What to look for in a tutoring app, as the person paying for it
Ask any tutoring app these seven questions before you pay for it, and ask them of us as well: the answers are more useful than any feature list, because most of them are checkable in an evening.
None of this is about which product is better. It is about which questions have answers you can verify yourself, because a claim you cannot check is not information, however confidently it is made.
Our own answers are under each one, in the same words we would give a regulator.
1. Whose syllabus is it teaching, and can it show you the document?
Why it matters: a tutor following the wrong chapter list is worse than no tutor, because your child does the work and it counts for nothing. Boards move, and books get replaced.
Ask to see the source. Not a chapter list on a page, the board's own document, with a page reference and a date somebody last checked it.
Us. Every chapter page carries the official document it came from, the page or section, a hash of the bytes we read and the day we read them. Four boards carry a syllabus today: two we call verified after structural checks and a second reading, two we call provisional and label as still being checked. Where we hold units and no topics under them, the page shows the units and nothing invented underneath.
2. What happens when the first explanation does not land?
Why it matters: this is the whole job. Anything can explain something once. A child who did not understand it the first time needs a second explanation that is different, not the same one repeated more slowly.
Ask what changes on the second attempt.
Us. The second explanation changes axis rather than volume: a different method, a different representation, a different example, or a different voice, and it never repeats the explanation that just missed.
3. What does it do with your child's data?
Why it matters: this one is law, not preference. India's Data Protection Act forbids a company from tracking or behaviourally monitoring a child, and from directing advertising at one. A child is anyone under eighteen. Parental consent does not make it allowed.
Ask two things: is there advertising, and is there any third-party analytics running while the child is signed in. The second one is the question almost nobody asks and it is the one that separates a policy from a practice.
Us. No advertising anywhere. No third-party analytics at all behind the sign-in door, enforced by the content security policy rather than by anybody's discipline, so it cannot be switched on by accident. The public pages a parent reads before signing up use a measurement tool with no cookies and no persistent identifiers. What happens inside the product is counted by our own server, by the day, and never by anybody else.
4. What can a parent see, and what can a parent not see?
Why it matters: a parent needs enough to help and not so much that the child stops asking honest questions. An app that shows every keystroke turns a tutor into surveillance, and a child who knows they are being watched asks safer questions.
Us. A parent view of the week and a weekly note home: what was worked on, what stuck, what did not. Not a transcript.
5. What does the free version actually do?
Why it matters: "free" covers everything from a real product to a demonstration that stops at the first hard question.
Ask whether the free version teaches the same syllabus with the same tutor, or a reduced one.
Us. Free every day, from the first day, with no card to start. Every learner gets the same tutor and the same lessons. A paid plan buys more time with it and never a better version of it, and it refills once a day rather than running out permanently.
6. Can you leave, and what happens then?
Why it matters: the ease of leaving is the most reliable single signal of how a company regards you, and it is visible before you join.
Ask where the cancel button is, and what happens to the data afterwards.
Us. Cancelling is in the account, in the same number of taps as subscribing, and the deletion path is on the same page. The legal set says what is kept, for how long, and why.
7. What does it refuse to do?
Why it matters: a product with no stated limits has not thought about its limits. It has thought about its marketing.
Us. It does not promise a grade or a mark. It does not do the homework for a child who has asked it to. It says when it does not know rather than producing something plausible. It has no streaks to lose, no countdowns and no messages designed to pull a child back. And it hands a child in real distress to a person rather than trying to be one.
The two we cannot answer well yet
We have no independent study of learning outcomes, because we have not run one. We are not going to describe internal numbers as evidence.
And several state boards do not yet have a syllabus in the product, because their portals will not serve their documents to anything but a browser. Those boards are stored as an honest negative rather than filled in with a guess, so choosing one of them today gets you nothing, and the product says so instead of pretending.
That is the list. If you run it against us and something above turns out not to be true, write to support and we will either fix the product or fix the sentence.
How this was written. Drafted with AI help, from source documents and notes a person gathered, then read and edited by a person before it went up. Every figure in it is one we can show you the source of.
Works on how an explanation is built, what happens when one misses, and what the tutor should refuse to do.