What users complain about in Varsity Tutors Live Tutoring

Do not get this app

Tutors were awful half barely spoke english. After canceling continued to charge card automatically of well over $2,000 refused refund even though no time was spent on the app. sketchy as hell

The new version SUCKS!

Ever since the new app update i have been having issues. And the worst issue of them all is every time i schedule a session it lets me choose everything then after i submit the session it randomly changes the date on me. And at first i thought it was user error but it’s not. Now i have to ask my tutor to schedule it for me. I’ll put 7 pm on the 8th but then after i submit it it’ll tell me 7 pm on the 12th. The first time i didnt notice it did it and lost a whole hour because i missed a session. Its very annoying. And theres other little things with the new update that just made things more complicated and make the app mess up. But id say the date change is the worst. Besides the app i love the tutor i have. He’s genuinely an amazing teacher and really works with me and knows how to explain things so i understand better and adjust to my learning style. So dont let this review steer you away from getting the tutor. But they either need to fix the app or go back to the old version cause this one is terrible!!!

Scam!!!

Don’t download app. This company continues to charge you AFTER you cancel! Worst customer service they lie & respond by email but keep charging!!!!

Stole my money

Be careful of this app. Didn’t ask for more sessions and was charged for two more months and only received one months back. Worst experience Iv ever had dealing with customer support. Wouldn’t recommend this app.

Good content but app experience made me give up.

App is very frustrating to use Banner is stuck on forgot password above When I try to change preferred contact to text, it gteys out continue Keep getting an ad to use the app even though I’m in the app

Scams

Paid 1k and the meetings got rescheduled also never showed up to the meetings and when I checked the weekly schedules, they removed all the sessions we were supposed to have. So I paid for nothing. The 5 star reviews are most likely fake and the same goes for the ai “tutors” and also deleted my account after paying. It’s embarrassing to scam people who are trying to learn.

SUBSCRIPTION SCAM!!

We set up weekly tutoring sessions and the instructor had an emergency event and could not make one of the sessions and now this dishonest company wants us to pay for another month to accommodate their issues. Do not sign up with them. I would guess that the 40k reviews are fake AI generated trash as well. good luck to anyone like me dumb enough to believe that they really care about anything but your money

As a tutor, I love working with the students but have issues with the platform, billing, and app

It seems that my students are billed weekly or monthly, regardless of whether we have a session. At the same time, I am only paid as a tutor for actual sessions by the minute. So Varsity is stacking cash while tutors get paid rather little (they advertise $40/hr but in reality, we start at only $18/hr and get minimal incentives for repeat sessions). I’ve been with the platform for about 2 months now and enjoy my time with my students very much, and have been able to accommodate their schedules and overall they report having a great experience with me. However when a student cancels their contract, all our message history is immediately erased without warning and I can no longer contact them and I get a weird email from Varsity about “no follow up needed.” They just disappear into a vacuum. At one point I had 5 students/week. I now only have 1 adult learner without any billing complaints (their work pays for it), and another adult learner who is in limbo and asked me for help and clarification on how many times we actually met. It’s not really possible to see my earnings by student nor how many actual meetings we had. I can see how much I’ve been paid in a week, but not scoped by student. I find their messaging system doesn’t work well on older phones (on the web or app), and the Varsity tech support could only tell me to update my iOS and my app. They use AI for first line help which is useless, so I’m often having to email different teams to escalate issues, which is a waste of my time (that I also don’t get paid for). My students find their Live Learning platform difficult to use to screen share. I like the whiteboard feature, but I have to explain every.single.time to my adult learner students how to properly share their screen, which takes time away from our learning session. The iOS app has been getting a lot of updates over the past few weeks, which is good in theory but also annoying as I’m trying to hop on to message a student, for example before a scheduled meeting or if a session dropped due to WiFi or something else. Overall, I appreciate the philosophy of this platform and the students I’ve connected with. Unfortunately, the actual tech and the billing issues I hear about from my students make me wary.

Horrible company, horrible platform

this app glitches incessantly. things just straight-up never load, and it is functionally impossible to chat with students/tutors or otherwise use the app. not to mention they charge upwards of $80/hr and only pay tutors $18.

DO NOT USE VARSITY TUTORS

Nothing against the tutors. THE COMPANY IS SKETCHY they will lie, they will bill you, they will charge you after saying they cancelled, they won’t give any confirmation emails, they hide invoices, they will say no to a refund. Figuring out the $506 scam taken out of my account with my bank.

Schedule layout broken after upgrading

After upgrading to the latest version, the schedule layout has errors and I couldn’t access the link to my session.

Requires some core-policy changes

Varsity Tutors has a lot going for it. I've connected with some great students and navigated a clunky interface (which functions like Zoom but with more glitches) to help those students find greater success. However, I have little choice but to give Varsity Tutors a low star rating until they can rectify some fundamental issues with their policies. The most urgent is the present reality that, apparently, if a student unilaterally pushes back a session till later in the day, even if they gave less than an hour of notice, the tutor presently has no choice but to either (A) agree to the new session time, or (B) forfeit all pay that student that day. Payment for the originally scheduled time is forfeit regardless, without tutor consent. Today I had a session scheduled for which I did about 3 hours of prep work, due to the student having some special needs. With less than an hour's notice, the student pushed back the start time to when I have a preexisting conflict. Varsity Tutors said they would not pay me for the time the student and I had originally agreed to: "We are unable to process a late cancellation [sic] invoice[,] because the session was rescheduled within the same day. As a result, this update no longer qualifies for a cancellation fee." Such a policy is untenable for prospective tutors; it means we are essentially expected to treat the rest of the day as on-call hours, but aren't being paid to do so. I will change my rating if this policy is amended, which it urgently needs.

Scam excessive charges

I enrolled in a $300 package. However, I was charged $1,300 and was never granted a refund. They are the worst! I learned nothing from my tutoring sessions which I could have practiced on my own!!!

Bad, not as advertised

Couldn’t find anything. Very confusing. Not flexible

The new update sucks

It won’t let me send the link to my computer or let me log on with my computer

charged twice

and it cant be fixed via chat. and I cant talk to anyone over the phone. it is always higher-than-usual call volume. please be careful what you are signing up for.

Tutor: Cannot download app on phone

Your update isn’t working on my phone. I am a tutor for VT, and I can no longer access my dashboard or messages on my phone via the app.

Cancelling is a nightmare

They don't tell you that the payment reoccurs every month and there is a one month cancellation notice. So they basically lie to you and try to milk you for money. Also you can't cancel online you have to call them. Absolute nightmare.

Shady and misleading

As a tutor you have no support if you run into any trouble or technical issues, and they seem to just want your data without any intention of helping you find work. And as a student they will mislead you with RECURRING charges that are advertised as one time only. The professor was unprepared and there was no support or alternative

Not fair to tutors

They are charging families upwards of $60 per hour and tutors are getting $15-20 an hour

Thieves

They continued to draw money from my account for 5 months and clearly saw that there was no activity on my account. It’s super inconvenient because you have to cancel your membership every 16 weeks in between semesters or they’ll charge you for that month knowing that you aren’t using a tutor. They wasted $1600 of my student loan and would not provide a refund even though they didn’t even provide a service. I promise that you can find a better service. Don’t pay these scammers. They have no conscious.

Read the 20 page contract

Just like apple they will get you if you literally do not read EVREY single word on the many page contract. Not only that but when we were on the phone with them they NEVER explained that you are actually paying a recurring monthly fee for up to a certain number of hours. The best part is they made sure not to mention that if you don’t use the hours they will wipe them clean and start you fresh ( used this program years ago and it was not like this) so now since my sons semester is done we will have to pay almost 600 dollars a for a month that we can’t use. And not only that but even if we could use it he won’t be back in school till late January so the hours wouldn’t stretch till then anyway. Besides that fact that the people who run the calls apparently aren’t aware of this too (or just chose to not mention it) the app itself has so many bugs and glitches it took 2-3 sessions just to get anywhere comfortable on it. 0/10 would absolutely not recommend, used to love this service but now I can’t in good faith recommend it to anyone.

Varsity tutors

Couldn’t agree more service has been awful I’ve been canceled on 3 times now and even waited on a call for 40 minutes. Now they are saying it’s not possible to refund even tonight I’ve payed and had 0 service so pretty much paying for nothing.

Badge notification not going away

There are no new notifications yet the badge notifications do not go away. I’ve tried removing- reinstalling the app but still no luck.

Rude Over the Phone Tech Support.

Varsity Tutors recently updated the live learning platform and in one of my sessions today we couldn’t figure out why the sound wasn’t working when we were playing our instruments. We adapted and turned it into a little science experiment to try and figure it out. Then after the session, I called their tech-support to explain the situation and see if they could help. Connor, who answered was rude about the whole situation. I explained to him the issue and how we tried to solve it. His only response was “why didn’t you use the in-session chat support?” I explained that we turned it into a science experiment and that I had data to share with him. He begrudgingly listened and several times asked that same question in a rude tone. In my next session my student’s parent showed me what the setting was that I had missed. Meaning my student’s father was more helpful than Connor, who’s supposed to know the program because he is the tech-support person. The student’s father was also kinder than Conner. This is not the first time that Connor has been rude to me when I’ve called in about something. Connor was also rude to me in May 2025 when I called about an invoicing error that needed to be fixed He told me that “nobody reads the invoices even when the “alert your director to any issues” button is clicked. I don’t know what’s going on in Connor’s life for him to act this way at his job at multiple points in the same year, but I do not appreciate it. I am wishing him well enough and I hope he has the day he deserves.

Terrible experience at every level

Went through the process to set up repeated tutoring sessions. Only had 1. The tutor erased all emails within the APP and never had a follow up session. Customer service would not refund money for services I didn’t receive. Find another group.

Still charging after I canceled

I was still charged monthly after I canceled with my tutor in good faith. DO NOT USE VARSITY TUTORS! YOU WILL BE CONTINUOUSLY CHARGED!

Terrible experience

We paid for two months, focus was on math SAT and ACT. Our daughter actually went down a point on ACT

Terrible experience

My daughter signed up for the service and had about 4 sessions. The tutor canceled on her a few times then said she cannot do during the week anymore and weekend did not work for my daughter. My daughter asked the tutor for a new tutor but never got one. Unfortunately, there was not any mechanism to check-in and varsity tutor kept on charging for their service even though my daughter did not have a tutor assigned. We requested a refund but varsity tutor told us twice they need to talk internally and then come back. They never did! I cannot recommend this service.

Predatory Practices

I purchased hours within a plan. I expressed that we were a military family living on post and was assured that they could work with our unique situation. The tutor was unable to make it, repeated cancellations, eventually COVID hit, we changed stations, and the services forgotten. I recently went back to use the 47 unused hours and they will not let me. I did not even want the money back. I just wanted the hours. Do not use

Errors upon errors upon errors

Poorly integrated with desktop website and even with itself. I get errors every time I use the app. I’m 0-for-40 when it comes to letting me accept tutoring opportunities that I’ve clicked on immediately after notification. One error message tells me that the tutoring opportunity falls outside of my availability, which is false. All my equipment and operating systems are up to date—> the fault is with the app.

Horrible tutoring

The people who had tutored me were HORRIBLE and so rude. My first new tutor was so rude when I asked for help and gave stupid faces and looked irritated when all I was trying to do was learn and be respectful to her. To include my school recommended it aka Edgar Middle School Metuchen, which did not help at all since teachers didn’t want to help students get better at their lessons. My second tutor was never on time as well, she needed to take care of her family all the time. When texting her she wouldn’t respond at times. Overall this was SUCH a bad experience didn’t help me with the subject that I was struggling with I do NOT recommend this app for help.

App is really bad

There are so many bugs in this app it’s insane. I can’t message my clients because the contact list won’t populate. I hate using this app. It needs a full overhaul.