K12 Tutoring | Beacon | Internal
Market readout for Beacon's 2027-28 pricing. October 1, 2026. Market data only, with no price recommendation.
This is what a district buyer sees on a quote for an AI tutoring tool today. It comes from two places: what vendors publish, and 1,279 purchase records showing what districts paid.
Do districts pay for this?
Yes
Paid is the norm. Free shows up two ways: a state or a foundation pays the vendor, or a free stretch is written into a paid contract.
In what unit?
Per student, per year
An annual license sized to enrollment or to a named group of students. Every student-facing AI tutor in the data is sold this way.
At what price?
$10 to $20
For a student-facing AI tutor. AI tools built for teachers run lower, at $4 to $6.
Khan Academy with Khanmigo shows $10 on its pricing page and $10 at the median on purchase records. Amira, a reading tutor with assessment attached, sells higher. AI tools built for teachers sell lower.
Price per student per year
Hover or tap a row for the range and the record count.
Districts mostly paid less than the published price. Outside Khan, the median paid was roughly 20 to 50 percent under published. Khan's list price dropped from $15 to $10, which matches its median paid.
| Product | Published | Median paid | Records | What sits behind it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Khan Academy with Khanmigo | $10, up to 1,000 licenses. Larger orders are custom and not public. | $10 | 19 | Range $3 to $60. The high end is 2023-24 launch pricing. District pricing was $15 with Khanmigo a year ago. |
| Amira | $22.50 to $35 list on 2026-27 quotes. $20 to $30 after discount. | $17 | 111 | Range $4.50 to $40. The tutor-only product lists at $15. Assessment plus tutor runs $18 to $22.50. |
| MagicSchool | $6.00 list | $4.75 | 9 | Same median across 86 unit-price lines. Average unit price has climbed each year, from $4.06 to $5.66. |
| SchoolAI | Not published. $4.75 on one 2026-27 quote. | $5.40 | 42 | Unit price as stated on the line. Range $1.78 to $7. |
| Brisk | Not published. $7 list appears on purchase records. | $4.50 | 31 | Unit price as stated on the line. Range $3 to $11. |
| Smaller AI tutorsColleague AI, Lumos, Project Read AI, Mathspace Milo | Mostly not published | $10 | 8 | Range $3.75 to $15. Large districts sometimes buy a flat license instead: Loudoun paid $660,000 for Mathspace. |
Median paid uses records that state a quantity and a term. For SchoolAI, Brisk and the smaller tutors it is the per-student unit price as written on the line, where the term is not always stated. Records with $0 to the district are counted separately and left out of the medians.
The largest orders were not cheaper per student. Palm Beach pays $10 per student for 93,800 students. Arizona pays $15 statewide for 126,666. The $0 records are either folded into a larger order or paid for by a state, a university program or a foundation.
Whether seats can move as students enroll and leave depends on the vendor.
Minimums: Khan's district orders start at 250 licenses and its self-serve tier stops at 1,000. Amira's co-op minimum is 2,000. i-Ready's is 150.
Vendors that sell both software and human tutoring price the two in three ways.
The most common pattern. Tutor.com's high-dosage offer, BookNook, Ignite Reading, Amplify and Saga all sell one all-in price. K12 Tutoring's co-op price list does the same: $65 for one student up to $150 for five, per 60-minute session, described as all-inclusive, with no platform line.
| Vendor | Platform line, published | Paid | Sold alongside |
|---|---|---|---|
| Littera | $39 to $45 per student per year, by volume | $36 median, 7 records | Tutoring at $69 per hour, curriculum at $65 per student |
| Paper | $20 to $65 per student for the unlimited license, by volume. Or $15 per student plus $30 per hour used. | $41 median, 21 records | Live help is bundled. High-dosage tutoring is separate. |
| BookNook | $48 per student for software alone | Not pulled | Session packages that include the software |
| VarsityLeft the schools business in August 2026 | $20.51 to $25.64 per student for its AI platform on a co-op list. Whole-district purchase required. | $7.50 to $11.40 on three paid records | Live tutoring, sold on top of the platform |
Varsity ran this from late 2023 to early 2025, then moved new customers to a priced platform. Smaller versions exist: Air Tutors waives its teacher license above $250,000 in sessions, and Khan zeroes out Khanmigo inside some grant-funded programs.
Several tutoring-platform licenses renewed at much lower prices. Penn Yan renewed the same 716 Paper seats at $9, from $45.66. Dougherty renewed 9,500 Tutor.com seats at $7.75, from $20. AI teacher tools moved the other way, stepping up from low first-year prices.
Below-list pricing shows up in five forms.
When the district is the one paying, the money is mostly Title I, state tutoring and literacy programs, and the last of the federal relief funds.
Paid prices come from 1,279 district purchase records in GovSpend dated July 2023 through September 2026. They are purchase orders, payments and board approvals, pulled September 30.
Published prices come from vendor price pages, public co-op price lists, state price lists and board-approved quotes, read September 30 and October 1. Fifteen of the published sources were opened a second time on October 1. Thirteen matched. Two board documents, the larger Amira quote and the MagicSchool order form, would not re-open and rest on the first read. The Varsity and Air Tutors co-op figures were not part of that second pass.
Full reports: BEACON-PRICING-paid-price-evidence-2026-09-30 and Research_Brief_Beacon-District-AI-Tutor-Pricing_2026-10-01.