Teacher Partner Agreement

1.1 You join EnglishTuts as an independent freelance partner — a self-employed professional offering language teaching services through our platform. We're delighted to have you. To keep things simple and clean for both sides, this partnership is not an employment relationship, not a partnership in the corporate-law sense, not an agency, and not a joint venture. You're your own boss; we're the marketplace that connects you to students.

1.2 Because you're self-employed, you naturally don't receive employee benefits — no salary, paid leave, medical insurance, pension, provident fund, social security contribution, gratuity, severance, bonus, equity, or any other employee entitlement under the laws of any country. You handle your own taxes, social contributions, and any professional registrations required where you live and work.

1.3 You're free to teach for other platforms, run private students, take holidays, and design your own work pattern. We just ask for professionalism when you're teaching with us.

2.1 We work hard to bring students to the platform and to feature our teachers fairly through our rotating-discovery system. That said, the volume of lessons you receive depends on student demand, your availability, your reviews, and our matching algorithms — all of which can change over time.

2.2 We are therefore unable to guarantee any specific number of lessons, students, hours, weekly bookings, monthly income, or earnings of any kind, at any time, ever. You enter this partnership with full understanding that your earnings will vary and may at times be zero. This is a fundamental term of our partnership.

2.3 Our discovery algorithms, ranking, search, and any "instant" or "featured" placement are entirely at our discretion and may be changed, paused, or removed at any time without notice or compensation.

2.4 We may, at our discretion, reduce or suspend your visibility for operational, quality, safety, or business reasons. We'll always try to tell you why, but we are not required to.

3.1 For every lesson you deliver that is marked completed in our system, you receive 70% of the lesson's realized price; we retain 30% as our service fee for marketing, payment processing, infrastructure, support, and platform development.

3.2 The "realized price" is the per-lesson rate of the package the student's credit came from, or the single-class rate if the student paid à-la-carte. This rate is locked at the moment of purchase, so future price changes never affect lessons already booked.

3.3 We process payouts monthly, on or before the 7th day of the following calendar month, in your local currency where supported (otherwise USD). Payment is by bank transfer, UPI (where available), or any other electronic method we choose. We may change the cadence with 30 days' notice.

3.4 No payment is due for: lessons not marked completed; lessons canceled by you; lessons canceled by the student under our standard cancellation rules (see Section 7); your own no-shows; lessons conducted outside the platform; lessons flagged for fraud, breach, complaint, or investigation; or lessons conducted in violation of any clause of this Agreement.

3.5 If you have a question about a payout, please raise it within 30 days of the statement date. After that, the statement is final and conclusive.

3.6 Minimum commitment & early-exit forfeiture. We invest meaningfully in onboarding, training, profile photography, marketing, and student matching for every teacher we welcome. In exchange, we ask for a minimum 12-month commitment from the date you accept this Agreement. If you choose to leave (or stop accepting bookings, or de-list yourself, or otherwise cease active teaching) before completing 12 months from the acceptance date, you forfeit any unpaid earnings accrued up to that point. Earnings already paid out are unaffected. After 12 months you may exit at any time with 30 days' written notice and any earned-but-unpaid amount is paid in the next normal cycle.

4.1 One classroom only. Every lesson with a student you met through EnglishTuts must be conducted inside our built-in video classroom. This isn't bureaucracy — it lets us guarantee quality, safety, recording, and recourse for both you and the student. Teaching an EnglishTuts student outside our platform — on Zoom, Google Meet, WhatsApp, Skype, in person, or anywhere else — at any time, even after this Agreement ends, is strictly prohibited. Breach of this clause triggers Section 11.

4.2 Our materials, your delivery. We provide a complete library of lessons, exercises, dialogues, audio, passages, and test-prep items, all designed to fit our methodology. You teach using these materials exclusively. Please don't bring outside slides, worksheets, third-party textbooks, exam papers, songs, videos, or images into a lesson — quite apart from quality control, importing copyrighted third-party content into a paid lesson is a copyright risk that you (not us) would be liable for.

4.3 No outside selling. Please don't promote external services, accept tips or payments outside the platform, share contact details, or invite students to take lessons elsewhere. This protects our shared brand and the trust students place in us.

5.1 Lessons may be recorded by the platform for quality assurance, safety review, dispute resolution, and student-requested replay. By accepting this Agreement, you give your full and ongoing consent to being recorded (audio + video) in every lesson, and to those recordings being stored, reviewed, and shared with the relevant student on request. Students are also notified of recording at lesson start.

5.2 Only the platform records. Teachers may not record, screen-record, screenshot, or otherwise capture any lesson, and may not request, receive, download, or retain any recording. Recordings are the platform's exclusive property and are not provided to teachers under any circumstances.

5.3 You acknowledge that lessons may also be monitored in real time by platform staff or our automated quality systems, with or without your prior knowledge in any specific lesson, for the purposes set out in 5.1. This monitoring is part of how we keep students safe and standards high — you are not entitled to advance notice of any specific monitoring instance.

6.1 We pride ourselves on a respectful, professional, encouraging classroom. You agree to bring exactly that energy to every lesson — patient, kind, well-prepared, on time, neatly presented, with a working camera, microphone, and a quiet well-lit space.

6.2 We never ask teachers to handle student personal data. You won't see student email, phone, address, social handles, payment details, or full name beyond display name and avatar. All communication outside the lesson room is intermediated by the platform — please don't ask students for their contact info or share yours.

6.3 If a student tells you something that worries you about their safety (especially involving a minor), please tell our admin team immediately through the in-platform support channel and we'll take it from there.

7.1 When a student cancels: if they give 12+ hours' notice, the lesson is refunded to them and you receive nothing for that slot. If they cancel within 12 hours, they lose their credit and you receive ⅓ of the lesson rate as a goodwill compensation. Students who cancel more than 10 lessons in a single calendar month lose the right to a refund on further cancellations — those credits go to the platform and you still receive nothing for those slots (the platform absorbs that overflow).

7.2 When you need to cancel: life happens, and we get it. You may cancel up to 5 lessons per calendar month with at least 24 hours' notice ("Regular"), and up to 3 lessons per calendar month with less notice ("Emergency"). Every cancellation requires you to message the platform admin through the in-platform support channel with a brief reason — we'll relay the news to the student. Please don't try to message the student directly; you don't have their contact info, and the platform handles all student-facing communication.

7.3 Going beyond either monthly quota, missing the admin message, or failing to appear for a booked lesson without canceling are breaches that we take seriously. A second breach in any rolling 90-day window may end the partnership; two no-shows in 90 days will end it.

8.1 Everything you find on EnglishTuts — lessons, exercises, dialogues, audio, reading passages, test-prep items, images, code, designs, brand, methodology, prompts, the AI evaluation rubric, the recording archives — is and remains the exclusive intellectual property of EnglishTuts, in every country, indefinitely.

8.2 We grant you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use platform materials only for delivering lessons inside the platform, only during the active term of this Agreement.

8.3 You will not, at any time during or after this Agreement: copy, screenshot, screen-record, photograph, transcribe, redistribute, repost, sell, license, sublicense, publish, share, summarize for resale, train an AI model on, or otherwise exploit any platform material outside the platform. Lesson plans, notes, or derivative works you create using platform material are also platform property.

8.4 Any inventions, improvements, or content you create for the platform during your engagement (e.g. authored lesson contributions accepted into the library) are assigned to the platform on creation. We may credit you publicly if you wish.

9.1 Anything non-public you learn about the platform — algorithms, pricing experiments, student data, financial figures, roadmap, internal tooling, complaints, other teachers' arrangements — is confidential. Please don't share it with anyone, ever, including after our partnership ends.

10.1 The following actions ("Material Breaches") result in immediate termination of this Agreement, forfeiture of all unpaid earnings, permanent removal from the platform, and the consequences in Section 11:

• (a) Verbal abuse, harassment, intimidation, threatening behavior, or any disrespect toward a student.
• (b) Any inappropriate behavior of a sexual, romantic, discriminatory, racist, sexist, casteist, homophobic, transphobic, religious-proselytizing, politically extremist, or violent nature.
• (c) Any contact with a minor outside the lesson room or in any unsupervised channel.
• (d) Sharing, leaking, accessing, or attempting to access another user's personal data ("data breach").
• (e) Copying, redistributing, leaking, screen-recording, photographing, or training an AI on any platform material in violation of Section 8.
• (f) Teaching any EnglishTuts-acquired student outside the platform, soliciting students off-platform, accepting off-platform payments, or sharing personal contact information with a student. This includes, indefinitely, any student you ever taught through EnglishTuts — even after this Agreement ends.
• (g) Using copyrighted third-party material in a lesson.
• (h) Conducting lessons under the influence of alcohol or recreational drugs.
• (i) Falsifying or misrepresenting your identity, qualifications, location, age, or experience at any time.
• (j) Any criminal conviction relevant to teaching, safeguarding, or financial honesty.
• (k) Any conduct that materially damages or could reasonably be expected to materially damage the platform's reputation, brand, or business.
• (l) Public disparagement of the platform, its students, or its other teachers, including on social media.
• (m) Any other breach we reasonably consider equivalent in seriousness to the above.

11.1 We've designed this partnership to be friendly. But if you commit any Material Breach under Section 10, or any breach of Section 4.1 (off-platform teaching), Section 5 (unauthorized recording), Section 8 (intellectual property), Section 9 (confidentiality), or Section 6.2 (misuse of student data), you will be liable to pay EnglishTuts a liquidated-damages amount of US $20,000 (twenty thousand United States Dollars) per incident, plus all of our reasonable legal, investigation, and enforcement costs, plus any additional damages we can prove.

11.2 You agree this US $20,000 amount is a genuine pre-estimate of the loss the platform suffers from each such breach (lost trust, lost students, brand harm, content devaluation, retraining costs, security remediation), and is not a penalty. You waive any right to argue it is unreasonable or unenforceable.

11.3 This amount is payable within 30 days of our written demand. If unpaid, we may pursue collection in any jurisdiction in which you reside, work, hold assets, or have visited within the last five years.

11.4 In addition, we may pursue any other remedy available to us — including injunctions, takedown notices, criminal complaints where the breach also amounts to a crime (e.g. data theft, copyright infringement, harassment), reports to professional bodies, and public notice to other platforms in our network.

11.5 The obligations in Sections 4.1, 5, 8, 9, 10, and 11 survive termination of this Agreement indefinitely, in every jurisdiction worldwide.

12.1 Our total cumulative liability to you under or in connection with this Agreement, for any cause whatsoever, is capped at the amount of unpaid earnings owed to you on the date of the claim, and in no event exceeds US $500.

12.2 We have no liability to you for indirect, consequential, incidental, special, or punitive damages, lost income, lost opportunity, lost reputation, or any third-party claim — even if we were advised of the possibility.

12.3 You indemnify and hold us harmless from any third-party claim arising from your conduct in a lesson, your tax or statutory non-compliance in your jurisdiction, your use of unauthorized third-party material, your breach of any clause of this Agreement, or anything you say or do that involves an EnglishTuts student.

12.4 You confirm you carry your own personal liability and professional insurance to the extent you require it; we provide none and owe none.

13.1 Subject to the 12-month minimum commitment in Section 3.6, you may end this partnership at any time with 30 days' written notice through the platform. You must honor every booking inside the notice window.

13.2 We may end this partnership immediately and without notice for any Material Breach (Section 10), any breach of Sections 4, 5, 7.3, 8, or 9, repeated student complaints, any safeguarding concern, any fraud, or any reason permitted by applicable law in your jurisdiction.

13.3 We may also end this partnership with 7 days' notice for any other reason — operational restructuring, removal of your subject area from the catalog, low demand, business decisions of any kind. We don't have to give a reason.

13.4 On termination: your visibility ends; pending bookings are reassigned or refunded; earned-and-payable earnings are processed at the next normal cycle (subject to Section 3.6 forfeiture and Section 11 liability); and Sections 4.1, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 keep running indefinitely.

14.1 We may publish revised terms with 30 days' notice by email and in-platform notification. Continuing to accept bookings after the effective date means you accept the revised terms. There is no annual renewal — this Agreement runs continuously from acceptance until terminated.

15.1 We'd much rather solve any disagreement directly. Please write to us first; we'll do our best to make it right.

15.2 You agree that the obligations under Sections 4.1, 5, 8, 9, 10, and 11 are essential to our business, and that breach of any of them entitles us to seek immediate injunctive relief in any court of competent jurisdiction, in addition to the US $20,000 liquidated damages per incident under Section 11 and any other remedy available at law or in equity, anywhere in the world.

15.3 This Agreement is intended to be enforceable in every jurisdiction in which you reside, work, hold assets, or have a meaningful connection. You waive any objection to forum, venue, or jurisdiction in any such place. If a clause is found unenforceable in any one jurisdiction, the remainder continues in full force; the clause itself remains enforceable everywhere it is enforceable.

15.4 You waive any right to participate in a class action or representative proceeding against EnglishTuts.

16.1 This document, plus the platform's published Cancellation Policy, Privacy Policy, and Acceptable Use Policy, is the entire agreement between us and replaces any prior conversations or promises.

16.2 You may not assign this Agreement to anyone else. We may assign it to any successor of our business.

16.3 Failure to enforce a clause once doesn't waive our right to enforce it later.

16.4 By clicking "I Accept" you confirm you've read, understood, and agreed to every clause above, you're at least 18, you have the legal capacity to contract, and the information you've provided in your application is true.