All answers›Online Tutoring Platforms

Skype is retired — what should I use for online tutoring now?

No — Skype was retired on May 5, 2025, and both the free and paid consumer versions are gone. Microsoft's official successor for consumer accounts is Microsoft Teams Free: you can sign into Teams with your old Skype credentials, and your Skype chats and contacts move across automatically. Teams Free is a fuller-featured tool than Skype was — Microsoft frames it as a "modern communications and collaboration hub" — but for online tutoring specifically it's roughly the same shape as Skype was, with the same gaps for teaching young learners that pushed tutors toward purpose-built virtual classrooms in the first place. The honest read, if you tutored on Skype for years: Teams Free is a workable free fallback for 1-on-1 lessons with adults or older students, but it isn't the right answer for anyone whose lessons need a shared interactive canvas, activities the student can act on, built-in scheduling and invoicing, or an engagement layer designed for kids. One thing to know before you go looking for your old records: if you never exported your Skype history, it's gone — Microsoft began deleting Skype data on April 1, 2026, and the Skype Export Portal stopped accepting requests on June 15, 2026.

What actually happened to Skype

Microsoft announced Skype's retirement on February 28, 2025 and shut down the consumer service on May 5, 2025. The retirement affects both free and paid consumer Skype accounts — Skype Credit, Skype Numbers, all of it — and does not affect Skype for Business (a separate enterprise product on its own end-of-life track). From May 5 onward the Skype app itself has stopped working; opening it just shows an error or nothing.

Microsoft's official migration path is Microsoft Teams Free. If you were an active Skype user, you can sign into Teams with your existing Skype credentials — your chats and contacts move across automatically. The other route — exporting your history through the Skype Export Portal — has closed: Microsoft began deleting Skype data on April 1, 2026, and the portal stopped accepting export requests on June 15, 2026. There is no revival plan; consumer Skype is gone.

Why Skype worked for tutors (and what it always left you doing manually)

A generation of online tutors ran their whole practice on Skype. It was one of the first tools with cheap, decent-quality voice and video calls that worked across borders — long before Zoom made the same thing normal. Language teachers, ESL specialists, and independent 1-on-1 tutors on every continent had a Skype workflow of some kind, and many still had a "skype:username" line on their booking page when the retirement announcement landed.

What Skype was good at: a stable voice/video call, a text chat alongside it for typing corrections or pasting links, and a file drop for sending a PDF worksheet mid-lesson. What it never did: a shared canvas where the student could draw, a lesson library, scheduling for paying clients, invoicing that handled currencies and refunds, or any concept of "engagement" for younger learners. Tutors filled those gaps outside the app — a whiteboard tool, a scheduler, a payment tool, a rewards spreadsheet — and moved between four or five tabs during every lesson. That friction was familiar; it wasn't fine, but it was the ambient cost of running an online tutoring business in 2015, 2018, or 2022.

What Microsoft Teams Free actually gives you

Teams Free is genuinely fuller-featured than Skype was. On top of the video calls, chat, and file sharing you're used to, Microsoft's retirement post highlights meeting hosting, calendar integrations, and communities for keeping in touch with a group. If you migrate straight across from Skype, that's a net upgrade for the pieces of your workflow that were Skype-shaped: chats and contacts come with you, and you get a slightly richer communications hub sitting on top.

What Teams Free doesn't add is anything specific to teaching. Microsoft's own framing is that Teams is a "communications and collaboration hub" — for work, for family, for community groups. That's a legitimate positioning; it's just not a virtual classroom. The gaps that made the Skype-plus-bolt-ons tutoring stack painful are all still gaps here:

  • No lesson-surface canvas. A meeting whiteboard is a rectangle everyone can draw on. That's a useful primitive for brainstorming; it's not the same thing as a lesson surface where a student drags fraction bars onto a number line, sorts letters into phonics categories, or works through the specific worksheet you uploaded for today's session.
  • No activities the student can act on. Related but distinct: even if you bolt on a whiteboard, a video-call-plus-whiteboard workflow gives you a canvas, not a lesson library. Phonics matching, dragging fraction bars, sorting words into categories, snapping shapes together — the interactive activities working tutors of young kids build a lesson around are not in Teams, and Teams doesn't have a home for them.
  • No parent-facing scheduling for paid lessons. Teams can schedule meetings on a linked calendar, but not the parent-facing "book this Tuesday at 4 PM against my open availability" flow a tutoring business runs on. You'll add Calendly, a dedicated tutoring scheduler, or a shared Google Calendar with a manual back-and-forth.
  • No invoicing or payments. Parents pay outside the app. If your students are in different currencies — or in mainland China — you're bolting on Stripe, PayPal, Wise, WeChat Pay, or a manual invoice, and reconciling which student paid for which package inside a spreadsheet somewhere.
  • No engagement layer for young learners. Face-on-webcam is still face-on-webcam. There are no stars, no gems, no avatars, no shared space for the student to be in as a character rather than as a face on a grid. Some tutors patch this with a rewards spreadsheet the parent can see, sticker printouts sent by mail, or a Class Dojo integration. All of those are workflow to run in parallel with Teams, not part of Teams.
  • Optimised for the Microsoft ecosystem. Teams is at its best when everyone in the call has a Microsoft or Outlook account and works inside the broader Microsoft 365 stack. Some tutoring families do; many don't — and where they don't, a parent may need to set up a Microsoft account for their child, which is a step a Skype ID didn't require.

The typical "Teams Free + bolt-ons" tutoring stack

If you ran a tutoring practice on Skype, the migration path Microsoft is steering you to is Teams Free plus roughly the same bolt-ons Skype needed — same shape, different app:

  • Microsoft Teams Free — the live video call, chat, and file sharing
  • Miro, Whiteboard.fi, or a Google Slides file — a shared canvas
  • Calendly, Google Calendar, or a dedicated tutoring scheduler — booking and rescheduling
  • Stripe, PayPal, Wise, or WeChat Pay — invoicing and getting paid across currencies
  • Class Dojo, a Google Sheet, or a printed sticker chart — rewards for younger learners
  • A OneDrive or Drive folder — where lesson materials and any recordings live
  • A spreadsheet — to track which student paid for which package, how many lessons are left, and who owes a make-up

None of that is broken. It's the same friction you were living with before the retirement, in a different app. For tutors with a small steady book of older students, that friction is tolerable. For tutors teaching young learners on shared screens — where every "can you see this?" tax compounds — it adds up fast.

When Teams Free is a reasonable fit for tutoring

  • You teach one-on-one adults or teenagers where the lesson is mostly talking — conversation practice, business English, IELTS speaking prep, university-level tutoring by discussion. A clean video call plus a shared document is often enough.
  • You already had your Skype practice running smoothly and you want to move the least possible amount of your workflow; the automatic import of chats and contacts is worth something concrete.
  • Your students' families are already deep in the Microsoft ecosystem — a school with Teams for Education, a workplace on Microsoft 365, or a parent whose whole calendar lives in Outlook. Meet them where they already are.
  • Cost is a hard constraint and you're testing whether you want to keep tutoring at all before committing to a paid stack.
  • You need a fallback for when your main teaching tool has a bad day. Every tutor should have one; free Teams plus a Google Calendar invite is a reasonable one to keep in your back pocket.

When it isn't

  • You teach young learners (roughly four to ten) and the retention story your parents write in reviews is about engagement — "she never wants to log off" — rather than curriculum. Video calls give a young learner one thing to do (talk when unmuted) and one thing to look at (a face on a grid). It falls short of what an engagement-designed classroom gives them.
  • You teach reading, phonics, math manipulatives, or any subject where the student needs to act on the material — dragging letters, sorting shapes, placing counters on a number line. Screen share plus voice narration is not a substitute for the student doing the thing themselves.
  • You teach students on tablets or Chromebooks. Screen share on a small tablet screen shrinks text below readable size and turns pinch-to-zoom into a wrestling match with the host's scrolling. See what is a cobrowser? for why the shared-browser primitive fixes this and screen share doesn't.
  • You teach students in mainland China. Cross-border connectivity through Western consumer video tools is a moving target inside the Great Firewall, and even when a tool nominally works, tutors report drops and audio hiccups on longer sessions. See teaching English to students in mainland China for the connectivity workaround pattern.
  • You relied on Skype's recording for parent updates, make-up sessions for kids who missed a class, or your own self-review. Whatever you were doing on Skype for recording, you'll need to re-set-up on the new stack — see how do I record online tutoring lessons? for the workflow, including the consent step you should be walking parents through regardless of which tool you record in.
  • You want a single login that handles video, the lesson canvas, activities, scheduling, and invoicing — and you're past the "am I really doing this?" stage of building a tutoring business. The stack collapse is what a purpose-built virtual classroom is for.

Purpose-built alternatives — what tutors typically switch to

The bigger reason a lot of long-time Skype tutors won't be happy on Teams Free is that the "video call plus a stack of other apps" shape has been getting old for a decade. The category that grew up around it — purpose-built virtual classrooms for online tutoring — is described in depth on what is a virtual classroom?, with a head-to-head shortlist of options on the best Zoom alternatives for online tutoring. Both are worth reading if you're actively picking a Skype replacement rather than just accepting the default Teams path.

Where Koala Go (the classroom we build) fits, specifically:

  • An interactive whiteboard with PDF, PowerPoint, and image upload. The file becomes the lesson surface — the student annotates the same page you're teaching from. This is the piece a Teams screen share can't do because a screen share is a picture the student can't act on.
  • A cobrowser (a live shared browser window). You and the student open the same real webpage together, both with your own cursor, both able to click and type. Wordwall, Boom Learning, Khan Academy, IXL, a leveled-reader site, a YouTube video for the ones that aren't blocked in your student's region — the student does the activity instead of watching you click. Koala Free ships a limited cobrowser (session-length capped); Koala Pro removes the cap. The cobrowser is region-aware, with separate routing for mainland China so students there aren't fighting the Great Firewall inside a Western tool.
  • A 3D Playground for younger students. A shared 3D world where each student has a customisable avatar. Used as a brain break, a themed lesson surface, or the reason a seven-year-old wants to come back next week. Face-on-webcam gives a kid nothing to be in; the Playground gives them a place.
  • Worldwide invoicing built in. Parents pay in their local currency, including via WeChat in China. There's a 4.5% Koala fee on Free-tier invoicing that drops to 3.5% on Pro and 0% on Platinum. No separate Stripe reconciliation.
  • Integrated scheduling on Pro. A teacher-and-parent scheduling portal where you set weekly availability once and parents book their own slots via a link. No Calendly bolt-on. Platinum adds a Scheduling Plus layer with 30/45/60-minute class lengths, booking-policy controls, and recurring classes.
  • Cloud lesson recording on Platinum. Recordings save inside the classroom, per-lesson, so a family whose kid missed a session can catch up without derailing next week.
  • 24/7 live support on Pro with a real person. When something breaks mid-lesson, there's a human to reach rather than a help-centre article.

Koala Free is a genuine free tier (up to 4 students per session, worldwide invoicing, limited cobrowser, up to 3 activities), not a trial that expires — so you can run a real trial lesson end-to-end with a real student on the device they actually use, and decide from there. Koala Pro is $25.99/month billed monthly or $21.99/month billed annually; Koala Platinum, which adds cloud recording and richer scheduling, is $49.99/month billed monthly or $39.99/month billed annually. The difference from Skype-shaped tools isn't really the price; it's what you get for it — a tool built for teaching, not a communication tool with teaching bolted on.

Honest limits worth naming so you can weigh them against the fit: iPad works but is rougher than desktop; mainland-China connectivity is served by our Hong Kong proxy but is a moving target; the whiteboard's math tools ship in Pro (the symbol palette's operations, comparisons, and fraction slash) and Platinum (the powers, the advanced symbols, and the drag-and-drop fraction bars) but stop short of a full graphing or equation editor, so heavy STEM tutors should test the workflow on a real lesson first; and the Playground is actively developed with requested features (group-select of Playground objects) still on the roadmap. Roughly 81% of the tutors on our 2026 product/market fit survey said they'd be very disappointed if they could no longer use Koala Go — the "very disappointed" threshold conventionally taken to indicate strong product/market fit is 40%, so that number is well past the bar. That 81% figure is the same one we publish on the main landing page.

Bottom line

Skype is gone. Teams Free is the direct successor Microsoft is steering you toward, and it works fine if what you needed was Skype-with-more-features. If what you actually need is a virtual classroom — with a shared canvas, activities the student can act on, scheduling and invoicing for the business side, and an engagement layer for young learners — the Skype retirement is a good moment to stop stacking apps and pick a purpose-built tool. Skype's own export window closed on June 15, 2026, so if you kept any record of who you taught and when inside Skype itself, rebuild it in whatever you pick next rather than assuming you can go back for it. If you'd like our honest read on whether Koala Go fits your specific practice — subject, age range, region, current stack — write to koala@teachwithkoala.com with a sentence about the kind of tutoring you do. We're a small team and we read everything.

Related answers

More answers on this topic