced for a 50-minute lesson. italki answers the same question with "$4 to $60 per hour" on one part of its page and "$5 to $50+ per hour" on another. All figures in US dollars, as served to this machine.
The reason is structural rather than sneaky: on a marketplace the teacher sets the rate, so the platform has a distribution, not a price. What you can do is decide your own ceiling first and filter to it.
Is a live class better than an app?
They do different jobs, and for most people the honest answer early on is to spend nothing. An app drills vocabulary and grammar patterns on your own time; a live class makes you produce the language under mild pressure and gives you someone to correct you. If you have never studied the language, a free app plus free listening will carry you a long way before a paid teacher adds much — and Duolingo's free tier costs nothing and pays us nothing.
Where live teaching genuinely earns its price is speaking: pronunciation you cannot hear yourself making, hesitation you cannot notice alone, and the specific corrections nobody has ever given you.
Are group classes cheaper than a private tutor?
Usually, and that is not the only difference. A group class splits the teacher's attention: Lingoda's own pricing page describes its group classes as "Learn with 3-5 students from all over the world" in "60-minute live online classes with different teachers and classmates", so you get a fraction of the speaking time and a different teacher each session. A private lesson is all yours and costs more per hour.
We cannot print Lingoda's prices here. On 24 September 2026 its pricing page served this machine in Brazilian reais and would not switch to dollars, so we have no dollar figure we actually saw. Where the figure is missing on this site, the reason is written down next to the gap.
How long will it take me to learn a language in classes?
Nobody who would know publishes an answer for you, so this site does not print one. The nearest official figure belongs to the US Foreign Service Institute, which schedules 24-30 weeks — "552-690 class hours" — for the languages it calls closest to English, Spanish among them, in a week it describes as "23 hours per week in class and 17 hours of self-study". Those are full-time government students, and the FSI itself says the actual time varies with "natural ability, prior language-learning experience, and time spent in the classroom".
We never turn that into evenings, months or a promise. Anyone selling you a number for your own timeline has invented it.
Why does this site refuse to print some prices?
Because a price we did not see is not a price, it is a guess with a currency sign on it. Every figure here was read from a platform's own page on a named day, from one machine in one place, and is labelled with the currency that platform actually served.
Two of them served us nothing usable. Lingoda priced itself in Brazilian reais and ignored an explicit request for dollars. Cambly put its prices behind a sign-in. Rather than convert, estimate or quietly leave them out, we print the hole and say how you can check it yourself in ten seconds.