italki vs Cambly: the price nobody quotes correctly

Cambly sells 30-minute lessons on a weekly allowance, at a price that drops the longer you agree to stay. Any minutes you don't use by Monday morning are gone.

italki sells you one lesson. You pay, you take it, nothing renews.

So a sentence like "Cambly costs $X an hour" is arithmetic somebody invented. Every page ranking for this question contains one, and no two agree.

Take the verdict up front, because it's simpler than the pricing. If you're learning Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian or German, Cambly isn't an option at all: it teaches English only.

If you're learning English and you'll genuinely show up several times a week for a year, Cambly's 12-month rate is real money saved. If your weeks are unpredictable, italki, and it isn't close.

Cambly sells a weekly allowance, and italki sells one lesson

Cambly's plan page, read on 21 September 2026, says it plainly: "Choose lessons per week (lessons are 30 minutes)", in options of 1, 2, 3, 5 or 10.

Then you pick how long you're committing for, and that choice moves the price. From the same page, per lesson: $18.75 monthly, $15.58 on a 3-month plan ("10% off"), $12.12 on a 12-month plan ("30% off").

The weekly allowance is the part the review sites miss entirely. Cambly's help centre: "Your plan includes a set number of minutes each week", and "Any unused minutes from the previous week expire and do not carry over." They refresh "every Monday at 3:00 AM (your local timezone)", and you can use at most 60 of them in one day.

So a busy fortnight on Cambly means two weeks of minutes you already paid for, deleted on a Monday.

italki has no such clock. Its own pricing guide: "There is no subscription, no monthly minimum, and no lock-in. You book lessons when you want them and pay per session."

Community tutors "typically charge between $4-$20 per lesson", professional teachers "$10-$40 per lesson".

Three top results, three wrong prices

The page at number 1 is on italki.com, bylined Cheryl Kochenderfer, updated 16 September 2026, and it concludes that italki wins. It prices Cambly at "$38–$53/hour" against italki's "From $4 per lesson".

Look at what that comparison does. $4 is italki's community-tutor floor for a short lesson, quoted from italki's own cheapest band. The Cambly number is a ceiling.

One company's basement against another company's roof, published by the company that owns the basement.

Result 2 is Leonardo English, by Emile Dodds, April 2026. It's the honest one of the three, and it earns that by testing things.

He reports finding italki profiles of "teachers who claimed to be native speakers, but who were obviously not". On Cambly he "often found no tutors available" at the level and time he wanted.

Independent negative findings about platforms he doesn't own. That's the standard.

Its Cambly figure is "around $20 per hour", a blended average matching none of the plans above. And because it's juggling four platforms across 4,500 words, it never issues an italki-versus-Cambly verdict at all.

Result 3, teast.co, is the one to actually avoid. Its title says 2025, its own stamp says last updated 10 April 2023, and its Cambly figure is "$0.17/min ($10.20/hr)".

That's the tutor's wage. The site is written for teachers looking for work. A learner who reads that number as a lesson price is off by a factor of two or three.

Three results, three numbers, spanning $10.20 to $53. A buyer who reads all of them knows less than when they started.

Cambly costs $24.24 an hour at best, against italki's $12.25 median

Here's the table none of them publish. Cambly bills 4 lessons per month per weekly lesson, so the monthly figure is the per-lesson price times 4 times your lessons per week. The arithmetic is mine; the per-lesson prices are quoted from Cambly's plan page as read on 21 September 2026.

Cambly, monthly cost by commitment (30-minute lessons)

1 / week $75 → $48.48 Monthly plan against the 12-month plan. Same lesson, $26.52 apart.

2 / week $150 → $96.96 One hour of tutoring a week, split into two halves.

3 / week $225 → $145.44 90 minutes a week, and 90 minutes you lose if you skip.

5 / week $375 → $242.40 The tier where the annual discount is worth about $1,590 a year.

Now convert Cambly to an hourly rate yourself, since a 30-minute lesson is half an hour: $37.50 on the monthly plan, $31.16 on the 3-month, $24.24 on the 12-month. That last number is the only one in the neighbourhood of what the review sites claim, and you only reach it by prepaying twelve months.

Against that, italki. I pulled the standing hourly rates out of the structured data on italki's Spanish teacher directory on 21 September 2026: 20 teachers on page one, every one priced for a full hour.

Sorted: $6, $7.60, $8, $8, $8, $9, $9.50, $10, $11, $12, $12.50, $13, $13, $13.50, $13.90, $15, $17, $20, $40, $74.

The median (the middle value) sits at $12.25. italki's own aggregate on that page covers 2,346 teachers, from $6 to $74.

Four hours a month at that median is about $49, bought whenever you want them, with nothing renewing. Cambly's closest equivalent, 2 lessons a week on the 12-month plan, is $96.96 and locks you in for a year.

One honest caveat on my own number: page one is italki's default ranking, not a random sample of 2,346 teachers. And English rates aren't Spanish rates. Pull the equivalent list for your own language before you budget from mine.

Cambly refunds in the first 7 days, and quitting later costs the discount

Not one of the three ranking pages mentions refunds, cancellation or what a broken commitment costs. These are the questions you ask at the exact moment you're about to pay, so here they are.

Cambly publishes a genuine 7-day guarantee, and it's better than I expected: "If you contact our support team within the first 7 days of the start date of your first Cambly plan, you are eligible for a full refund."

The policy adds that this holds "even if you've taken lessons during that time." First plan only, and you have to write to support rather than click a button.

After that window, the discount you were sold becomes the trap. Verbatim: "our long-term discounts are based on a minimum commitment; because canceling early means these requirements were not met, the discount is forfeited and the standard monthly rate will apply to the days used."

Read that twice before you take the 30% off. Quit a 12-month plan in month 3 and Cambly reprices those 3 months at $18.75 a lesson rather than $12.12, then refunds the difference against what you paid.

Cambly also states that if the full-price cost of the time you've used exceeds what you originally paid, there's no refund at all. The annual discount is a loan against your own future attendance.

Plans renew automatically unless you turn renewal off before the renewal date.

On italki there's nothing to cancel, because there's nothing running. You hold credits "pegged to USD" and spend them when you like.

I couldn't verify whether those credits expire: italki's comparison page claims they don't, its pricing guide is silent, and its support site blocks my tools. So I'm not repeating the assurance. Ask italki support before you top up a big balance.

Pick Cambly only for English and steady attendance, and italki otherwise

The axis that decides it for most readers here has nothing to do with money. Cambly teaches English. italki lists teachers in over 150 languages.

If your target is Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian or German, the comparison ended before the prices loaded.

For English learners, a rule rather than a verdict. Cambly's 12-month plan beats italki's median only if you actually take the lessons. At 2 lessons a week you're paying $96.96 a month for 4 hours, against roughly $49 of italki at $12.25.

Cambly's price buys you instant availability and a tutor you don't have to choose. Cambly's own product also hands you something italki charges for, since Private+ includes "Lesson recordings and transcripts after every lesson".

Skip a fortnight, though, and those minutes are deleted on the Monday. Miss enough of them and you've paid for lessons you never had.

So: if you've quit tutoring before because nobody was expecting you, the weekly allowance is a commitment device and it works on the people who need one. If your calendar is a mess, italki, every time.

Credit where it's due, since I've been hard on italki's own page: what you ask for in your first lesson changes the second one more than either platform does.

And both sell you a conversation and stop there.

italki says so itself: "It's up to you to take the language you learned in your italki lesson and add it to a smart platform." The vocabulary stays your problem, which is where the money leaks.

That gap is the thing I built. Verbamor is an iOS app that turns the words from a lesson you already paid for into fill-in-the-blank cards with generated audio and a picture. They're scheduled so you're still using them next month.

Past its Essentials deck of roughly 650 common words, it teaches you nothing new, and it won't find you a tutor. $19.99 a month, or $129.99 a year with a 7-day trial on the annual plan. Both are US prices, read off the app's own plan definitions on 21 September 2026; the App Store sets a different number in other countries.

No free tier, and English is only on offer to Spanish and Portuguese speakers, who get the app in their own language. Any other English learner is out of luck on both counts.

The honest version is that you might not need any of it. If you'll write your lesson words into a notebook on the train home and actually test yourself on them, that beats every app here including mine, and costs nothing.

Anki is free on desktop and Android and runs a serious scheduler once you set it up. The people who should pay me have tried twice to keep a deck going and stopped.

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