How Faidence's Credit-Based Pricing Works (and Why It's Fairer Than Flat Subscriptions)

Most tutoring and scheduling software charges a flat monthly fee — the same price whether you're running 3 students or 30. That works fine at the top of the range, and quietly overcharges you at the bottom of it. Faidence does the opposite: pricing scales with how many active students you actually have, calculated daily. Here's exactly how, with the real formula and real numbers, not marketing math.

The problem with flat-fee tutoring software

Tutoring businesses aren't flat. You gain students in September, lose a few over winter break, pick up more before finals season. A flat monthly fee ignores all of that — you're paying the same price in a slow month as a busy one, which means the software is effectively most expensive exactly when your revenue is lowest.

How Faidence actually prices it

Faidence bills based on active students — students currently linked to your roster — not seats, tiers, or feature bundles. Every day, each active student consumes a small number of credits, and the rate per student decreases as you add more students (economies of scale):

R(U) = minRate + (maxRate − minRate) / √U

Where U is your number of active students that day and R(U) is the credit cost per student, per day. Credits have a fixed cost with a small margin built in, so your daily cost is R(U) × U × creditCost, and monthly is roughly that × 30. Here's what that works out to at our current live rates — these update automatically whenever we adjust pricing:

What that formula is actually saying

You don't need to do the math yourself — the point of the formula is what it produces, not the formula itself. As U grows, R(U) gets smaller: the per-student rate decreases the more active students you have. That's intentional. A tutor with 1 student pays a slightly higher rate per student than a tutor with 50, because the fixed cost of running the platform is being spread across more students. Growth is rewarded, not penalized.

What the numbers mean

The estimates above come straight from our current pricing, so they're always accurate — no stale table to trust. Two things worth noticing: the total bill scales with your business, and the per-student cost keeps dropping as you grow, because the fixed cost of running the platform is spread across more students. It's never a flat per-seat tax you'd pay regardless of activity.

What counts as "active"

Only students currently linked to your roster count toward the daily calculation. A student who's no longer active on your roster stops being counted the next billing day — there's no separate "seat" to cancel, and no fee for capacity you're not using.

Why this matters more in a slow month than a busy one

A flat-fee tool's worst month is the one where your student count drops — you're paying full freight for a fraction of the usage. Under Faidence's model, your bill drops with your roster automatically. You're never subsidizing an empty seat, and you're never blocked from adding one more student because it would bump you into the next pricing tier.

Try your own numbers

The exact formula above is live on the pricing calculator on our tutors page — plug in your real student count and see the real number, not a rounded estimate. If you're deciding whether to run your practice on Faidence, that's the actual bill you'd see, not a sales-page approximation.