The corporate language training layer publishes everything except price

A Preply TOEFL tutor's hourly rate is on the listing card: $22 median per Issue 1, displayed in every search result. An italki Business English filter chip surfaces a $9–$25 trial-rate range per Issue 3. Wyzant's own copy declares "$35–$60 per hour on average" on the Business English subject page. Consumer language-tutoring marketplaces publish prices — openly, durably, and at the unit a buyer compares on.

The corporate B2B layer above those marketplaces does not. We reviewed the public corporate-solutions pages of seven major B2B providers — Berlitz Corporate, EF Corporate Learning, goFLUENT Corporate License, Voxy, Preply Business, Babbel for Business, and Busuu Business — and found zero published per-seat or per-learning-hour rates. Every provider routes its pricing surface to a sales contact form: "Request pricing," "Let's talk," "Book a Demo," "Get a custom cost quote."

Issue 3 hypothesized that the marketplace 1:1 tutor channel captures roughly 10% of total Business English buyer demand. The other 80–90% — corporate procurement, in-house corporate language programs, RFP-priced enterprise contracts — runs through providers that price every deal in private. This issue is what we can and cannot quantify about that layer with primary sources only.

The headline finding is the absence itself: per-seat corporate language training pricing is not a measurable market because none of the major providers publish it. What is measurable is the labor side. US corporate English trainer salaries (ZipRecruiter, May 2026) run from $60,000 at the 25th percentile to $111,000 at the 75th, with an $87,325 mean — a floor 2.7× above the established Preply tutor's net income at 25 hours per week.

The opacity is universal across delivery models. Traditional in-person providers, AI-first SaaS, the B2B arms of consumer marketplaces — same pattern.

Berlitz Corporate Language Training lists six product tiers on its corporate page — Private/Group, Berlitz Flex, Total Immersion, Berlitz On Demand, On Demand Plus, and Business Communications Skills. Each option's feature list ends with the same call-out: "Request pricing." None of the six surfaces a rate.

EF Corporate Learning publishes scale claims and named-client logos (Nike, Amazon, H&M, Bayer, Unilever, ArcelorMittal, Toyota Brazil, McDonalds), method documentation (Efekta Method™, Hyperclass™, EFEKTA//26 AI platform), the languages on offer (English plus 70+ others), and the format ("100% online, 24/7 live group classes, private classes, 3,000+ hours of self-study"). Its pricing FAQ entry — "What is the cost per learning hour?" — answers with a marketing claim ("market's lowest cost per learning hour") and a contact CTA. No quantitative anchor.

goFLUENT Corporate License lists its 12 supported languages, its 12 LMS/LXP integrations (Cornerstone, Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Docebo, Degreed, Skillsoft, others), its 8 ATS connectors, named case studies (Canon 140% participation growth, Boehringer Ingelheim 80% CEFR improvement, Moody's 40+ global locations connected), and 19 industry verticals. Its pricing surface is "Book a Demo," "Request a Free Trial," "Contact Us."

Voxy publishes case studies, AI-first positioning, named industry verticals (hospitality, manufacturing, call centers). Third-party software review sites (Capterra, ITQlick, SaaSWorthy) estimate Voxy at roughly $8–$10 per user per month for small-and-mid-market deployments, but those sources explicitly carry the disclaimer "Voxy has not provided pricing information for this product or service." Under primary-sources-only data discipline, those are excluded.

Preply Business, Babbel for Business, and Busuu Business — the corporate arms of three consumer language marketplaces — keep B2B pricing private despite their consumer-side parents publishing per-hour or per-month rates openly. Preply tutor cards show hourly rates; Preply Business does not. Babbel's consumer subscription is $14.95/month standard; Babbel for Business does not publish a per-seat equivalent.

Seven providers reviewed, seven with no published per-seat or per-learning-hour pricing. This is uniform.

The same providers publish substantial information about everything except price. Five categories are nearly universally surfaced on their corporate pages.

What is uniformly withheld is the unit of comparison a buyer needs to comparison-shop: per-seat-per-month price, or per-learning-hour cost. The mechanism is straightforward — sales-led enterprise pricing maximizes the surplus the provider captures per deal. Published pricing would anchor buyer expectations and compress that surplus. Every named provider has reached the same conclusion about which surplus is worth more.

The pricing layer is opaque. The labor market is not. US corporate English trainers — the salaried trainers who deliver the live-instructor side of these B2B contracts — appear on ZipRecruiter and LinkedIn with disclosed salaries and disclosed job-posting counts. That is the issue's only quantitative anchor on the corporate training layer.

ZipRecruiter's May 22, 2026 distribution for the US corporate English trainer role:

LinkedIn lists 32,000+ "corporate language trainer" postings in the United States, with comparable scale (~1,000+) for India. The role exists, the postings are numerous, and the salary distribution is well-defined. This is a real US labor market at meaningful scale.

The comparison anchor from Issue 1: an established Preply tutor at the 18% commission floor (reached after roughly 400 cumulative platform hours, ~10 months at 10 hours/week) earning $22/hour, working 25 hours per week × 50 weeks, nets $22,550 per year. That is the marketplace baseline.

The gap is substantial: a salaried US corporate English trainer earns roughly $37,000 more at the 25th percentile and $88,000 more at the 75th percentile than the marketplace baseline. The mean ($87K) sits at 3.9× the marketplace tutor's net.

That gap is the closest thing this issue can deliver to "what the corporate training layer pays." It's the labor cost the providers absorb to deliver the trained-instructor side of their contracts. Provider pricing has to clear that labor cost plus platform, content development, technology, integration, sales-and-marketing, and operating margin. We can't measure those latter components from the public surfaces. We can measure the labor.

The implication for an EFL teacher reading this: a corporate trainer position with one of these providers — or as an in-house corporate language trainer at a Fortune 500 company — pays materially more than equivalent hours on a consumer marketplace. The requirements are also different. Corporate trainer postings typically require a four-year degree, often a TEFL/CELTA, frequently 2+ years of teaching experience, sometimes industry-vertical experience (banking, healthcare, manufacturing). The marketplace requires only that you list yourself and clear at whatever rate the platform's buyer pool will pay.

The asymmetry is sharpest within the consumer-marketplace companies that operate B2B arms. Preply, Babbel, and Busuu all publish consumer-side prices openly and B2B-side prices privately. The opacity isn't a capability limitation — it's a deliberate channel choice.

Preply's consumer marketplace publishes every tutor's per-hour rate on the listing card. Preply Business — the same company's B2B-arm — does not publish per-seat rates anywhere. Babbel's consumer subscription is $14.95/month, plain on the pricing page. Babbel for Business pricing requires a sales demo. Busuu publishes consumer subscription tiers; Busuu Business does not.

The mechanism is the deal size. Consumer transactions are small, frequent, price-sensitive, and comparison-shopped — published prices are what get tutors and subscriptions booked. B2B transactions are large, infrequent, custom-scoped, and procurement-mediated — published prices set buyer anchors that compress sales surplus. Same company, two buyer behaviors, two transparency regimes.

This is mechanism, not malpractice. It also produces a market where HR buyers comparison-shop on the dimensions providers do publish (integrations, case studies, named-client lists, format, languages) rather than the dimension a competitive market would normally use (price). That is the actual signaling architecture of the corporate language training layer.

If you are an HR buyer. Expect every provider you contact to give you a custom quote rather than a list price. Expect minimum-seat thresholds — most enterprise SaaS providers in this layer require 50 to 100+ seats; Berlitz typically works with groups of 10 or more. The comparison dimensions that providers do publish — integrations, learning hours, case studies, languages, learner-outcome guarantees — are the ones they want you to evaluate on, because published price is the surplus they're protecting. If price is your decision factor, you have to gather quotes from multiple providers and compare them privately.

If you are an EFL teacher considering a move from marketplace to corporate trainer. The salary uplift is real — roughly $37K at the 25th percentile vs the established marketplace baseline; $65K at the mean. The role is also structurally different. You become an employee or contractor of a provider, delivering scheduled live online classes (mostly via Zoom-equivalent or proprietary classroom — EF Hyperclass, goFLUENT Conversation Classes), grading written assessments, sometimes building corporate-vertical content. Job postings show the requirements skew toward four-year degree, TEFL/CELTA, prior teaching experience, often industry vertical credibility. The flexibility is lower than marketplace work; the income floor is materially higher.

If you are a marketplace tutor in the Preply / italki / Wyzant pool. A meaningful slice of the buyer demand you are servicing comes from individual employees paying out-of-pocket for English coaching because their employer has not (yet) procured a corporate provider. Issue 3's Preply Business "Google Ads sponsored result on the 'business english' keyword" was the supply-side response to that demand. As corporate procurement expands, that buyer slice contracts — those employees stop paying out-of-pocket and start using a company-provided benefit. The pace of that shift varies by employer size and country (Microsoft AI Diffusion data per Issue 3 suggests Korea and the Gulf adopt fastest), but the direction is consistent.

Provider review scope. Seven providers reviewed on their public US English-language corporate-solutions pages between 2026-06-02 and 2026-06-09: Berlitz Corporate Language Training, EF Corporate Learning, goFLUENT Corporate License, Voxy, Preply Business, Babbel for Business, Busuu Business. All seven returned zero published per-seat or per-learning-hour rates. The review is not exhaustive — Pearson Mondly Workforce, Duolingo for Business, Cambridge English Corporate, Open English Business, and dozens of regional providers were not individually reviewed for this issue. Sampling shows the same pattern; primary-source coverage will expand in a follow-on issue.

What "primary source" means here. A primary source is the provider's own public page or a recognized labor-market statistical publisher (ZipRecruiter, LinkedIn job count). Third-party review sites (Capterra, G2, GetApp, ITQlick, SaaSCounter, SaaSWorthy) often surface estimated pricing ranges, but those review sites explicitly note "[provider] has not provided pricing information for this product or service." Under primary-sources-only data discipline, those estimates are excluded. This is the constraint that forces the issue's central finding.

Labor-market data. ZipRecruiter US Corporate English Trainer salary distribution as of May 22, 2026: $60,000 (p25), $87,325 (mean), $111,000 (p75), range $60,000–$112,000. LinkedIn US job-count signal: 32,000+ "corporate language trainer" postings. Comparable scale (~1,000+) in India per LinkedIn IN. These are the only quantitative anchors in this issue. The percentile distribution does not break out by experience level, industry vertical, employer size, or geography within the US — all of which materially affect actual offers.

Marketplace anchor. Established Preply tutor at $22/hour × 25 hours/week × 50 weeks = $27,500 gross. × (1 – 18% floor commission) = $22,550 net. The 18% floor is reached after ~400 cumulative platform hours per Issue 1's commission analysis. The anchor excludes the 100% trial-lesson tax on every new student (which slows book-building and forces ongoing new-student acquisition), and excludes the self-employed tax burden (no employer-side pension contribution, no subsidized healthcare). Net of those, the actual marketplace position is somewhat below $22,550 for a tutor who has frequent new students.

What this issue does not measure. Total addressable market for corporate language training (would require named industry-research firm estimates — HolonIQ, Frost & Sullivan, Technavio — which are excluded under primary-only discipline). Win rates between providers. Provider revenue (none of the seven providers are public companies with disclosed segment revenue). Buyer churn rates or contract renewal patterns. Per-deal pricing dispersion (clearly large per the case-study reporting, but unquantified).

What we cannot rule out. It is possible that some of the named providers do publish per-seat rates on regional pages (e.g., German, French, Japanese corporate pages) that we did not review. The US-English-language corporate-solutions pages reviewed for this issue showed no rates. A follow-on multi-language review would either find regional published pricing — which would be an interesting market-segmentation finding — or confirm the opacity is global.

Single-point measurement. This issue is a 2026-06-09 snapshot of provider pricing surfaces. We cannot make trend claims ("pricing transparency is increasing," "providers are publishing more") without comparable measurements over time. The salary distribution data is also a single point; ZipRecruiter does not currently surface historical percentile changes for this role.

Issue 6 (June 18): International schools as the high-end of the overseas EFL labor market. Year-round salary, housing, airfare, tuition for dependents, and how the requirements differ from the JET / EPIK floor measured in Issue 4. The other anchor at the top of the package distribution.

Issue 7 (June 25): Multi-region scan revisit. Issues 1–3 measured Preply, italki, and Wyzant from an Italy-IP session. Multi-region replication from US, UK, Spain, Vietnam, India, and Brazil VPN endpoints has been on the work list since Issue 1; June 25 is the target ship for the first multi-region comparison.

Data: Seven B2B language training provider public pages reviewed between 2026-06-02 and 2026-06-09 (berlitz.com, corporatelearning.ef.com, gofluent.com, voxy.com, preply.com/business, babbelforbusiness.com, busuu.com/business). US corporate English trainer salary distribution from ZipRecruiter, May 22, 2026; LinkedIn US job-count signal from same-day fetch. Marketplace anchor from Chalk Index Issue 1 commission analysis.