Updated
When did you last use all your Cambly minutes?
Subscriptions don't fit real schedules. Pay for the time you actually talk.
Cambiyo launches 1 July 2026. No subscription. Free waitlist.
You used 12 of your 60 minutes this month. The other 48 are gone at midnight on the 30th.
You meant to use them. You always mean to. The week you blocked out for daily practice was the week the project went bad. The Tuesday lesson got moved. The tutor you liked stopped showing up at the times you are free.
So you cancelled. Or you are about to. Or you are letting it roll over for another month and quietly hoping this time will be different.
Cambly is good at what it does. The tutors are real native speakers. Many of them are excellent. The platform works. None of that is the problem.
The problem is the subscription. You are not paying for English practice. You are paying for the option to practise on a schedule Cambly's price plan assumes you will keep. Real life is not like that.
You took the yearly plan because the price was better. Then you missed three weeks because of work. Then two more because you were ill. The unused minutes do not carry over. The discount you got for paying twelve months turns into a tax on every week you do not use it. By month four you are paying for English practice and not actually doing English practice.
Maybe you tried other things. Preply or italki are pay-per-lesson, but every session is a booked, planned slot, and the booking time still does not match how your week actually shapes up. Tandem and HelloTalk are free, but the gap between "free" and "useful for serious learners" is wider than you can deal with. ChatGPT is patient and always there, but you are already past the point of believing AI practice is going to make you fluent.
You don't need a subscription. You don't need a structured lesson. You don't need a free app full of strangers. You need a real person, online when you happen to have time, who will talk for as long as you have, and bill you only for the minutes you used.
That is what we are building.
What we’re building
Cambiyo
You open the app. You see who is online right now. You filter by accent: English, American, Scottish, Australian, Irish. You see ratings, prices, profiles. You pick someone. You start talking.
Speakers set their own prices, starting from $5 an hour. You pay only for the time you spend in conversation. No subscription. No commitment. No minutes to lose.
That last part is the whole point. The clock starts when you start talking. It stops when you stop. If you have ten minutes, you have a ten-minute conversation and you pay for ten minutes. If you have ninety minutes on a Sunday morning, you have a ninety-minute conversation and you pay for ninety minutes. Nothing rolls over. Nothing expires.
Every speaker is checked before they go live. They send a video selfie. We check their face, accent, and country. Anyone fake doesn't get on the platform. Anyone who behaves badly later gets a warning, then removed.
They are not certified tutors. If you want lesson structure and homework, Preply or italki are good. Cambiyo is for the times you just want to talk to a real native speaker without the lesson.
What practice looks like
It's Tuesday morning. You wake up early because you've decided to practise English before work. You make tea. You open Cambiyo. Sarah is online. You spend 30 minutes talking. You go to work warmed up. It cost you about $7, for time you actually used, on a morning you actually had free.
It's a Sunday afternoon. You have an hour. You open the app. Jake is online. You talk for 50 minutes about everything and nothing. It cost you about ten dollars. Nothing rolled over. Nothing expired. Nothing is hanging over you.
It's the week before your visa interview. This time you actually want a lot of practice. You log on twice a day for six days. Some sessions are 20 minutes, some are an hour. You pay for what you used. Same week, you would have used up a Cambly month plan and still wanted more.
The visa interview goes well. You stop being held back by something you can fix.