Updated
What if you didn't actually want a tutor?
Preply gave you lessons. What you wanted was a conversation. Here's what works for that.
Cambiyo launches 1 July 2026. Free waitlist. No card.
You took six lessons. Maybe ten. They were good lessons. The tutor was patient and prepared. She had a plan for the next session. She gave you homework.
You stopped opening Preply about three weeks ago. The homework is still there.
It is not that the lessons did not work. They did. Your grammar is tighter, your vocabulary is wider, you can definitely tell something improved. The problem is that you do not actually want lessons. You want to talk.
You want the kind of practice where you log in for twenty minutes after work, talk to someone about your day, hang up, and get on with your evening. No assignments. No "next time we will cover the conditional." No three-day-out booking calendar that turns every session into a commitment you will feel bad cancelling.
Preply is a tutoring platform. That is its job. It does that job well. There are great teachers on it, the platform works, the booking system is fine. But you are not really shopping for a teacher. You are shopping for a person to talk to.
Maybe you used to be more fluent. Maybe you spent six months somewhere, or you worked in English for a while, or you had a partner whose family was British. The English is in there. It just has not been used in a while and it has gone quiet. You don't need someone to teach you the conditional. You need someone to make conversation with you until your English warms up again.
Or maybe you are not coming back from a fluent past. Maybe you are at this point and you can already tell that lessons are not the right shape for you. You have watched friends learn languages by speaking them, not by being taught at. You would rather pay a real person to chat with you for thirty minutes a day than book an hour-long lesson once a week.
Either way, the structure is wrong for you. You don't need a tutor. You need a speaker.
The free apps don't fix this. Tandem and HelloTalk get you stuck in DMs and feeds with people who have their own reasons for being there. Cambly is closer in feel but it's still a subscription and still framed as lessons. ChatGPT is patient and always there, but you have tried that, and you are past believing it is actually moving the needle.
You need a real person, online right now, paid to talk to you for as long as you have, with no homework waiting at the end.
That is what we are building.
What we’re building
Cambiyo
You open the app. You see who is online. 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 talking. No package to buy. No booking. No homework.
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 tutors. That is the point. They are real people: students, freelancers, retirees, anyone fluent in English who wants to earn from a conversation. Some are studying education on the side. Some are just chatty. None of them are going to set you homework or follow up about how the conditional went.
If you genuinely want lesson structure with progression and assignments, Preply is great. Don't leave Preply for the wrong reasons. But if what you wanted was the freedom to just talk, that is what Cambiyo is.
What practice looks like
It's a Tuesday after work. You have 25 minutes before you need to start dinner. You open Cambiyo. Sarah is online. You spend 20 minutes telling her about your day, asking about hers. You hang up. There is no homework. There is no calendar invite for next week. There is just the next thing you have to do tonight.
It's a Sunday afternoon. You are walking the dog. You have decided you want to keep speaking English at the weekends, not only at lessons. Jake is online. You talk for 30 minutes about a book you are reading. The walk is done. The English is warm. There is nothing to follow up on.
It's the week before a work trip. You want more practice than usual. You log on for forty minutes a day, not because you have committed to it, but because you have the time and the speakers are there. You pay for what you used. There is no plan, no syllabus, no assignment.
The work trip goes well. You stop being held back by something you can fix.