A tutoring firm is closing and tells parents to use $30 AI

An Australian tutoring company is closing its doors, and its parting advice to customers is to spend their money on an AI subscription instead.

The closure

Dymocks Tutoring and Talent 100, part of the 140-year-old Dymocks group, is shutting its five Sydney centres this week. Its tutoring can cost parents up to $900 per subject. The company says students have increasingly turned to AI tools like Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT for exam preparation and study feedback.

Dymocks Education chief executive Mark Buckland explained the decision to the Australian Financial Review in unusually direct terms. “Most of our customers would be better off using their hard-earned cash on cheaper solutions rather than simply paying for overpriced tutoring,” he said. “Sure AI won’t perform as well as our human tutors with all the support behind them, but it’s also $30 a month.”

Not everyone in the sector agrees. Mohan Dhall, head of the Australian Tutoring Association, told the AFR he was surprised by the decision and thought there was more to realise in the industry.

An unusual admission

Dymocks named AI as the reason it is closing and directed its own customers to the replacement, while conceding in the same breath that the product it recommends is worse than the one it is shutting down.

That concession is the core of the argument. The company is not claiming AI tutors match human ones. It is claiming the gap no longer justifies the price: a monthly subscription in the $30 range against a cost that can reach $900 for a single subject.

What families are weighing

For parents, the comparison is now explicit and in numbers. On one side is a human tutor with structure, accountability and a person who notices when a student stops paying attention. On the other is a tool that is always available, answers instantly and costs a fraction of the price, but depends on the student using it well.

The Dymocks closure does not settle which is better for learning. It shows that at least one established tutoring business has decided the market has already made that choice on price.