Most tutoring businesses are small. One teacher, a shared calendar, a spreadsheet of lessons, and a stream of parent messages asking to move Thursday to Friday. The teaching is rarely the hard part. The admin is.
That is why the search for “AI tools for tutoring businesses” turns up two very different things: software that helps you teach, and software that runs the business. They are priced completely differently, and only one of the two categories is genuinely using AI today.
This roundup separates them. Every price below was read from the vendor's own pricing page, and every tool that markets no AI is labelled as such rather than dressed up.
The two kinds of AI tool a tutoring business buys
On one side sit teaching assistants: a lesson-plan generator, a quiz builder, an AI tutor that gives a student feedback on an essay at 9pm. These tools are cheap, often free for individual teachers, and they make your lessons better without touching your invoices.
On the other side sit the business platforms: scheduling, invoicing, tutor payroll, parent portals. These cost $17 to $400 a month, and most of them ship no AI feature at all. That gap is the most useful thing to understand before you buy.
1. MagicSchool AI — the broadest teacher-tools library
MagicSchool is built for educators rather than tutoring companies: more than 80 AI tools covering lesson plans, quizzes, rubrics, writing feedback and a chatbot called Raina, plus separate tools intended for students. A solo tutor would use a handful of these daily and ignore the rest.
Pricing is straightforward. The Free plan covers core tools forever. Plus costs $8.33 per user per month billed annually, or $12.99 month to month. Districts negotiate Enterprise pricing separately.
Why it made the list: the cheapest way to find out whether AI actually saves you preparation time.
2. Brisk Teaching — AI inside the tools you already use
Brisk is a browser extension rather than a platform. It adds an AI layer to whatever is already open — a Google Doc, a worksheet, a PDF — and can generate a rubric, rewrite a text for a younger reader, or leave feedback on a stack of assignments in a batch.
The teacher tier is free. Brisk Teaching publishes no self-serve price above that: Premium and Intelligence are quoted per school or district. There is also a student-facing mode, Brisk Boost.
Why it made the list: no new dashboard to learn, and the free tier covers individual tutors.
3. Quizgecko — turn any document into a quiz
Paste a chapter or upload a file and Quizgecko generates multiple-choice questions, flashcards and study guides, and can package the result as a narrated course. For a tutor who reuses the same material across five students, that replaces an hour of typing.
The free tier allows short files. Quizgecko Plus is $16 per month and Ultra is $29 per month, both discounted on annual billing. Exam banks inside the product are the parts still marked as beta.
Why it made the list: the clearest time saving per dollar in the whole category.
4. Khanmigo — an AI study companion students can use between lessons
Khanmigo is Khan Academy's AI tutor. It works through problems with a student conversationally instead of handing over the answer, and it includes a Writing Coach that gives feedback on an essay. A tutoring business can put it in front of students as homework support.
Teachers get it free. For everyone else Khanmigo is $4 per month or $44 per year, with district-wide tools quoted on request. That is a fraction of the cost of an extra hour of your own time per student.
Why it made the list: the free teacher tier, and a price a student can actually pay themselves.
5. TutorBird — the cheapest full business platform
TutorBird covers the operational basics in one place: student profiles and progress notes, calendar and attendance, automatic invoicing with online payments, a parent portal, payroll for other tutors, and a simple website builder. SMS reminders are included rather than metered.
TutorBird is $16.95 per month for unlimited students, plus $4.95 for each additional tutor or staff member. There is a 30-day trial and a 90-day money-back guarantee. No AI feature appears anywhere on its pricing page.
Why it made the list: a priced no-AI baseline — useful to know what the boring work costs.
6. TeachWorks — pay per lesson instead of per tutor
TeachWorks is built for tutoring companies with several teachers, where scheduling gets political. Beyond the calendar it handles invoices, payroll, attendance and parent communication, with an API on the top plan for anyone wiring it into other systems.
Plans mix a monthly fee with a per-lesson charge: Starter is $16.49 plus $0.320 per student lesson, Growth is $47.99 plus $0.189, and Premium is $187.99 plus $0.065. There is a 21-day trial. No AI feature is marketed.
Why it made the list: the usage-based model can be far cheaper than a seat licence at scale.
7. TutorCruncher — built for tutoring agencies, priced in pounds
TutorCruncher aims at agencies rather than individuals: matching students to tutors, managing payroll for a roster of freelancers, and hosting the whole operation on your own domain. Its online whiteboard is billed by the minute of use, not by seat.
Prices exclude tax and start from £25 a month on Pay as you go, £60 on Startup and £200 on Enterprise, with card fees of 2.65% and 2.3% respectively. Extra branches are £40 a month. No AI feature is named.
Why it made the list: the only one here that prices agency overheads — branches, domains, card fees — openly.
8. Pike13 — scheduling, billing and memberships at studio scale
Pike13 handles recurring bookings, memberships, automated waitlists and client progress tracking. That makes it a fit for a learning centre running group classes or a term-based programme rather than one-to-one hourly lessons.
Essential is $159 a month, or $139 billed annually. Advanced is $225 or $195, and Premium is $286 or $249. Its page mentions building a foundation ready for AI-powered tools, but no shipped AI feature is named.
Why it made the list: honest about AI being on the roadmap rather than claiming it today.
Also worth knowing
My Music Staff is TutorBird's sibling product aimed at music teachers, at the same $16.95 a month plus $4.95 per extra teacher. It is the one to check if your lessons are instrumental rather than academic.
Sawyer Tools handles class booking and enrolment for learning centres: Launch is $79 a month ($71 annually), Grow $219 ($189) and Scale $399 ($379), with enterprise pricing on request. No AI feature is named.
LearnSpeed charges 29 cents per recorded session billed monthly, plus card processing at 3.15% and $0.30. For a small tutor with 200 sessions a month that is roughly $58 and no flat fee at all. No AI feature is named.
Class Companion gives students AI tutoring and instant feedback on assignments, but publishes no self-serve price — teachers start free and schools ask for a quote. Oases, another scheduling platform, returned errors on every attempt to load its pricing page, so no figure is repeated here.
How to choose without paying for AI you cannot see
First, decide which problem you are buying for. If parents keep messaging you at odd hours, a business platform fixes that. If your lesson preparation eats Sunday, a teaching tool does. Very few products do both well.
Second, compare the shape of the price, not the headline number. Per seat suits a solo tutor; per lesson or per session suits a growing team, because the cost tracks the work. TutorBird at $16.95 all-in and LearnSpeed at 29 cents a session can both be right at different sizes.
Third, ask what the AI actually does before you pay for it. On this list, MagicSchool, Brisk, Quizgecko and Khanmigo have AI as the whole product; TutorBird, TeachWorks and TutorCruncher publish prices with no AI claim. That is not a flaw, but it does mean you should not pay an AI premium for a scheduling calendar.
The honest takeaway
A tutoring business rarely needs an AI platform. It needs reliable scheduling and invoicing, and then one or two teaching tools that genuinely save preparation time. The cheapest combination here — TutorBird or LearnSpeed to run the business, MagicSchool or Quizgecko to prepare lessons — comes to well under $50 a month.
Anything that charges considerably more should be able to show you a shipped AI feature on its own pricing page. If it cannot, the honest answer is that you are buying software, not intelligence.