aitutors.me began as a connector you added inside the Claude app. It worked — but the setup step was quietly losing me the families I most wanted to help. So I built a second front door: a tutor that runs right in the browser, with nothing to install. Same Mentor, same professors, same teaching. One brain, two surfaces. This is the honest story of why I did that, and what I learned about the difference between "technically possible" and "a parent will actually do it".

The install step was the enemy

When I first opened aitutors.me to other families, the only way in was the Claude connector: add our server as a custom connector inside the Claude app, paste a client ID, approve an OAuth screen. If you already use Claude every day, that's five minutes and it's genuinely lovely — the tutors live right where you already work.

But watch a busy parent do it who doesn't live in the Claude app, and you see the truth. They'd signed up. They'd paid. They wanted it for their child. And then a wall of setup — words like "connector", "OAuth", "client ID" — and the tab quietly closed. Not because they didn't care. Because the distance between "I've decided" and "my child is learning" was three steps too long.

I'd built something for over-scheduled families and then asked the busiest of them to do the most fiddly thing first. That's on me. The methodology was right; the front door was wrong.

The one thing I refused to do

The obvious fix would have been to build a separate web app — a lighter, simpler tutor for people who found the connector hard. I said no to that, hard, and it's the most important decision in this whole story.

The moment you have two products, they drift. The web one gets a fix the connector doesn't. The connector learns something about your child the web one never sees. Within a term you've got two half-tutors that disagree about your kid, and a parent who can't tell which one is "the real one". That's not a smaller problem than the install step — it's a bigger one.

So the rule became: not a second product. A second door into the same room. Everything that makes the tutor a tutor — the personas, the Socratic refusal to hand over answers, your child's learning history, the weekly energy system — all of it stays in one shared place. The browser tutor and the Claude connector are both just windows onto it.

One brain, two surfaces

Here's the shape of it, without the engineering.

There is one brain per child — the tutors' intelligence and everything they know about your child, held in one place. Then there are two surfaces that reach it:

The Claude connector The browser tutor
Where it lives Inside the Claude app On aitutors.me, at /tutor
Setup Add the connector once None — just sign in
Best for Families already using Claude Everyone else, any device
Who pays for the AI Your own Claude subscription We do (so, a daily cap)
The tutors, teaching, memory Identical Identical

The last row is the one that matters. The browser tutor is not a demo or a stripped-back taster. It's the same professors giving the same lessons, remembering the same child. I unpack the choice between the two in Website Tutor or Claude Connector? — but the honest headline is that most families should just use the browser and never think about it again.

What the browser made possible

Once the tutor lived on our own site, a few things became possible that a connector inside someone else's app simply can't offer:

  • Zero-install onboarding. Sign in, open the tutor, go. The gap between deciding and starting is now seconds. That alone was worth the whole build.
  • A child-shaped screen. Rooms for each professor, tappable questions, a calm full-screen focus mode. On the connector we're a guest in a general-purpose chat app; on our own surface we can make it feel built for a 12-year-old.
  • Stronger safeguarding. On our own surface, the check for a child in distress runs in our own code before anything else — so the Childline response is guaranteed, not left to the model's good judgement. That's a promise I can only make on a surface I control.
  • Works on a phone, no app store. The browser tutor behaves like an app on a phone with nothing to download. That's most of how tutoring on a phone actually happens.

The trade-off I won't hide

There's a real cost difference, and I'd rather you hear it from me. When your child uses the Claude connector, your Claude subscription pays for the AI — it costs us nothing to run. When your child uses the browser tutor, we pay for every word the AI generates.

That's why the browser tutor has a sensible daily limit on how much a child can use it in a day, and the connector doesn't need one. It's not a trick to upsell you — it's the honest economics of who's footing the inference bill. For the vast majority of families the cap is comfortably more study than any KS3 child should do in a day. But I'd rather tell you it exists than have you discover it.

What I'd tell a new family

Start with the browser. Sign in, open the tutor in your browser, and let your child meet Mentor. If you're already a heavy Claude user and want the tutors inside that app too, add the connector as well — it's the same tutors, and whatever your child does on one shows up on the other. You genuinely can't pick wrong, because there's only ever one brain behind both.

I spent a long time building the connector and I'm proud of it. But the browser tutor is the version I'd have wanted as a parent on a Tuesday night — the one where you decide, and thirty seconds later your kid is learning. That gap being short turns out to matter more than almost anything else I've built.

FAQ

Why does aitutors.me have both a browser tutor and a Claude connector?

They're two doors into the same tutors. The connector suits families who already live in the Claude app; the browser tutor suits everyone else — sign in, open the tutor, and you're talking to the same Mentor and professors with nothing to install. I built the browser version because the install step was quietly turning good families away.

Is the browser tutor a cut-down version of the real thing?

No. It runs the identical tutors, the identical Socratic teaching, the same energy system and the same memory of your child. The main difference is who pays for the AI: with the connector, your own Claude subscription does; with the browser tutor, we do — so there's a sensible daily limit to keep it sustainable.

Do I have to choose one forever?

No. Both surfaces read and write the same shared record, so you can use whichever fits the moment. Set your child's energy on the web on Monday and the connector knows it on Tuesday. The choice is per-session, not permanent.

Duke Harewood built aitutors.me for his own KS3-aged daughter. The browser tutor is the front door he wishes he'd built first. Updated 09 July 2026.