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Comment by jpcompartir | Hacker News Reader

I believe their rationale is that a private tutor costs more than this per lesson, and they're targeting the people who will pay for a tutor once/twice a week for themselves or their children.

I tend to agree with you, it seems like they could be wayyy more competitive on price but I also understand where they're coming from.

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They’re not a private tutor, though. They don’t explain very much and there certainly isn’t a way to ask questions. As I said elsewhere, to me they’re about twice as expensive as they should be.

> They don’t explain very much

That's not really the case. Each separate step of each lesson is explained and practiced many times. Repeated failures across multiple students are noticed and explanations reworked. If it's not enough, you can report your issues. And there are MA communities to check with if you really get stuck for some random reason.

I’m currently doing the Calculus I course and while there are explanations interspersed throughout the problems, these mostly seem to be the bare minimum you need to work the problems. When I compare it to the calculus textbook I keep alongside it (Stewart’s “Calculus Early Transcendentals”) it barely seems enough.

The explanations are very limited compared to actual maths lessons, though: in my experience they were very often something like "it turns out that the formula for this is...".

IMO it's scaffolded and explained a bit more than an average mathematics lesson, though teachers vary a lot.

There's a whole lot of "here's the formula" and not so much "here's the derivation" in most classrooms.

The math classes that I taught: I tried to do a lot more of the why, either rigorously or using proof by gesticulation. But there were still absolutely times that I just handed something over and was like "do this, for now."

Yes, they are not a private tutor, and they do not claim to be. That is just the market they are going after.

They believe they can help people reach better outcomes for less. Whether they're correct or not is another question.

Private tutors are much more expensive and not uniformly effective. Math Academy is an extremely low-risk bet for parents of math students (you'll know before the first usage period whether it's working out). I like the business model here a lot --- I also just think it's like something concocted in a mad scientists lab to annoy HN people, who always have a really hard time intuiting market/pricing segmentation.

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