Pros
Verbling used to be my favorite platform to teach on, the fees were fair and they offered a lot in terms of teaching tools.
Cons
Unfortunately, verbling doesn't feel safe anymore. Recently they started an entire purge of teachers if they don't comply with their new invasive background checks made by a third party without giving any knowledge as to how this really personal and private data is processed and who it is shared with. Accounts of the teachers who didn't comply were deactivated, posts on the teacher's forum where people were just asking honest questions about this situation were deleted and many people who were desperate enough to comply also lost their accounts (and often their main source of income) because the website of the company making the checks had various technical issues that didn't allow some people to complete them. I've read a few heart-wrenching pleas of teachers about to lose all of their students either because they didn't feel safe with a random company acquiring all their data or because they couldn't complete the check due to technical problems with the website or because they lived in countries where it might not have been safe to do so. Some teachers based in the UK asked if they could simply complete a DBS check but that of course didn't satisfy verbling either. Not only does this shady practise affects teachers' lives but students as well, because - surprise! - none of them were given refunds! Without any notice they were just given their verbling credit back and had their classes cancelled without any explanation when their teacher's account was deactivated. If they are learning a less popular language there are often no other teachers available so they can't transfer that credit to someone else and even if they can it's still highly unethical not to offer a refund. Considering how much verbling pushed students to buy 10 or 20 hours packages many students lost hundreds of dollars that they can't get back. What's most upsetting about this whole situation is how completely unnecessary it is - I've never heard of anything like that happening on any other teaching platform. I have no idea what happened to Verbling but the way they currently conduct their business is ethically questionable at best.