How to Build a Tutoring Progress App

The commercial insight: tutors get paid for lessons but retained on visible progress. Parents who can see improvement keep paying. Parents who can't, don't — regardless of whether improvement is happening.

Most tutors have no way of showing it.

What it needs

1. Student profiles with subject, level, and target exam or goal.
2. A lesson log — date, topics covered, homework set.
3. Progress notes against specific topics, marked as struggling, developing or secure. This is the core.
4. A parent-visible summary. Read-only, showing recent lessons and topic progress.
5. Homework tracking — set, completed or not.
6. Invoicing or lesson-count tracking, depending on how you charge.

Starting prompt

Build a tutoring app for iOS and Android. Maintain student profiles with name, subject, level, parent contact and target exam. After each lesson, log the date, duration, topics covered, homework set, and a progress rating for each topic covered (struggling, developing, secure). Show a progress view per student listing all topics with their current rating and how it has changed over time. Generate a shareable read-only summary for parents showing the last five lessons and current topic ratings. Track lesson counts per student for billing.

The honest hard part

Child data. Names, schools, academic performance, parent contacts. Depending on where you operate, this may fall under specific legal obligations — GDPR in the UK and EU treats children's data with additional care, and other jurisdictions have their own rules.

Practically: keep data on the device rather than a server if you can, don't collect anything you don't need, and be clear with parents about what you store. If you're operating at any scale, get advice rather than guessing.

Cost

• Subscription: $25/month
• Equivalent developer quote: $12,000–30,000

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