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Lighthouse Tutoring
Last updated 28 August 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 supply the tutoring directly to the student. Your contract for the tutoring is with them, not with Lighthouse. You are not an employee of Lighthouse and you are not a contractor supplying 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:
their rights run against you. 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.
one supplying it. 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 before we pay you, so our records show who was paid.
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, by uploading a transcript that we review.
You choose which of your eligible papers to make yourself available for. We may add an equivalent paper to your eligibility where the content genuinely overlaps, and you can turn any of them off.
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 monitor how long sessions run compared to 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 monitor 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. 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 session length. If a student has the funds and you both want to keep going, you can.
You may instead choose to take earnings as in-platform credit at an enhanced rate, currently shown in your payout settings.
Credit can only be spent on tutoring for yourself on Lighthouse. It cannot be withdrawn as cash, ever. The enhancement is a bonus from us for keeping your earnings in the platform, and it is not income to you: the amount you declare for tax is what you earned, not the enhanced credit amount. Your session history shows the correct figure for a tax return.
Switching between bank and credit affects future sessions only.
A session starts when you mark it started, because you are the person turning up to work. The clock and the student's cost start from that point, and so do your earnings.
The student can end a session 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. If you end one and the student has not, it is held for review rather than paid straight out.
Our own software checks every few seconds that each of you is still present.
either of you was seen.
sitting waiting and your time is being used. You keep earning.
you are not present for.
If somebody comes back within three minutes, the same session carries on.
If you start a session and the student never joins, wait ten minutes. You can then end it, and 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 track how often each tutor claims 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. Your session history shows whether each payment has been sent.
How long a payment takes to appear depends on Stripe and your bank.
If a session is reported, your share is held while a person reviews it. We aim to resolve reports within 2 business days.
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. 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.
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 close your account 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. Any credit balance remains spend-only and cannot be converted to cash on closure.
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.
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. We do not operate a public counter, so email is the way to reach us and we answer from the same address.
Questions about this document? Email lighthousetut@gmail.com.