TL;DR
- ChatGPT and Google’s AI answers took most of Chegg’s homework-help customers.
- Homework help still brings in two-thirds of its money, and it shrinks every quarter.
- Its new bets haven’t grown, so Chegg is surviving by cutting staff.
Nearly a decade ago, while I was scrambling for part-time gigs, I came across a Chegg job post. It paid psychology experts ~$100 an hour (as far as I remember) to answer students’ questions. The rate put other gigs to shame.
Those experts were what Chegg sold. For $15 to $20 a month, students, mostly in college, got step-by-step answers to textbook problems, or could ask an expert a new one.
Then came the AI “experts.”
In early 2021, Chegg was worth about $14 billion. Today it’s worth less than $80 million. I’d assumed it had been delisted. It hasn’t, and it still brings in about $50 million a quarter. So I dug into its financials to find out where that money comes from now.
How Chegg Makes Money Now
Chegg still makes most of its money the old way: students paying for homework help. AI hit that from two sides.
Students started asking ChatGPT instead. In May 2023, Chegg’s stock fell 48% in a day after it said ChatGPT was slowing sign-ups.
Then Google, which brought in 71% of Chegg’s US homework-help traffic in 2024 by Chegg’s count, started answering those questions itself. Chegg even sued Google over it (and lost).
In Q2 2026, Chegg made $51.8 million, half of what it made a year earlier. It now reports that money in two parts:
- Academic Services: the homework subscriptions, plus some ads and content deals.
- Skilling: Busuu, a language-learning app, and Chegg Skills, which sells career courses.
Academic Services brought in about two-thirds of that money, and Skilling the rest.
Academic Services: The Cash Cow
ChatGPT launched in November 2022. By mid-2025, Chegg had lost about half its subscribers, falling from 5 million at the end of 2022 to 2.6 million. That was the last time it reported the number.
Revenue fell even harder. Homework subscriptions brought in $175 million in Q2 2022. In the same quarter of 2026, the whole Academic Services business brought in $34 million.
Chegg says the students who stay are staying longer and paying more. It just isn’t finding many new ones.
The experts from that job post are gone too. In October 2025, Chegg Study switched to AI for new questions. Students can still search its archive of nearly 120 million expert answers.
Chegg even sold some of those answers. In 2025, two of the world’s ten biggest tech companies paid about $11 million to train their AI on a small part of the archive. It’s ironic: the industry that took Chegg’s traffic paid for its content. That money has mostly dried up this year.
This year, Chegg said it runs the homework business for cash: its “investments in skilling are funded by the strong free cash flow being generated by Chegg Study.”
Chegg Skilling: Where the Cash Goes
| Academic Services | Skilling | |
| Q2 2025 | $87.9M | $17.2M |
| Q3 2025 | $60.2M | $17.6M |
| Q4 2025 | $54.9M | $17.7M |
| Q1 2026 | $45.7M | $17.6M |
| Q2 2026 | $34.3M | $17.5M |
Skilling is Chegg’s bet on life after homework help. It’s mostly two businesses Chegg bought:
- Chegg Skills: a coding bootcamp, formerly Thinkful, bought in 2019 for nearly $80 million.
- Busuu: a language-learning app, bought in early 2022 for about $420 million.
So far, neither has made up for the homework business. The career courses are shrinking as fewer people pay for them out of pocket, and Skilling as a whole has stayed at about $17.5 million a quarter.
Chegg’s answer is to sell to employers. In November 2025, it said it wants Skilling to become “a larger, more profitable B2B” business. It’s also turning Busuu into more of a tool for work, adding courses on the language people need for specific jobs.
In Q2 2025, the last time Chegg broke it out, Busuu’s sales to businesses grew 39%, against 6% for sales to individuals. It’s the shift Udemy made back in 2022, but even Udemy’s business customers now spend less each year than the year before.
Chegg’s other bet is the students it already has. In August, it said it is “becoming an employability business,” one that helps students find internships and jobs. The service starts rolling out on Chegg and Internships.com this fall, and about 10,000 students have tried the beta.
Is Chegg Profitable?
No. The homework business brings in cash, but not enough to cover everything else. Chegg lost $3 million on $51.8 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2026. It has made a profit in only two quarters in the past three years.
Chegg has kept its losses small by cutting staff. It has laid off people four times since mid-2024:
| Announced | Employees cut | Share of staff |
| June 2024 | 441 | 23% |
| November 2024 | 319 | 21% |
| May 2025 | 248 | 22% |
| October 2025 | About 388 | 45% |
By the end of 2025, Chegg had fewer than 600 employees, down from about 2,000 at the end of 2022.
In September, it paid off the last of its debt, leaving it with about $38 million in cash. For now, Chegg’s barely floating.
The post How Chegg Makes Money Now That AI Gives the Answers Away appeared first on The Report by Class Central.