We built this because our own families needed it.

CinderTutor is run by two parents who got tired of online tutoring tools designed for the tutor’s convenience rather than the student’s progress. We started in 2024. We’ve been customer-funded since the second month.

Why we made it

Lisa had been tutoring out of a spare room in Adelaide for five years. By 2023 her waitlist was 40 students long and growing. Every parent asked the same thing — “can you do it online?” — and every time she said no, because the available platforms weren’t built for the way she taught.

The tools wanted her to format her lesson plans into their templates. They wanted students to log into a system, complete pre-assigned worksheets, and click through “learning objectives” before she could even start talking. They wanted her to use their auto-generated progress emails — templates with fill-in-the-blanks that bore no resemblance to what she’d actually noticed in the lesson.

James had been writing software for fifteen years and was a parent of two. He’d already paid for a different online tutoring service for his older child. The experience was bad in ways he couldn’t articulate at first, and then could.

They met at a barbecue. Within an hour they’d agreed on what to build.

The first lesson should be the first lesson. Not the third login attempt, the second password reset, and the calendar invite that didn’t sync.

What that turned into

CinderTutor is a deliberately small tool with three jobs: match a student with the right tutor, run the lesson, and tell the parent what happened. That’s it. We don’t do gamification, badges, AI-generated practice problems, or a marketplace where tutors bid for students. None of that helps your child learn.

Tutors are paid more than the platform average and don’t pay platform fees. Parents pay one flat monthly rate. There are no booking fees, matching fees, recording fees, or “premium tutor” surcharges. We make a small margin on each lesson. That covers our salaries, hosting, and a slow growth rate we can sustain without raising money.

Where we are

We’re based in Adelaide. Lisa lives in Norwood; James lives in Glenelg. We work out of a small office near the Hindley Street tram stop on the days we both come in. Our nineteen tutors live across Adelaide, Sydney, Wellington, Auckland, and Singapore — the Singapore four came on board in late 2025 when we started covering A-Levels and Singapore JC students.

We’re customer-funded and we’ll stay that way. Investors generally want the business to grow 3× a year, and 3× a year doesn’t work for tutoring — it would mean watering down who teaches. We’d rather stay small and stay good.