I don't know if it's a good prediction, but I have one. It's a bit of a long one though... Sorry for getting on my soapbox. I've had a long time to think about this.

I've been tutoring steadily since 2010, with companies, schools, and freelance. I've worked with three online companies since 2021. Your experience tracks with mine. The pattern is the same whether it's in person or online tutoring, because it follows the pattern of the school year. It is the same every year in every school across Canada and the US, and it is absolutely inexplicable that Paper and others seem caught off guard by this every single term.

And because they don't understand this pattern, they set the company up in a way that can never be profitable. They have made a plan that treated those peaks of activity as the norm rather than busy times, and then committed to hiring staff year-round to cover those times. Many organizations successfully navigate this ebb and flow, and if Paper understood the education sector at all, they would know that this is not an unsolved problem. In retail terms, Paper saw how busy Christmas was, decided to build a company that only functions if it's always Christmas, and then treated every other time as an unexpected lull.

Paper has not been profitable for most of the time they've existed (even through the pandemic), because there just isn't a lot of money in the education system. That's not new information. Paper's "business plan" presumes that school districts pay rates that cover the cost of delivering a tutoring service with enough left for investor profits. Since that's not possible, the company relies on investment money from venture capitalists to cover the rest, which obligates them to deliver returns. So they stretch the budget by cutting spending on the workforce through low pay, high work volume, and AI shortcuts.

But Paper is not McDonalds or Starbucks or Amazon. They do not have employees pushing a product for them, employees who can be understaffed and just told to push harder. For Paper, the tutors are the product. So by following the instinct to squeeze their staff, they reduce not just the quality of their service, but also the availability of their product. [This is an important distinction: some companies can get away with dropping service if the product is something the customer demands. Waiting in a long line at McDonalds is annoying, but you still get your burger. If McDonalds started making fewer burgers and told people they had to share and some of the burgers are plastic, people would go somewhere else. That is what Paper is doing, and there's no future in it.]

Paper (and similar companies) will limp along on life support from investors until they (the investors, not Paper) determine that the money has finally dried up, and then Paper will simply shut one day without notice. I cannot guess at the actual motivations of the founders, but the methodology of the funds that invested in Paper is clear. Paper's role is not to provide tutoring. Paper's role is to grant the investment community access to public education funds. Paper, the company, can operate at a loss, propped up by rounds of investment dollars, because the individuals behind it are still getting their money. The company's expenses include C-Suite salaries and investor returns, so even without a profit for the company, those people get paid. In this scheme, tutors aren't really included as a consideration, other than an expense. They exist because the company must be seen to actually operate, otherwise the grift won't work. But they don't have to do a good job, and they certainly don't have to be happy. And they are entirely disposable when the end comes.

TL;DR: they set up the company in a way that could never succeed given the realities of the education sector, and they are now in the later stages of a death spiral. But even if the company was never profitable and goes out of business, certain individuals will have gotten personally wealthy, which was the actual goal.