Chase the syllabus. Stop chasing the monthly fee.
For independent tutors running 20 to 40 students across curricula, grades and exam batches. A different rate per subject, the month's fee collected when the seat is booked, and a record of what every student has actually covered.
Batch record · monthly
Grade 10 Maths, August
Mon, Wed, Fri · 5:00 pm
- Course and level
- Mathematics · Grade 10
- Sessions in the month
- 12 of 13 held
- Seats filled
- 9 of 12
- Unit test
- 24 Aug · marks on each student record
Seats, with the parent who pays for them
- Noah S.Paid by Claire S., motherPaid
- Mia M.Paid by Peter M., fatherPaid
- Liam J.Paid by Nina J., motherPaid
- Ethan T.Seat held, unpaid since 5 AugUnpaid
The student attends, the parent pays, and the two are on the same record. A guardian record for students under 18, with consent taken from the parent, is on the roadmap below.
Pick your exact business
Built page by page for education
Each page below is written for one kind of practice, in its own vocabulary, with the honest list of what is and is not built for it.
Tuition and coaching classes
Batches listed as bookable services, fees collected online through your own UPI account, and one record per student.
See your pageMusic and dance classes
Lessons booked against your real hours, class packs sold as prepaid bundles, and monthly fees paid online instead of in cash at the door.
See your pageLanguage and skill trainers
One-to-one sessions and batch courses on the same page, booked against real hours and paid before the first class.
See your pageExam coaching institutes
Enquiries become bookings, admission fees are paid online, and every student from first call to enrolment sits on one record.
See your pageA day in the life
School hours are prep. Four to nine is teaching. The fifth of the month is accounts.
A tutor sells months, not hours, to a payer who is not the person in the room. That single fact shapes the whole business, and no generic scheduler is built for it.
- 10:00 am
Prep, marking and the syllabus clock
While the students are at school you mark last week's test papers and plan against a syllabus that has to finish before the exams, not before the term.
- 4:00 pm
The first batch arrives, minus two
Attendance goes into a register. Two students are absent and nobody told you, because the person who would have told you is at work.
- 5:00 pm
Grade 10 Maths, then Grade 12 Physics at seven
Different curricula, different grades, different rates. Grade 10 Maths is not the Grade 12 Physics rate, and after a long day it is easy to quote the wrong one.
- 8:30 pm
The parent call
A father wants to know what his daughter has actually covered in eleven sessions and whether she is improving. You know. You cannot show it, because it is in your head and a spiral notebook.
- Saturday
Doubt clearing and the test series
Weekend slots that only open in exam season, with a different fee and a different length from the weekday batch.
- 5th to 12th
The fee cycle, and the part nobody enjoys
Fees are due on the fifth. On the eighth, four parents have not paid. You send the polite message, then the second polite message, then teach their child anyway.
The teaching is fine. The business is a monthly fee cycle, a seat count, and a conversation with a payer who never sits in the room, and none of that fits in a calendar app.
What you run on today
A register, a WhatsApp group per batch, and a fee Sheet you dread opening
This is what almost every independent tutor actually runs on. It is free, it is familiar, and it puts the least pleasant part of the job on your evenings.
- A paper attendance registerOne page per batch, ticked at four o'clock.
- A WhatsApp group per batchParents, students and homework in one thread.
- A fee status SheetWho has paid this month, colour coded, out of date.
- A UPI QR photographForwarded to parents, one at a time, every month.
- A diary of batch timingsExam season rearranges it and the diary does not.
- A spiral notebook of marksTest scores, in your handwriting, in one copy.
Where it breaks, specifically
The payer and the attendee are different people, and nothing records that
A parent pays, a student attends. Your Sheet has one name in it, so you are constantly translating between the child in the room and the adult who transferred the money.
The eighth of the month is a teaching evening you lose
Four unpaid parents, two reminders each, and a decision you will always make the same way because you are not going to turn a fifteen year old away at the door.
You cannot show a parent what was covered
Eleven sessions of progress lives in your memory and a notebook. When a parent asks, you are defending your work from recall instead of reading it out.
A WhatsApp group is not a place to keep a child's data
Names, phone numbers, marks and photographs of homework, sitting in a group where every other parent can see them, on phones you do not control.
Today versus operate1
The same tutoring business, before and after
| The job | How it goes today | How it goes here |
|---|---|---|
| Collecting the month's fee | A QR photograph forwarded on the fifth, chased on the eighth and the twelfth. | The month's batch is sold as a bundle and paid when the seat is booked. There is nothing outstanding to chase. |
| Different rates per subject and grade | Held in your head, and undercharged twice a term without noticing. | Grade 10 Maths and Grade 12 Physics are separate bookable services, each with its own fee and duration. |
| Exam season timetable | The diary is rewritten and half the parents work from the old one. | Weekday evenings stay open, Saturdays open only for intensives, and the page shows the real availability. |
| Answering what has been covered | From memory, on a call, at half past eight at night. | Each session sits on the student record with your notes on what was covered and what was set. |
| Knowing who is on the roll | A register page, a group membership list and a Sheet that disagree. | One record per student, with attendance, fees paid and the parent who pays them. |
| A parent asks you to delete their child's data | It is in a group, a register, a Sheet and your phone contacts. You cannot honestly comply. | The student exists once, as a record. Guardian consent and one-click export are named in the roadmap, not claimed here. |
Three things that go wrong every week
It is the eighth of the month and four parents have not paid. You send the polite message, then the second polite message, then you teach their child anyway because you are not going to turn a fifteen year old away at the door.
The fee is collected when the slot or the month's batch is booked, on UPI, so the class and the payment are the same action. There is no eighth of the month, because there is nothing outstanding to chase.
Exams are in six weeks. Every parent wants extra hours, one wants to move Tuesday to Saturday, and your Grade 10 Maths rate is not your Grade 12 Physics rate. You have already undercharged twice this term without noticing.
Each subject and grade is its own bookable service with its own fee, duration and availability. Saturday exam-prep slots can open while weekday mornings stay closed. The right rate applies without you remembering it.
A parent asks what their daughter has actually covered in eleven sessions and whether she is improving. You know the answer. You cannot show it, because it is in your head and a spiral notebook.
Every session sits on the student's record with the date and your notes on what was covered and what was set. Eleven sessions is a page you can read out, not a memory you have to defend.
What you get on day one
Fees collected at booking
UPI, cards and net banking through Razorpay. Parents pay the way they already pay for everything else, and the slot holds when it clears.
A service per subject and grade
Grade 10 Maths, Grade 12 Physics and a weekend exam-prep intensive can each carry a different fee and a different length. No mental arithmetic at fee time.
Availability that respects school hours
Weekday evenings open, weekday mornings closed, Saturdays open only for intensives. Set it once before the term and stop negotiating slots over WhatsApp.
A record per student
Sessions attended, fees paid, and your notes on what was covered, what was set and where the gaps are. Ready before a parent asks.
Monthly blocks sold up front
List the month's batch as a bundle at your monthly price and sell it in one payment, instead of collecting the same fee eight times a term.
A page you can send to a parent
operate1.com/p/your-name with your subjects, your batches and your fees written down. Custom domain on Pro. It answers the questions before the call happens.
The alternatives
Coaching software is built for institutes. Schedulers are built for one adult booking another.
An independent tutor sits between the two and is served properly by neither. Facts below are the vendors' own, with the billing term stated.
SimplyBook.me
Published from around 12 euros per month for Basic, with many capabilities sold as stackable add-ons, including a custom domain sold separately.
simplybook.me pricing; the full grid is at operate1.com/compare/simplybook-me.
Where it stops
Built for premises with walk-in queues rather than for batches of students. The headline price is rarely the paid price once a tutor adds the pieces they actually need.
Zoho Bookings
A free tier for one user with calendar sync and reminders, then Basic and Premium per user. The local-currency figures for those tiers were not published on the page we read.
zoho.com/bookings pricing, read 4 August 2026.
Where it stops
It books an adult into a slot. There is no student record, no attendance, no marks, and no concept of a parent paying for a child, so everything that matters to a tutor stays in the Sheet.
A WhatsApp group and a Sheet
The most common setup by a distance, and the only one that costs nothing.
Not a vendor. No pricing claim is made here.
Where it stops
It puts children's names, numbers and marks in a shared thread on phones you do not control, and it makes the fee cycle your problem every single month.
Institute coaching software
Priced and built for centres with admissions teams, faculty rosters and multiple branches.
General market observation, outside our vendor pricing survey. No pricing claim is made here.
Where it stops
A tutor with 26 students on the roll does not need an admissions module. Our flat price does not change with the number of people who teach in your practice.
Competitor figures are taken from a pricing survey we ran on 4 August 2026 and are reproduced with the vendor's own currency and billing term. Prices change and some vendors do not publish at all. Check the vendor's own page before you decide, and tell us if anything here has gone stale.
Specific to your work
Batches, parents, minors and the monthly cycle
Four things make tutoring different from every other vertical on this site, and the software you have been offered so far has modelled none of them.
The commercial unit is a month, not a session
You sell August, not twelve Wednesdays. The month's batch can be listed as a bundle at your monthly price and sold in one payment, which is what removes the fifth-of-the-month chase entirely.
The payer is a parent, the attendee is a student
Both belong on the record. The parent gets the confirmation and the receipt, the student's attendance and notes accumulate underneath. A separate guardian record for students under 18 is on the roadmap, not shipped.
A batch has seats, and a seat is either paid or held
Nine of twelve filled, one held unpaid since the fifth, is the real state of a batch. That is a list, not a colour coded Sheet you update when you remember.
Children's data carries a heavier obligation
Every privacy regime we have looked at treats a child's personal data as a special category needing consent from a parent or guardian. In India, the DPDP Act 2023 and its 2025 Rules require verifiable guardian consent, and tutoring does not sit inside the health exemption that covers some clinical processing. Verifiable guardian consent, per purpose consent and a deletion log are being built and are listed in the roadmap below.
What we do not claim
We do not claim that using operate1 makes your tutoring practice DPDP compliant, and none of the guardian consent tooling described above is in your account today. What exists now is one record per student instead of a group chat, which is the precondition for the rest. Your obligations under the Act remain yours, and a lawyer is the right person to advise on them.
Worked example, not a customer result
A tutor with 26 students, one month of fee collection
Invented fees in US dollars, chosen to be plausible for an independent tutor. Convert them to your own rates or ignore them: the number worth looking at is the last one.
- Charged per one-to-one hour
- $40 to $90
- Charged per student for a month of batch classes
- $200 to $500
- Students on the roll
- 26
- Parents who paid only after two or more reminders
- 9
- Seats held unpaid past the 12th
- 4
- Evenings spent following up on fees instead of preparing
- 6
Six evenings went to fee follow-up, which is roughly a week of preparation time given back if the money simply arrives with the booking. Collecting at the point of booking is not a stricter policy, it is the same policy with the chasing removed.
Illustration only. These are the practitioner's own fees in a made-up week, not operate1 pricing and not a claim about anyone's results.
Working in your account today
A bookable service per subject and grade, each with its own fee and duration
Fees collected at booking on UPI, cards and net banking through Razorpay
The month's batch sold as a single bundle instead of eight separate collections
Availability by day and time, so school hours and exam weekends behave differently
24-hour and 2-hour reminders by email to the parent and the student
One record per student with attendance, fees paid and your session notes
Your own page at operate1.com/p/your-name, custom domain on Pro
No commission on the fees you collect, on any plan, whatever your batch size
Being built now, not available yet
Everything above is in the product today. Everything below is on the records roadmap and is not in your account yet. We list it here so you can decide with the real picture rather than a demo of something that does not exist.
- A session template for tutoring: covered today, homework set, next focus
- Marks and test scores captured in the session and charted across the term
- A guardian record for students under 18, with verifiable consent taken from the parent
- Per-purpose consent kept separate for classes, reminders and anything promotional
- Reminders to parents over WhatsApp rather than email, unmetered
- A term-fee ledger that counts down classes paid for against classes taught
- One-click export of everything held about a single student
The 14-Day Move Guarantee
Sign up for Business, send us your records in whatever shape they are in, Excel, Google Sheets, a WhatsApp export, or an export from your current software, and book your setup call.
Within 14 days of that call your records are live in operate1, your consent notice is written for your profession, and your retention schedule is configured. If we miss the fourteenth day, your next three months are free. You do not have to ask and you do not have to prove anything. We watch the clock, and if we are late we email you and apply the credit.
Two things we need from you, because we cannot do them for you: send the records within 3 days of signing up, and turn up to the setup call. If either does not happen, the clock starts when it does.
What this guarantee is not. It is a promise about our delivery, not about your legal position. operate1 gives you the records, the consent capture, the retention schedule and the audit trail. Whether your practice complies with the privacy law where you work depends on how you run it and on advice from a lawyer, which we are not.
Start with your next booking
Built for tutors and educators. Free tier needs no card and no call. Move your first records tonight and decide in the morning.
One price for the whole practice, however many people work in it. Cancel yourself in the app and take your data with you.