Still looking for a Tonara replacement?

Mikey Hurdle, 26 October 2026

Tonara was a practice and assignment app that a lot of piano and music teachers built their week around. It closed at the end of 2023. If you moved to something else at the time and it never quite fitted, or you went back to paper and have been meaning to look again, this is for you. I make Mewstro, which is one of the options, so I'll be plain about what it does and what it doesn't.

What happened to Tonara

Teachers heard in early September 2023 that Tonara was closing its apps. Accounts from the time give the closing date as 8 November or 8 December 2023, and the app has since been removed from the stores. Teachers had about two months to export what they could and move their students. Tonara data that wasn't exported then may not be recoverable now. The sources are listed at the end of this page.

Plenty of teachers liked it. Many studios leaned on it through lockdown teaching, and its closing left people rebuilding their routines in the middle of a school year.

What teachers used Tonara for

From teachers' own write ups, the parts people relied on were:

• assignments, often with recordings or files attached
• practice time against a target of minutes and days
• messages between teacher and student during the week
• points and leaderboards to keep students going
• recording, including comparing a student's playing with the teacher's

No single app I know of does all of that in the same way, so it helps to decide which of those you missed most.

What Mewstro does that overlaps

• Assignments. Set something like “bars 12 to 24, 15 minutes a day” for one student or several, and their practice counts towards it.
• Practice time, and how it went. Students time their sessions, say beforehand what they'll work on, and afterwards how it went. You see both on their page.
• Studio materials. Share a video, a listening example or a PDF with the whole studio or a few students.
• A leaderboard, if you want one. Each student chooses whether to appear on it.
• Short clips. Students can record a Milestone Moment when a passage comes together and choose to share it with you.
• Goals with a date. A piece or a graded exam, with the weeks laid out, which you can set for a student.
• A Monday email saying who practised, who didn't and what they worked on.

What Mewstro doesn't do

• There's no chat between you and a student. You can leave a note on a goal, and that's all.
• It doesn't listen to or mark a student's playing, and it can't compare their recording with yours.
• It doesn't schedule lessons or send invoices.
• The student app is on iPhone and Apple Watch. Students on Android use the web version in their phone's browser for now.
• It can't import anything from Tonara, so you'd start fresh with an invite code.

If messaging or recording comparison was the heart of how you used Tonara, Mewstro probably isn't your answer, and I'd rather you knew that before you tried it.

What it costs

The teacher pays and students don't. A studio is £14.99 a month for up to 25 students, or £24.99 for more, with a 30-day trial on both. Every student you invite gets the full app. The pricing page has the yearly prices too.

And if Mewstro closed?

It's a fair question after Tonara. Mewstro is small: I build it on my own, and my teacher Ellie's studio has used it since the spring. My commitment is that if it ever had to shut down, every user on every plan would get a full CSV export of their data before anything went offline.

See it before you decide

A minute of the teacher side, then what a student does:

If you'd like a walkthrough with your own studio in mind, or you want to tell me what you miss about Tonara, the walkthrough form comes straight to me. There's also a longer piece on what to look for in a practice app, whichever one you choose.

Tonara is a trademark of its owner. Mewstro isn't affiliated with Tonara, and the name is used here only to describe the app teachers are replacing.