Can You Trust Verbling Reviews? We Will Provide You With the Answer!

Figuring Out How Does Verbling Work: Starting Up Your Account

Starting your account with Verbling is extremely easy. Just click the “sign up” button, enter your email address and your first name, and then create a password or use the one generated by the platform.

Then, you have to go through six steps. The first step is selecting the language that you want to learn. After that, you need to select the country you want to get a tutor from. The third step is selecting the qualities your tutor is required to have. There, you can select up to three options.

The next step is to select hours suitable for you. And that’s the first confusion we encounter. Say we want to learn Belgian French, and we selected a tutor from Belgium. Are the hours we select suitable for us in North America, or are they tweaked to fit the tutoring schedule in Europe? It’s a bit unclear.

The fifth step is selecting your budget. The average offered there is $30.98. The budget range is between $4.99 and $75. Again, is it a tutor’s per-lesson price or a monthly subscription for the service?

The final step is browsing for the tutor. After the platform provides you with the list of tutors who correspond to your requirements, you can have a half-an-hour free trial with each of them. Seems good so far.

Communicating With Verbling Support: Are They as Rude as Reviews Suggest?

If you are looking for support on the Verbling website before registering as a user, we have some bad news for you. You won’t find it. If you want to communicate with the support team after registering as a customer, we have more bad news for you.

When you click on “Help” in the upper right corner of your screen, you are directed to the FAQ section. There, in the lower right corner of the screen, you can find a small “Help” window where you can enter your request. You will be disappointed by what follows.

First, you learn that live support comes with an 8% fee. If you want to communicate with the customer support for free, you can email them. We did just that, asking whether the budget we selected upon registering had to do with the per-lesson fee of the tutor or anything else. At the time of writing, we still didn’t get the reply from the customer support team.

So, going back to some of the reviews, we cannot agree with the claim that the customer support team is almost rude. Yet, we can support the claim that Verbling customer support is unresponsive.

In Search of the Verbling Tutor Who Won’t Wreck Your Budget

The list of tutors you get based on your requirements looks fine and dandy. You can check the pricing after the free trial: generally, the per-hour price ranges between $15 and $75.

You get brief information, like whether the particular tutor teaches any other language. And you can see the tutor’s rating based on the reviews of their former students — no matter how hard you look, you won’t find a tutor with a rating below 4.9 stars, which looks a bit suspicious.

And, as we’ve mentioned, the most important aspect is that you can spend thirty minutes with the tutor for free.

We ended up checking two French tutors and were quite impressed with the free trials. Both tutors were from France and had quite a good command of English; one of them spoke with a perfect British accent.

Why check two of them? Well, when we decided to try booking a lesson with the first one, with a per-lesson price of $24, we learned that we had to book (and pay for them) five lessons in advance.

Okay, it could be the policy of this particular tutor. But we encountered the same with the second tutor. So, to start working with any tutor, you have to book and pay for at least five lessons in advance.

$24 seems suggestive, but saying goodbye to $120 + 8% for the live support is not that appealing.

Mythbusting the Suggestive Verbling Price and Uncovering Site Inconsistencies

The Verbling cost is quite speculative. When you enter the website, you learn that the starting price per lesson is $8. When you look at the tutors’ promo, the lowest price is $7. Upon selecting your budget while registering, the lowest price is mentioned as $4.99.

So, is it $8, $7, or $4.99? None of the mentioned prices is correct. We tried different languages with different tutor requirements, but we’ve never encountered a per-hour price lower than $12. And don’t forget that the platform takes 8% for live support.

But Verbling offers more inconsistencies than just pricing.

If you google information about Verbling, you can find out that the platform alllows you to learn more than eighty languages. Look at the tutors’ promo we’ve mentioned above, and you will see that the platform offers over seventy languages. But when you check the tutor section, you learn that the actual number of languages is sixty-one.

Can You Expect a Verbling Refund After Canceling Your Subscription?

When it comes to online services, one thing you want to know for sure is whether you can get reimbursed if you are not satisfied with what you’ve got.

Going through customer reviews, we’ve encountered multiple complaints about refunds. Yes, customers weren’t refunded, but we cannot blame the service for that.

If you go through the Terms & Conditions section of Verbling, you will learn that cancellation of your subscriptions means just that — cancellation. Are you going to get your money back? No, because, as Verbling puts it, all purchases are final and nonrefundable.

We are really glad that we didn’t proceed with booking any lessons with those tutors, as it would’ve meant saying not goodbye but actually farewell to that $120 + 8% for customer support.

Other Customer Complaints That Are Worth Mentioning

There’s another common complaint we didn’t check because of what we’ve learned from Verbling’s Terms & Conditions. Many comments by past users cite that the tutor either canceled the lessons without notifying them or wasn’t even aware of the prospective lessons.

If you hire a tutor and they offer you a discounted amount for the package of lessons, and then, for whatever reason, you decide to change a tutor, you will be charged for the package at the original, i.e., non-discounted price.  

Finally, there were complaints that tutors refused to work with some students based on their nationality. One of the reviewers claimed that after complaining about that to the support team, the said tutors weren’t suspended or reprimanded.

Are There Any Verbling Alternatives?

The quality of learning is quite good, judging from the majority of customer reviews and what we got from free trials with our tutors. Most complaints are directed not at the tutors but at the platform itself.

Verbling has unresponsive support, hidden fees, and inconsistent pricing information. Finally, It doesn’t issue refunds, which is enough to make you look for alternatives.

You can try Italki, which offers tutors in over 100 languages. While it doesn’t issue refunds, unlike Verbling, you can utilize credits from unused lessons when switching from one tutor to another.

Are you more into AI? Try Lingvist, an app that allows you to learn languages using AI.

Finally, you can opt for traditional language courses. After the COVID-19 pandemic, most, if not all, offer online classes, including one-on-one lessons.

Summing It All Up: The Benefits and Downsides of Verbling

The only thing left in this Verbling review is to list the advantages and drawbacks of the platform. The platform is user-friendly, which is a plus. The tutors are quite good – that’s also a plus.

The end price differs greatly from what’s advertised – that’s a minus. Just like the hidden fees, unresponsive support, and unflattering things that some customer reviews suggest.

Hence, we cannot recommend Verbling to our readers.

Pros:

✅ Verbling has an easy-to-navigate interface, so users can easily figure out what’s what. ✅ Verbling offers thirty-minute free trials with the tutor of your choice so you can figure out if they are worthwhile.

Cons:

❌ Verbling’s customer support team is mainly available through email and is highly unresponsive. ❌ Verbling is inconsistent with its pricing, and the end price often doesn’t correspond to what’s advertised. ❌ The platform has hidden fees, like + 8% to communicate with support, and doesn’t issue refunds.