Chalkden connects students doing VCE with tutors who sat the same study design a year or two ago — and who are still close enough to it to remember what was actually hard.
Tutoring in Melbourne mostly runs through agencies. A family pays around $85 an hour, the tutor is paid something closer to $35, and neither side chose the other. The agency's incentive is to keep them apart, because the gap is the business.
The tutors doing that work are usually university students who did extremely well in the subject recently. They are the product, and they are the part being paid least. Chalkden is the straightforward version: they set their own rate, families can see who they are booking, and the platform takes a share that gets smaller rather than larger.
Chalkden is built and run by its founder, who also writes the software. There is no support team, no sales floor and no investor deck. That is worth knowing before you trust us with a booking, so it is on the page rather than buried.
What it means in practice: replies come from a person rather than a queue, and they may take a day. It also means the safeguarding rules were written by the same person who implemented them, which is the main reason they are enforced in the booking system rather than in a policy document nobody reads.
Booking goes live in December 2026. We are recruiting the first tutors now for Victorian Term 1, 2027, across nine suburbs in Melbourne's south-east — Clayton, Glen Waverley, Mount Waverley, Wheelers Hill, Box Hill, Blackburn, Burwood, Balwyn and Camberwell.
There are no lessons taught, no reviews and no tutors listed yet. Any site telling you otherwise at this stage would be making it up.