At PolyTripper, we want to keep our costs low and pass these costs on to our students in the form of lower commissions for teachers and lower prices for students. To do this, we look for ways to reduce the amount of busywork and monitoring we need to do so we can focus on more meaningful tasks that benefit our paying members. That's why in order to do certain things, like submit bug reports and upload a profile image, you need to be a participating member.

Students can become participating members after they have bought any amount of credits (even $1) through the Buy Credits page. The student will be able to use those credits towards booking lessons. Teachers are automatically given a participating member status. Deactivated students or teachers lose this status.

Although $1 is a ridiculously low price (and don't forget that's also a lesson credit), your ability to buy at least one credit shows us that you're a real person and not some tiresome bot or spammer on which we have to waste our time, energy and resources. Ultimately, we all end up winning from the time we save.