Why we started
In 2018 a tutoring agency in Austin billed my family for a term of lessons in August, and my brother met three tutors before Christmas. Two of them left. The balance stayed theirs, the hours were non-refundable, and nobody at that company had met a single one of the people they sent us.
Priya Raghunathan · Founder, who started Saal the following year
$1,200
Committed in August, before a tutor had taught a lesson. Saal was built to make that invoice impossible to write, and four decisions came out of it. Each one has a date on it, and each one has a price we pay for it.
What a lesson costs hereFour decisions
Every one of them cost us something we would rather have kept
Three of the four are promises the rest of this site already makes. The column that is new is the second one: what each of them costs us to keep.
Measured against
A result is a difference, so we publish the other half of it
The home page prints what our students moved. Plenty of that is a term of school, so every result sits beside untutored classmates at the same schools. Only the gap belongs to a tutor.
What twelve weeks of lessons added
+0.9
1.4 levels against 0.5 for the comparison group, over the same twelve weeks. From 3,180 students.
No tutoring — same schools, same tests
With a Saal tutor, once a week
Not counted, in either group
A student who took fewer than eight of the twelve lessons is dropped, however well or badly they did.
The free half hour is not a lesson. Nobody enters the measurement until they have paid.
Nobody is counted twice. A student who tutors two subjects appears once, under the first.
The people
The six you are most likely to need
Every photograph on this site is a tutor who cleared five checks, so there are none of us here. What matters is not our faces but who picks up when a lesson goes wrong, and how fast.
How a report is handledYou get a person. Not a ticket number.
Answers
Anything a tutor or a family has already raised twice.
“Every year somebody proposes we sell a term up front, because it would double what we book in September. It is the same invoice my family got, and the answer has been no every time.”
Written about in
Five national outlets have written about how the vetting works since 2019.
That was the company. The tutors are the product.
Everything above is why the roster looks the way it does. What it is worth is one free half hour with somebody on it — no card, nothing to cancel.
180
2020
640
2022
1,420
2024
2,180
2026