StudyGate Review 2024: Is the Grade Nirvana Promised by the Platform Reachable?

Based on 48 comments on various review aggregation sites, StudyGate has a rating of 3.2 stars out of 5.0. This signifies that most customers are not satisfied with the service. The most frequent complaint is about customer support service. All in all, StudyGate is ranked 11th in our ranking of tutoring services.

Finding reviews of past customers was a tough task. On GlassDoor, you can easily find a StudyGate tutor review, and while most tutors are not satisfied with their work conditions, we required customers reviews.

With some googling, we bumped into eleven reviews on Rating Captain. All eleven reviews were positive, claiming that StudyGate was the best tutoring platform on the web. That could’ve been the end of the story, right? An ideal tutoring platform. But there were a few things that piqued our interest.

The first obvious question is: if it’s that perfect, why are there only eleven reviews? Another thing that bugged us is that all of those reviews were posted three years ago.

Has the service been inactive since 2021? And the reviews were all the same: “highly recommend,” “best tutors,” friendly tutors,” and so on. So, we decided to check out and learn a bit more about StudyGate.

Based on the information we get from the website, StudyGrade has been around since 2014. Based on the customer reviews that we’ve managed to find, it ceased to operate in 2021. But, hey, we still have tutors’ reviews that were posted recently — the most recent one, at the time of writing, was posted on March 19, 2024.

Yet, when we got to tutor testimonials on StudyGate’s website, we figured out that the problem could’ve been in the language. You see, based on the testimonials, tutors are generally from Chile, Turkey, India, Kenya, and Cuba. And this knowledge got us a bit confused.

Is it the service that hires tutors from around the world to help people from around the world improve their knowledge of certain subjects or what?

StudyGate is a Los Angles-based company that promises its customers a Grade Nirvana. And based on the “Our Story” section, we may conclude that the said Nirvana is offered to North American students.

Not that math or any other subject differs depending on the side of the Atlantic it’s been taught in, but educational systems do differ. Another thing is the language barrier, which may prevent tutors from other countries from properly explaining certain subjects to students.

One of the weirdest things we came across while researching the service was how little there was on the web regarding it.

Reviewing various assignment helpers, we often came across services launched ages ago, got tons of negative reviews, and remained afloat despite that. There are also a bunch of great services that receive praise from customers. And, of course, there are new platforms that attract either positive or negative reviews.

StudyGate is a miracle. Given that it’s been in the market for a decade, the minuscule amount of StudyGate reviews — bad or good —is frustrating.

When checking out the website, you are greeted with a link to over 12,000 reviews, but it leads to the testimonials section. There are links to the major outlets, like Forbes and Inc., and the claim that “we are in the news.” But checking out those links leads to a slight disappointment. Those are articles written by Daniel Zhao, the man behind StudyGate.

Shouldn’t the service that offers a pass to a Grade Nirvana have thousands of articles and reviews written about by someone from the outside? Where are the students on review sites recounting how the service improved their grades?

The only plausible explanation is Grade Nirvana has limited or no internet access.

Given that those few comments that we’ve managed to find regarding the service were about the platform’s customer support, it was the first thing that we needed to check.

Browsing through StudyGate’s website, we weren’t able to find the option to get in touch with its support service. In the end, we simply googled “StudyGate support” and followed the link to the platform’s help center.

There, we were greeted with three options: FAQ, How To, and the link to the homepage. The latter option has an explanation that we need to click the 🖂 icon and select “support.” But the said icon is non-existent.

All other options to submit any kind of request are exclusively assignment-related. No option to clarify the pricing, terms and conditions, and so on.

We must admit that the FAQ and How-To sections are quite detailed, but the absence of the support team is frustrating. What are you going to do if the tutor or writer working on your assignment stops responding?

And you are gravely wrong if you think that there’s a “contact us” section where you can at least get an email address. We finally found the support’s email address after checking the Refund Policy section.

StudyGate offers help with a wide range of subjects. If you need help with civil or mechanical engineering, the platform got you covered. In case you need help with programming languages, math, physics, or biology, StudyGate is there to help you. Law, accounting, and finance are in, too.

Do you require assistance with preparation for ACT or SAT tests? The service will provide you with all the help that you may need... Or so it claims.

By the way, do you have problems with humanity? The service will help you as well. Sounds confusing? We were also confused that the platform that promises Grade Nirvana doesn’t know the difference between humanity and humanities.

So, humanity… One thing that we forgot to mention in our StudyGate review so far is that it’s not only a tutoring platform but also an essay writing service. As an essay writing service, StudyGate offers you “Essay Writing,” “Essays for College Students,” and “Custom College Essays.”

What’s the difference between those three options? Our initial guess was that the first option was about high school essays, the second allowed you to browse through a database of essays that you can use for drafts (a-la 123HelpMe.com), and the third allowed you to hire a writer for your college writing assignment.

But no, all three options lead to the same page where you can submit your order.

If you manage to find the pricing section, you will see that the service offers prices as clear as the answers of its tutors, with no subscriptions and hidden fees.

However, browsing through other sections, you can find an offer to subscribe for $99 per month to get unlimited access to tutors. So, no subscription unless you choose otherwise.

The price of the subscription in yet another section is justified by the fact that online tutors take $40 per hour on average. Which is false, as, on average, tutors get paid between $10 and $25 per hour. You need to be a first-class expert to be paid $40 per hour.

But let’s imagine that you decided not to subscribe. You can post a question for free and choose among the tutors’ bids that start, on average, at $5. Want to post another question? To do it for free, you should come back within 24 hours; otherwise, you need to pay $2 for any extra question you post in one day.

Finally, an essay will cost you between $10 to $18 per page. And, based on our experience, the chances that the per-page price will be closer to the latter digit is quite high. More on that in the following section.

Hopefully, this article will manage to succeed in something in which other StudyGate reviews failed, namely, shed some light on the quality of the services that the platform provides.

When it comes to tutoring, it seems that StudyGate doesn’t lie: the tutors are real people and not AI bots. They do provide answers, and everything is great, aside from the occasional poor English. Yet, nothing exceptional and nothing that you couldn’t have done on your own for free. But most of our questions were in the humanity field, so we cannot say much about StudyGate’s success in sciences.

We couldn’t help but order an essay. We requested an analysis of Susan Sontag’s “One Culture and the New Sensibility” that will showcase how it’s still relevant today.

Unfortunately, the writer that we got failed to make a connection between Sontag’s essay and the contemporary relationship between art and technology. We got just an analysis of the essay in regard to the 1960s when it was published. All that with our detailed instructions, one-week deadline, and a $15 per page price.

When we asked for revisions, the writer simply stopped responding. Our refund request, at the time of writing, remains without reply as well.

One thing in which StudyGate is truly great is deadlines. You select how soon you need an answer to your question, and the service sticks to it. It is stated in the FAQ section that the platform rarely misses the deadline, and based on our experience, this is true. All the answers were provided based on our requirements.

The same can be said about our essay. We set the deadline to one week, as we were expecting that it would help lower the bids. Unfortunately, it didn’t. Yet, the essay arrived on time.

And things would’ve been great if the writer had followed our instructions. However, given that it’s a tutoring platform, first and foremost, we shouldn’t have expected much from its essay writing services.

The Buddhist concept of Nirvana doesn’t have equivalents in other religions. But when it comes to Grade Nirvana, there are alternatives to using StudyGate.

Based on our StudyGate tutor review, you should consider the alternatives, especially if your aim is to gain knowledge and not just get a one-off solution to an ASAP problem. Now, let us give you a little nudge.

If you need to improve your knowledge of any particular language, you should check out Preply, the platform with more than 30,000 tutors. CueMath, as the name suggests, has helped over 400,000 users to understand math better via one-on-one sessions. The pricing of those platforms is in the $10-$18 per hour range. And they have a 24/7 customer support team.

For the platform that promises students to help them break the vicious circle of getting bad grades, StudyGate has too many problems. The quality of the work that it provides is far from being exceptional. Pricing is somewhat unreasonable. The website is confusing and looks dated.

The platform has been on the market for over a decade, and its creator is being published in Forbes. Yet, based on the lack of testimonials anywhere except the StudyGate’s website, many students are oblivious to its existence. However, the service sticks to deadlines.

*Screenshots used for review and criticism purposes fall under the 'fair use' doctrine of the United States Copyright Law.