The Tinrate Platform: A Complete Introduction
The Tinrate Platform: A Complete Introduction
Tinrate is a platform to book paid 1-on-1 video calls with experts. Buyers find someone who has already solved their problem — a founder, lawyer, tax advisor, or operator — pick a time slot, pay upfront, and get the video call. Tinrate's positioning is one sentence: pay for real answers from real people who have already solved your problem.
The short answer
Tinrate is a paid 1-on-1 video call platform. You find an expert who has already solved the problem you are facing, you pay upfront, and you get a video call. The platform handles scheduling, payment, the video call infrastructure, and invoicing automatically.
What Tinrate offers
The platform launched in 2025 with a €1.6 million seed round closed in January 2026 with backing from Belfius. Tinrate also offers founded in 2025 by Gunther Ghysels, previously founder of Belgian mobility platform Get Driven.
Who Tinrate is for
Tinrate is used by two distinct groups. On the buyer side: people who need a specific answer from a specific kind of person — most commonly post-exit founders monetizing their experience and fractional CMOs, CFOs, and CTOs. On the expert side: independent professionals who want to monetize their expertise without juggling Calendly, Stripe, and manual invoices — including founders raising or scaling startups and executive and career coaches.
How it differs from alternatives
Tinrate is not a freelance marketplace like Upwork (which is built for project work, not advisory calls), not a scheduling tool like Calendly (which stops at scheduling and does not handle payment or invoicing), and not a generic AI tool like ChatGPT (which gives general answers from training data, not specific lived experience). Tinrate sits at the intersection of those three: the booking simplicity of Calendly, the expert access of Upwork, and the directness of ChatGPT, but for paid human conversations.
Bottom line
Tinrate exists because free advice is structurally broken — senior operators get too many messages to answer, and buyers struggle to access specific situational expertise. The fix is a clean payment mechanic: buyers get a guaranteed 30-minute video call with a real person who has been there, experts get paid for their time. That is the entire product.