AI Tools for Private Tutors in 2026: Judged by the Hour You Cannot Bill

The AI tools that pay for themselves in a tutoring business are the ones that touch the hours nobody is paying you for: preparation, marking and the parent update. Everything else is a toy with a subscription. This is a comparison sorted by that test, with prices checked on 16 September 2026 and the catches left in. We sell one of the tools on the list, and that is declared where it appears.

The hour that hurts is the unbilled one

For a private tutor the teaching hour is the invoice. The forty minutes finding a good worksheet, the twenty marking last week’s, and the ten writing something for the parent are all unpaid by definition, and they are where a tool earns its keep or does not.

The OECD’s TALIS 2024 survey found that administrative work takes a comparatively small share of a teacher’s time and yet is the most-reported source of stress, because it is experienced as getting in the way of the real work. TALIS surveys school teachers, not private tutors, so treat it as the nearest evidence rather than your own numbers. The tutor version is sharper: the work does not merely get in the way, it is the part you cannot bill. We covered the parent-report half of that in why parents renew on evidence, not on a good session. This page is about the tools for all three halves.

The comparison

Prices are the vendor’s own published figures on the date above, in US dollars unless stated. Where a price is not published it says so.

General assistants: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini

Job: explaining a concept three different ways, drafting a worksheet from a description, turning your bullet notes into a parent-readable paragraph. Price: every one has a usable free tier; the paid tiers change often enough that you should check them the day you decide.

What they do well: the parent summary. Give any of them six lines of shorthand from a session and ask for a plain-English paragraph a parent can read in thirty seconds, and you will get one. That alone saves the ten minutes you least want to spend.

The catch: they answer. Handed to a student for practice, an open assistant is the condition in the 2025 PNAS field experiment where high school students did 48% better on practice and 17% worse on the exam once it was removed. The hint-only version of the same model showed no exam penalty. Use assistants for your work, not the student’s. And none of them knows your student’s curriculum code unless you paste it in every time.

MagicSchool

Job: lesson plans, rubrics, leveled texts, quiz questions, from a menu of more than 80 teacher tools. Price: free plan; Plus is $12.99 a month or $8.33 a month billed annually, which adds unlimited generations, output history and the student tools.

What it does well: the breadth. If your week involves five subjects and three age groups, having a tool for each shape of task beats prompting from scratch.

The catch: it is built for a classroom. The unit of work is a class and a lesson, not a client and a session, and the output has to be re-cut for one child before it is useful. It also does not track what the student did with it afterwards.

Diffit

Job: take any text or topic and produce a reading passage, vocabulary and questions at a chosen reading level. Price: free plan with access to the last 90 days of what you made; the individual teacher price is not published on the pricing page, and school pricing is an annual flat rate by enrollment.

What it does well: differentiation for reading tutors. Same article, three levels, in a minute.

The catch: the 90-day window on the free plan means your resource library evaporates unless you download everything, and it is a reading tool first; math tutors will use it rarely.

Khanmigo

Job: a Socratic AI tutor over Khan Academy’s content, plus a set of teacher tools. Price: free for teachers; $4 a month or $44 a year for a parent or learner account, which covers up to ten linked child accounts. For the 2026 school year it added Gemini-built visual tutoring with interactive diagrams.

What it does well: it is designed not to hand over the answer, which puts it on the right side of the PNAS finding, and the price is close to nothing. For between-session practice on Khan’s own exercises it is hard to argue with.

The catch: it is Khan’s curriculum, mapped to US standards, and the reporting is built for a parent or a classroom teacher rather than for a tutor with twelve clients. You do not get a per-client view of the actual questions to put in front of a paying parent.

NotebookLM

Job: a notebook that only answers from the sources you give it. Drop in the student’s syllabus, the textbook chapter and your own notes, and ask questions of that and nothing else. Price: free with a Google account.

What it does well: preparation for a course you do not know well. Because it is grounded to your documents it does not wander, and the study guide and audio overview outputs are good enough to hand to an older student.

The catch: it is a research tool, not a tutor. It has no idea whether the student learned anything.

The admin platforms: TutorBird, Teachworks, TutorCruncher

These are not AI tools, and it is worth saying so, because they are what most tutors mean by “software” and none of them advertised an AI feature on their pricing page on the date above.

• TutorBird: $16.95 a month, plus $4.95 for each additional tutor. One plan with everything: scheduling, invoicing, lesson notes, a student portal, a website builder. 30-day trial, no card.
• Teachworks: $16.49 a month plus $0.32 per student lesson on the Starter plan, falling to $47.99 plus $0.189 on Growth. 21-day trial. The per-lesson fee is the number to model: at 60 lessons a month, Starter is about $36.
• TutorCruncher: the vendor’s own pricing page did not load for us on the day, so this is from third-party listings: from $30 a month plus 1% of revenue, with card processing fees on top. Built for agencies with several tutors more than for one person.

What they do well: the invoice and the calendar. The catch: the lesson notes field in all three is a text box. Filling it well is still the unbilled ten minutes, and that is where the general assistants above come in.

Sprout Lessons (ours)

Job: build an interactive lesson from a specific curriculum code, in your student’s own framework, around whatever they are into that week. Price: free plan of 300 credits a month with no card; a lesson costs 20 credits, so that is about 15 lessons a month; a printable pack or slide deck is 15 credits. Subscriptions start at A$10 a month, billed in Australian dollars, roughly US$7.

What it does well: the curriculum. It holds seven frameworks, US Common Core and NGSS, Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, the Australian Curriculum, the Victorian Curriculum and the NSW syllabuses, and every lesson carries the code it was built from in the footer. For a tutor that is the line in the parent update that no other tool on this list writes for you: “this session covered 4.NF.A.1, the equivalent-fractions standard your school teaches in the spring”.

The catch: it is lesson-shaped, not chat-shaped, so it will not answer a student’s stray question at 9pm. And the per-student practice tutor with the dashboard of actual questions, which is the tool a tutoring business really wants, is in development and not yet for sale. We would rather say that than sell you a roadmap.

Three questions before you pay for any of them

1. Does it remove an unbilled hour, or add one? A tool that produces output you then have to rewrite for one child has moved the work, not removed it.
2. Can the output go in front of a parent as it is? A named standard, a concrete question the student got wrong, a plain sentence about what changes next week. If the tool cannot produce one of those three, it does not touch retention.
3. Does it know the student’s curriculum, or does it know curriculum in general? “Grade 5 fractions” is not the same as the code the school reports against, and the parent knows the difference when the report card arrives.

A stack for one tutor, under $20 a month

Most tutors end up with one admin platform and one or two specialists, not five subscriptions. A stack that covers the three unbilled hours:

• Admin: TutorBird at $16.95, or Teachworks if your lesson volume is low enough that the per-lesson fee stays under that. This is the only line item.
• Prep and the parent paragraph: the free tier of one general assistant, used on your notes, never handed to the student for answers.
• Curriculum-coded material: Sprout Lessons on the free plan, 15 lessons a month, each with the code in the footer for the parent update. Start free.
• Between-session practice, optional: Khanmigo for a family at $4 a month if the student is on US standards and the parent wants something to run at home.

That is one paid tool. If a fifth subscription is not saving you a named hour a week, cancel it.

The short version

Judge every AI tool by whether it touches prep, marking or the parent update, because those are the hours a tutor cannot bill. General assistants are excellent at the parent paragraph and dangerous as student practice, per the 2025 PNAS trial. MagicSchool and Diffit are classroom-shaped and need re-cutting for one child. Khanmigo is cheap and withholds answers but reports for parents, not tutors. The admin platforms run the invoice and leave the notes to you. Sprout Lessons builds the lesson to the exact code in seven curricula on a free plan of about 15 lessons a month, and our per-student tutor is still in development. One paid tool is usually enough.

Checked 16 September 2026. Prices from the vendors’ own pages on that date: MagicSchool, Diffit, Khanmigo, TutorBird, Teachworks, and TutorCruncher (from third-party listings, as noted). The admin-time finding is from The demands of teaching: Results from TALIS 2024, which surveys school teachers. The practice-versus-exam finding is Bastani et al., PNAS, 2025. Prices move; re-check before you buy.

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