What Les Sherpas actually does
Les Sherpas provides private tutoring for French students from primary school through higher education, but unlike an open marketplace, it curates its own roster of tutors and assigns each family a dedicated advisor to help find the right match, adjust the arrangement over time, and swap tutors at no extra cost if the first pairing doesn't click. It's a bootstrapped, Paris-founded company that has stayed privately held by its founders rather than raising a large outside funding round, which the company frames as allowing it to prioritize service quality over rapid, investor-driven scaling. Les Sherpas was founded in 2017, and its tutor roster is deliberately selective rather than open to anyone who applies: the company reports accepting only around 40% of tutor applicants, drawing heavily from students at competitive French institutions like Polytechnique, HEC, ENS and Sciences Po, with tutors ranging in age from their early twenties to their sixties.
The core product
Two main formats are offered: ongoing regular tutoring (suivis réguliers), a 3-to-12-month engagement billed per hour at rates that rise with school level and course intensity, and intensive short courses (stages), 5-to-30-day packages aimed at focused exam preparation, billed as a package rather than hourly (for example, a 10-hour package starting from €196). Both at-home and online delivery are supported, each requiring a minimum of 4 hours per month and carrying an €80 annual access fee that funds the dedicated advisor service, available six days a week. The company reports having served more than 30,000 families across over 50 subjects, with tutoring available in more than 20 French cities as well as online nationwide, and cites an average self-reported progress gain of a little over 4 points for students using its regular tutoring track.
What's new or notable
Les Sherpas has continued positioning its differentiator as the managed-service layer — the assigned advisor, free tutor replacement, and augmented classroom resources — around what is otherwise a fairly standard hourly private-tutoring product, aiming to sit between the low-touch openness of a marketplace and the heavier structure (and higher overhead) of a legacy in-person tutoring agency. Alongside paid tutoring, the company also publishes free study guides and exam-prep articles that it says reach several million readers a month, which functions both as a marketing channel and as a genuinely usable free resource for students not ready to commit to paid sessions.
Who should use Les Sherpas
Great fit if…
- You want a managed matching process with a dedicated advisor rather than searching and vetting tutors yourself on an open marketplace.
- You might need to swap tutors if the first match isn't working — that's included free rather than requiring you to start a new search from scratch.
- You want at-home tutoring eligible for France's "service à la personne" tax credit, which the company notes can reduce effective at-home costs by half.
Skip it if…
- You're price-sensitive at the higher school levels, where hourly rates for lycée and higher education tutoring climb well above €25/hour before any tax credit.
- You just want to browse and pick a tutor yourself without a managed advisor relationship — an open marketplace will be cheaper and more direct.
Pricing in detail
Les Sherpas prices ongoing tutoring by hour and school level, with a separate package-based rate for short intensive courses, plus a mandatory annual fee covering the advisor service regardless of format chosen.
| Plan | Price | What's included |
|---|---|---|
| Regular tutoring — Primary | €14-20/hour | Ongoing tutor relationship, 3-12 month engagement, flexible scheduling |
| Regular tutoring — Middle/High school | €18-35/hour | Same structure, curriculum matched to level |
| Regular tutoring — Higher education | €25+/hour | Same structure, subject-specialist tutors |
| Intensive courses (stages) | From €196 for a 10-hour package | Short, exam-focused course over 5-30 days |
| Annual access fee | €80/year | Dedicated advisor (6 days/week), free tutor replacement, augmented classroom resources |
Where it falls short
- Costs stack up — the hourly rate, the minimum monthly hours, and the separate €80 annual fee all apply together rather than being bundled into one simple number.
- Higher-level tutoring gets expensive fast — university-level rates start at €25/hour and can go higher depending on subject and tutor experience.
Privacy & data
Les Sherpas is a French company operating under GDPR, handling student progress information shared between tutor, advisor and family as part of the managed-service model.
How we checked this
Checked 2026-09-05 against https://sherpas.com/formules-cours-particuliers for current formulas, hourly rate ranges and fee structure.
What you get, what you give up
What you get
- Bootstrapped and founder-owned since launch, without outside equity investors reported to be steering strategy
- A managed advisor service (six days a week, free tutor replacement) that a pure open marketplace like Superprof does not offer
What you give up
- Hourly rates rise significantly with school level — from roughly €14-20/hour for primary up to €25+/hour for higher education — so total cost scales fast with older students
- The €80 annual fee is a mandatory add-on to hourly tutoring costs, on top of whatever the chosen format and level already cost per hour