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Lighthouse Tutoring
Last updated 22 October 2026
This applies to you if you tutor on Lighthouse. It is in addition to the Terms of Service, which also apply to you.
This agreement is between you and Nicholas William Ian Poppelwell, trading as Lighthouse Tutoring, NZBN 9429053878878, called "Lighthouse", "we" or "us" below. Lighthouse Tutoring is a trading name of a sole trader, not a company.
Read this part carefully, because it changed and it decides what you are responsible for.
You can take advice first. You do not have to agree to this today. You are welcome to show it to a lawyer, an accountant, UCSA Advocacy, or anyone else you trust before you accept it, and your account will wait for you. Nothing in this agreement stops you working for anyone else, including other tutoring businesses and platforms. Section 12 only covers taking a student you met here privately.
You are an independent contractor, and you are not an employee of Lighthouse. You tutor on your own account.
You supply the tutoring directly to the student. Your contract for the tutoring is with them, not with Lighthouse, and you are not supplying your services to Lighthouse.
Lighthouse works for you. We find you students, provide the tools the session runs in, time the session, collect the money from the student on your behalf, and hold your share until it is paid out to you. We charge a commission for doing that.
An agent acts on behalf of somebody else rather than for itself. A real estate agent does not buy your house and sell it on; they find a buyer, handle the paperwork and take a fee, and the sale is between you and the buyer. That is the shape of our arrangement.
So when a student pays for a session, we are collecting that payment for you, not earning it ourselves. Our own income is the commission we keep, not the whole amount the student paid. The rest is yours, and we pay it out to you.
The alternative arrangement, which we are not using, would be for Lighthouse to sell tutoring to the student and separately buy your time at a rate we set. Under that model the student's contract would be with us, the whole payment would be our income, and you would be working to our price.
Two practical consequences worth being clear about:
run against you, and the law can also hold Lighthouse responsible as your agent. That is the trade for the arrangement being a commission rather than a wage.
you have earned, it is the half that reaches you that counts.
This is not tax or legal advice and we are not qualified to give you any. How this affects your own tax position depends on your circumstances, and if you are unsure you should ask an accountant or Inland Revenue rather than us. We have set out how the arrangement works so you know what you are agreeing to, and no further than that.
What this means in practice:
entitlements.
because you decline requests.**
one supplying it, and the law can also hold Lighthouse responsible as your agent. Section 6 explains when a refund we make to a student comes out of your share. The Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 requires a service to be provided with reasonable care and skill. Turn up, be honest about what you know, and do not claim a grade you did not earn, and this looks after itself.
You must give us your IRD number, date of birth and home address before we pay you. Inland Revenue requires us to report each tutor's earnings every year with those details, and we give you a copy of what we report.
If your total income from all sources means you need to register for GST, that is your responsibility. We assume you are not GST registered unless you tell us otherwise.
You may only tutor a paper where you have proven an A-, A or A+ grade in that exact paper. For a new transcript, upload it with your signed, dated authority for University of Canterbury (UC) to confirm your claimed results. Lighthouse pays UC's verification fee. We approve new eligibility only for the grades UC confirms. If we have already approved you after a UC check, you keep your existing eligibility while any new course claim is reviewed.
You choose which of your eligible papers to make yourself available for, and you can turn any of them off in Settings. We never make you eligible for a paper you did not prove yourself.
Explain, clarify and help someone understand. Turn up when you accept a request. Be on time. Treat the other person with respect.
Work at the pace the student needs, not at the pace that pays best. Sessions are charged by the minute, so a longer session earns you more. We may compare how long your sessions run with other tutors in the same paper, and a pattern of unusually long sessions gets looked at by a person. Finishing early when the student has what they came for is the right call and it will never count against you.
You must not complete work that will be assessed. See the Academic Integrity Policy. If you are asked to, decline and report it using the button in the session. Doing so will never count against you.
You must not arrange fake sessions. Running sessions that did not really happen, with anybody, for any reason, is fraud. We may review accounts for it, and we will suspend the accounts involved and report it where appropriate.
The student is charged by the minute with a minimum number of minutes, and your fee is a fixed share of that. At the time of writing the student pays $1.50 a minute with a 20 minute minimum and your share is half, so 75 cents a minute and at least $15 for any session that starts, unless a session is reported and a person reviewing it decides a smaller charge is fair. Our commission is the rest.
The rate and your share are shown on every request before you accept it, and both may change from time to time. The figures shown when you accept a request are what apply to that session.
There is no maximum online session length. The duration shown on a request is the student's estimate, not a billing limit. A session can continue beyond it while the student's confirmed wallet funds cover the time and both of you remain present. The student can end it at any time; you are paid for the minutes actually charged, subject to the minimum.
You may instead choose to take earnings as in-platform credit at an enhanced rate, currently shown in your payout settings.
While your account is open, credit can only be spent on tutoring for yourself on Lighthouse, and cannot be withdrawn as cash. Section 10 explains what happens when you close your account. When you spend, any money you paid in on a card is used before your credit. The enhancement is a bonus from us for keeping your earnings in the platform. Your session history shows both what you earned and the credit you received. How the extra credit is treated for tax depends on your circumstances, so check with an accountant or Inland Revenue before you file.
Switching between bank and credit applies to every session that finishes after you switch, including one already running or under review when you switch.
A session starts when you and the student have both tapped Start. The clock and the student's cost start from that point, and so do your earnings.
Once a session has started, the student can end it on their own at any time, and they pay only for the time up to that point, subject to the 20 minute minimum. You cannot end a session on your own. When you tap Finish, the student is asked to end the session. If they agree, or they have already left, it is charged, and you are paid, up to the moment you tapped Finish.
Our own software checks about every 15 seconds that each of you is still present.
For online sessions:
A short interruption is billable if the lesson resumes within that window. If either person does not return, the lesson closes and your share is calculated only through the last confirmed time both were present, subject to the minimum.
time in that funding pause.
minimum and a person reviews the session.
In-person sessions end the same way: when the student taps End, or when you tap Finish and the student agrees. If neither happens, the session closes once the booked length has run out, and it is charged, and you are paid, for that length. Phones are often locked in an in-person session, so a quiet phone is not treated as someone leaving.
If you accept a request and the student never joins, wait ten minutes, then report it from the session screen as a student who did not turn up. A session nobody started is also flagged automatically once its time has passed. A person reviews it, and if the student did not turn up, the 20 minute minimum is charged to the student and your share is paid. You are not expected to sit there for nothing.
Every one of these is looked at by a person, and we can see how often each tutor reports one. Claiming a no-show for a session you did not genuinely wait for is a breach of this agreement.
Your share is worked out as soon as a session finishes, and we hold it for you until it goes out. Money reaches you through Stripe, which handles your identity verification and bank details directly. We never see or store your bank details.
You must finish Stripe's setup before any money can reach your bank. Until you do, what you have earned is recorded and held for you, but not sent. The same applies if you disconnect your bank: your earnings stay money owed to you and are paid once a bank is connected again. They never turn into credit unless you choose credit. Your session history shows whether each payment has been sent.
You are paid once a week, on Wednesdays. Your share moves to your Stripe account as each session finishes, and Stripe sends everything that has cleared to your bank every Wednesday. Money needs a few days to clear first, so a session late in the week is usually paid the following Wednesday. Your bank may take a day or two more to show it.
If a session is reported while it is running, it ends at that moment and your share is held while a person reviews it. A student can also report a session up to 7 days after it ends; a person reviews that too, and no money moves without that review. We aim to resolve reports within 2 working days.
If a student is refunded after you have been paid. Where a report made after a session is upheld and the student is refunded, the refund comes out of your share for that session, because you were paid for tutoring that, on review, was not properly supplied. It is never more than your share of that session. We tell you the outcome and why first, and you have at least 48 hours to respond before anything is taken. We then take it from your next earnings. If you have no further earnings within 60 days, we will ask you to repay it.
If you accept an in-person session, meet in a public, visible place on the UC campus. You are responsible for your own safety. If you feel unsafe, end the session and report it.
You may decline any in-person request without giving a reason.
Students rate sessions. You can see the ratings and comments you are given. Consistently low ratings are reviewed by a person and may result in your eligibility for a paper being removed. We do not remove eligibility automatically.
Ratings affect who hears about a request first. Once a paper has at least five tutors, those in the top half by rating for it see a new request 3 minutes before the others. A tutor with no ratings yet in that paper counts as 4 out of 5.
Nothing here obliges you to be available at any time. You will not be penalised for being unavailable, and being unavailable does not affect your eligibility or rating.
You can stop tutoring at any time by turning off your availability, or ask for your account to be closed in Settings.
We may remove your eligibility for a paper, or your access, if you breach this agreement, the Terms of Service, or the Academic Integrity Policy.
Any earnings already held for you will still be paid. If you close your account with credit you earned, we pay you its base value to your bank: what you would have been paid had you chosen the bank, without the bonus added for choosing credit. We do the same if we end your access. You need a connected bank for us to pay it. While your account stays open, credit can only be spent on sessions.
What a student tells you in a session is theirs. Do not share it, repeat it, or post about it. Do not contact students outside Lighthouse about their sessions.
Recording is required for tutors. By accepting this agreement, you agree to allow Lighthouse to record your online tutoring sessions (audio, video and shared whiteboard) and transcribe them, as set out in the Privacy Policy, so a reported session can be reviewed fairly. An automatic summary of each recorded session, written from the transcript, is shown to you, the student, and any parent linked to the student, so what you explain may be read by the student's parent. The transcript itself is shown to you and the student only while a report made during the session is under review. Recording protects you as much as the student: a recording is often the quickest way to show that a session ran properly or that you declined to do assessed work. Recordings are processed automatically to make transcripts and summaries; nobody routinely watches them. An authorised administrator may watch a recording if a session is reported and a review is requested. It is deleted after 90 days unless needed for an open report. You cannot turn recording off while you are a tutor. A student can turn it off for their sessions; then there is no recording, transcript or automatic summary, and a dispute may be harder to resolve. Do not record a session yourself without the student's clear agreement.
Finding you students is the work we do for you, and our commission is how we are paid for it. So when you meet a student through Lighthouse, tutoring them for a while afterwards stays on Lighthouse.
For 6 months after your most recent session with a student you met through Lighthouse, any paid tutoring you give that student yourself, privately, in a paper you can tutor on Lighthouse goes through Lighthouse. You met a student through Lighthouse if you tutored them in a Lighthouse session and had not tutored them before. This applies even if you stop tutoring or close your account.
In practice:
transfer, an app or anything else.
no.
This does not cover, and nothing in this agreement stops you doing:
someone else's employee;
them; or
If you break this section, we may remove your access. You will also owe us the commission we would have earned had those sessions been booked on Lighthouse, worked out from their length at the price and commission share in force when each one took place. That is what we lose, and no more.
New Zealand law applies.
lighthousetut@gmail.com
Lighthouse Tutoring is a trading name of Nicholas William Ian Poppelwell, a sole trader registered in New Zealand, NZBN 9429053878878, of 14 Maungarei Road, Remuera, Auckland. We do not operate a public counter, so please contact us by email, and we answer from the same address.
Questions about this document? Email lighthousetut@gmail.com.