[mtts]

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.

[viraptor]

> 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.

[zelos]

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...".

[mtts]

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.

[tptacek]

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.

[jpcompartir]

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.