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Chegg sells homework help and study tools to students, mostly through a subscription to its website and app.
Chegg is a study-help company. Students pay a monthly subscription to get step-by-step answers to textbook problems, ask experts questions, and use tools that check their writing and flashcards. For years the core of the business was simple: a student is stuck on a problem at 11 p.m., and Chegg answers it fast — faster than waiting for a professor's office hours.
The company makes most of its money from those subscriptions, paid directly by students, sometimes bundled with textbook rentals. It also sells through college bookstores and has other study services folded into the subscription. The appeal is convenience and speed, not deep teaching; customers pick it because it is quicker than a tutor and cheaper than one. Then ChatGPT arrived and broke the spell. Students realized a free chatbot could often explain a problem just as well, and Chegg's subscriber base started shrinking. The stock collapsed, and the company cut jobs and leaned hard on a new plan: building its own AI-powered study tools and pushing into skills and professional training for people beyond college. Whether students will pay for a Chegg-branded AI helper when free alternatives exist is the whole question hanging over the company.
Chegg was founded in 2005 and went public in 2013. One of its founders, Dan Rosensweig, later became CEO and turned it from a textbook-rental site into a subscription study business. That pivot worked brilliantly for about a decade, which makes the current fight for survival a sharp reminder that a business built on answering students' questions is only as safe as the next tool that answers them better.
Saved answer · last researched 24 Oct 2026