Parla or a tutor.

A tutor and a companion are not two versions of one purchase. An hour with a person is the thing that can tell you why your sentence was wrong in a way you will still have next month, and it is bought by the hour. A companion cannot explain like a person, does not mind a Tuesday, and costs 14 euro a month or 99 euro a year, so for a lot of people the right answer is one of each rather than either alone.

What an hour with a person buys

It buys diagnosis. You say something wrong, and a person hears not only that it was wrong but which of several possible confusions you are actually in, asks the question that tells them apart, and answers the confusion rather than the sentence. A good tutor also notices what you avoid, which is often more telling than what you get wrong, and can bring it up gently the next week.

It also buys judgement. A person can decide that today you need to talk about your job rather than the conditional, or that the conditional is exactly why you cannot talk about your job. A tutor can prepare you for a certificate, walk you through a grammar point you have misunderstood for years, and tell you honestly where you stand. That is worth an hour of somebody's working day.

Tutors are usually booked by the lesson or by the hour, often through a marketplace that lists many of them side by side. Each tutor normally sets their own price, and prices vary widely with experience, qualifications and where the tutor lives. Some sell single lessons, some sell packages, and some sell a plan that renews. Whatever the packaging, what you are buying is time, so the bill grows with how much you use it.

Two things follow from buying an hour at all, and neither is a criticism of tutors. An hour has to be scheduled, which means it has to survive a week in which something else happens on Thursday. And an hour does not fill a week: one or two sessions leave most of the days with no Italian produced at all, unless you find something for them.

What daily contact buys

It buys the other six days, at the cost of the diagnosis.

All of it happens inside Telegram, already on your phone and your desktop, where nothing new needs installing. There is no message count to watch, so a long evening costs the same as a short one, and voice notes work both ways. One subscription covers every companion and every language, including the ones added later.

Corrections arrive inside the reply. What is read in a message is the pattern behind it rather than the typo, and at most two patterns a week are raised. They are raised the way a friend would: the reply uses the right form and carries on talking, with no list and no score. On Sunday a letter and a PDF arrive, one per language: the days you talked, the minutes, the new words, the words that came back, your sentence length, your level, and the two patterns to work on. It is a summary of a week, not an assessment of an hour.

A companion can also begin the conversation, which a booked hour does not do. It is fenced: a companion writes first only in a chat you have already written in and never inside your quiet hours. A new conversation from one companion starts at most once a day and four times a week; beyond that, a companion may write to wish you luck with something you mentioned was coming, or to ask afterwards how it went, and the weekly letter comes on Sunday, or on Monday if Sunday was missed. A new conversation that goes unanswered gets a single follow-up, and only if you have switched follow-ups on.

Now the limits, stated as plainly. A companion is AI, says so in its opening messages, and will sometimes be wrong: a correction is a suggestion, not a ruling. Everyday conversation is what a companion does, so this is a poor place to look up the subjunctive and a worse one to prepare for an exam. There is no course to work through, and the floor is roughly A2, which means you can already hold a simple conversation. Complete beginners are better served first by a course or a tutor.

How the two bills are shaped

Parla is 14 euro a month, or 99 euro a year, VAT included, which is about 27 cents a day. There is a free week of seven days before either, once per account, from your first message, with no card needed to begin. Pausing for two or four weeks, or cancelling, is one screen; cancelling stops the next charge and the current period is not refunded.

A tutor's bill is shaped differently. It is set by the tutor you pick and the number of hours you book, so two learners can pay very different amounts for the same week. That is not a point against tutors: it is what paying a person for their time looks like. The useful comparison is not which costs less but what each one is for. A year of daily conversation and a handful of hours with a person are different goods, and a week has room for both.

What most people actually want

Look at the week rather than the month. With one tutor hour a week and nothing else, the week is one good hour and six quiet days. With a companion alone, the week is six or seven small exchanges and nobody who can tell you, properly, why the imperfect was the wrong choice on Wednesday. Those are two different gaps, and they are not in the same place.

So the arrangement that suits many people who type this comparison is both, weighted the cheaper way round: a tutor every week or two for the explanations, and daily contact in between for the producing. Bring the patterns from the Sunday letter to the tutor, and the tutor's explanation back into the next day's conversation.

If you want a person, someone to prepare you for an exam, or a structured path from the start, pick a tutor. If you already have the explanations and what you lack is the habit of using them, daily contact is the cheaper half to add.