What is Kadensy? A No-Expiry Credit Wallet for Live English Lessons

#TL;DR

Kadensy is an English-tutoring marketplace built around a no-expiry credit wallet. You buy credits in EUR or USD, then spend them on vetted tutors at your own rhythm through HD video and a collaborative whiteboard. There’s no subscription, no contract, and no calendar pressure. Kadensy launched in 2025 as a EUR-native alternative to Preply, italki, and Cambly.

A quick disambiguation before we go further: Kadensy is not Cadence Design Systems, the EDA company. We’re an online English-learning platform. The internal codename of our app server is “Cadence”, but the product you use is Kadensy.

#How Kadensy actually works

Kadensy gives you five steps from sign-up to a lesson in your headphones. Buy a credit pack, browse tutors, book or drop in, run the lesson in HD video with a 15-tool whiteboard, then leave a review. Credits are debited at the rate the tutor sets. The wallet itself has no expiry column in the database, so unused credits sit there until you spend them.

Here’s the flow in detail.

Step 1: buy a credit pack. Four packs are available, ranging from 60 credits to 600 credits. You choose EUR or USD at checkout.

Step 2: browse tutors. Visit /tutors to see vetted teachers. You can filter by language, CEFR level (A1 through C2), and subject. Phase 1 launches with English. The taxonomy already supports Spanish and French.

Step 3: book or drop in. Booked lessons go through a 5-step wizard: tutor, subject, date and time, review, confirm. Drop-in lessons are different: when a tutor opens a drop-in window and you click “join”, an atomic match guarantees no double-booking.

Step 4: run the lesson. Both flows land in the same LiveKit HD video room with chat, a multi-page Fabric.js whiteboard, 7 mini-games, and 4 utility panels (timer, random picker, YouTube picture-in-picture, DeepL translator).

Step 5: review and tip. End-of-lesson optional 1-5 star review with an optional tip in credits. The credit settlement is final once the lesson ends.

#The credit wallet model and why it matters

Subscriptions create three failure modes. You pay for lessons you don’t take. You feel pressure to use lessons before the month-end reset. Cancellation feels punitive because you lose the unused balance. Kadensy’s credit model fixes all three.

Credits never expire. That’s not marketing copy: the wallets table in our database literally has no expires_at column. Credits added to your balance stay there indefinitely. Take a month off, take six months off, then come back and book a lesson. The credits are still yours.

The trade-off is honest. Without an automatic billing cadence pushing you to use the lesson before it disappears, you need to be self-motivated about your learning rhythm. Some people thrive on that flexibility. Other learners do better with a fixed schedule. If you need a hard external deadline to study, a subscription product might fit you better.

If you want to know whether Kadensy fits your specific learning profile, the 5 learner archetypes Kadensy fits best breaks it down case by case.

#Vetted tutors, not a marketplace free-for-all

Tutor onboarding has gates. A teacher applies through /tutor/register, passes a KYC and qualification check, and only appears on the public marketplace after their profile reaches “published” status. The verified date is stored on the profile.

Tutors can onboard from 40 supported countries: the US, the UK, all EU member states, Switzerland, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, the UAE, and more. The 40-country list is enforced by the Stripe Connect Express integration that powers tutor payouts.

Tutors set their own hourly rate in credits. That means pricing is not flat across the platform. A newer tutor might be priced near the entry of the range; a tutor with stronger reviews might price higher. The market sorts itself out through ratings and the LessonReview system, with a dispute mechanism for the rare cases where the lesson goes wrong.

#Booked vs drop-in, the hybrid model

Kadensy supports two scheduling modes inside the same wallet. Booked lessons are scheduled ahead of time through a 5-step wizard. The lesson appears on both calendars, both parties get a notification, and credits are reserved (not yet spent) until the lesson ends.

Drop-in lessons are different. A tutor opens a drop-in window from their dashboard. Students see “online now” indicators on tutor cards, click to join, and the match either confirms or rejects within milliseconds. Under the hood, a Postgres advisory lock prevents two students from claiming the same slot at the same instant.

Both modes share the same lesson room, the same whiteboard, and the same end-of-lesson settlement logic. You don’t have to pick one mode at sign-up. Use whatever suits the day.

This hybrid is materially different from the incumbents. Preply and italki are booked-only platforms. Cambly is drop-in-only. Kadensy is the only platform of the four that runs both on a single credit balance.

#What’s inside a Kadensy lesson

The lesson room runs on LiveKit Cloud, hosted in the EU region. Video is HD by default. Chat is built in. The whiteboard is where Kadensy spends its differentiation budget.

The whiteboard is a Fabric.js canvas with 15 tools (pen, eraser, line, arrow, 8 outline shapes, 8 filled shapes, text, image insert, table, pan, select). Pages are multi-page with manual snapshot save and restore. Real-time collaboration runs through Reverb WebSockets.

On top of that sit 7 mini-games designed for English practice: Tic Tac Toe, Word Guesser, Match Column, Unscramble, Stop the Bus, Vocab Pick, Bubbles, and Target Game. These are not generic distractions; each maps to a vocabulary or grammar drill.

The four utility panels round out the surface: a countdown timer with an audio beep, a random picker for cold-calling students, a YouTube picture-in-picture window for clip-based exercises, and a DeepL translator. Mobile is supported with pinch-zoom.

#Pricing in EUR and USD

Four credit packs, two currencies, no subscription.

The effective price per credit drops as you buy more: about 0.83 EUR per credit at the entry pack, dropping to 0.70 EUR per credit at the Pro pack. Tutors set their own hourly rate in credits, so the per-lesson cost depends on the tutor you choose. There is no surcharge for using drop-in vs booked.

There’s no monthly fee. There’s no charge to browse tutors. There’s nothing to cancel.

#How Kadensy is different from Preply, italki, and Cambly

We respect the incumbents. Each does something well. Here’s a factual comparison of the four products as of 2026.

Honest gaps on the Kadensy side: our tutor pool is smaller than Preply’s at launch. We start with English only, with Spanish and French already in the taxonomy but not yet active. There’s no native mobile app yet, just a mobile-responsive web experience. Group lessons, AI lesson plans, and trial lessons are not in Phase 1.

The commission numbers above are based on each platform’s own public disclosure. Preply’s own “best online English teaching jobs” article puts their commission at 18-33%. Cambly’s at 31-56% is from their tutor terms. Italki’s at 15% is from their published help center.

#Who is Kadensy for

We built Kadensy for five archetypes, all with English at the center for now.

• Flexible English learners (A1-C2). Adults who want lessons that fit around work and travel, not the other way around. The CEFR levels A1 through C2 are seeded in our taxonomy.
• Drop-in conversationalists. Travelers and digital nomads who want a quick 30-minute English chat without scheduling a week ahead.
• Returning learners. People who studied English years ago, want to refresh, and want a wallet that doesn’t punish them for taking two months off.
• European tutors. English teachers based in the EU who want EUR-native payouts via Stripe Connect Express, instead of USD with FX conversion fees.
• Self-directed students. Learners who don’t need a subscription to force them to study.

Kadensy is probably not the best fit for two profiles. Complete beginners with zero motivation may need the rhythm a subscription enforces. Enterprise teams need group accounts and reporting we don’t ship yet (Phase 2).

#How to get started

Four steps and you’re in your first lesson.

1. Browse tutors at /tutors. No sign-up required to look.
2. Register at /register. Email + password, or Google SSO.
3. Buy a credit pack. Starter at 50 EUR / 55 USD is the cheapest way to test the platform.
4. Book a lesson or drop in. Use the booking wizard for a scheduled lesson, or click “available now” on a tutor card for a drop-in.

Phase 1 launches with English. Spanish and French are in our taxonomy but not yet active for student-facing browsing. If you want to teach on Kadensy, apply at /tutor/register.

#Read next

• Who Kadensy Is For: 5 English-Learner Archetypes Our Credit Model Fits Best — match yourself to one of the five learner profiles (IELTS preparers, business-English learners, drop-in conversationalists, returning learners, EU expats) and see exactly which Kadensy features fit each.
• Building Kadensy: Why We Chose Credits Over Subscriptions — the team’s reasoning on the credit-wallet model, what we gave up by avoiding subscriptions, and what we’d change if we built it again.
• Or browse the full Kadensy blog.