Two IELTS teachers, one scoring engine we check in public.
Built by two DELTA-qualified IELTS teachers with 13 years of combined classroom experience.
Why we built it
Between us we have spent 13 years in IELTS classrooms. The same thing happens in almost every one of them. A candidate writes a solid essay, gets it back covered in red, and still cannot answer the only question that matters: which exact sentence cost me the half band, and what should it have said instead?
Getting that answer usually means paying a tutor around $100 an hour, and most people who need IELTS are already paying for a test, a visa application and often a flight. Failing means a retake at roughly $250 and months of delay. The feedback that fixes your score should not be the most expensive part of the process.
So we built the thing we kept wishing we could hand every student: somewhere you write or speak, and 30 seconds later you see a band score against the four official criteria and the specific words losing you marks. Not a video course. Not fifty lessons. A practice gym with a marker attached.
Who actually writes and marks this
Every guide on this site is signed by the teacher who wrote it, and both of us are DELTA qualified. In a market full of anonymous AI tools, you should know whose judgement the marking is modelled on.
CELTA and DELTA qualified with 8 years of IELTS teaching experience. He built the BandNine scoring engine and writes the Writing, Reading, Listening and immigration guides.
CELTA and DELTA qualified with 5 years of IELTS teaching experience. She specialises in speaking and pronunciation and writes every Speaking guide here.
Priced so the people who need it most can afford it
BandNine runs as a social enterprise. The point is not to extract the maximum from a candidate at the most stressful moment of their year. It is to keep real exam practice affordable for everyone chasing a band for work, study or immigration.
That shows up in three concrete ways. There is a free tier you can use without a card. Paid plans start at $12, renew until you cancel, and cancelling takes two clicks from Settings, and buying again simply extends your access. And every plan carries a 7-day no-questions refund, with a band guarantee on the longer plans.
The full breakdown is on the pricing page and the guarantee terms.
An AI band score is worthless if you cannot audit it
Manish built the scoring engine, and it is re-benchmarked every week against a fixed calibration set, labelled criterion by criterion against the public band descriptors. The deviation is published publicly, whether it flatters us or not. We have not found another AI IELTS scorer that does this.
Scoring is also deterministic by design. Submit the same essay twice and you get the identical result, because the first full score for a piece of text is sealed as canonical. You can test that yourself in a minute.
What you will never find here
- Invented testimonials or before-and-after student quotes. We tried writing sample ones once, decided they were dishonest, and pulled them.
- Student counts or success rates we cannot evidence from our own data.
- Partner or accreditation logos. BandNine.ai is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the British Council, IDP Education, Cambridge Assessment, or any official IELTS organisation.
- A guarantee of any particular band. We publish how close our marking runs to our calibration set and let you judge.
Questions about the marking, a score you disagree with, or a refund? Write to support@bandnine.ai. A teacher reads it, not a ticket queue.
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