The cost to produce quality content is quite high. Even if you are "only" putting together a screencast, the cost of learning that content, planning how to teac

The cost to produce quality content is quite high. Even if you are "only" putting together a screencast, the cost of learning that content, planning how to teach it, editing it, and inevitable retakes can all easily stretch to 20x the length of a video. I'd call that estimate fairly optimistic, to be honest, it can go much higher. To use an example I'm familiar with: Code School courses took about 6 or so hours to complete (including challenges), but take 4-6 months of effort by an average of 4 people at any given time to create. We tried many times to tighten that timeline up, but being too aggressive inevitably resulted in a course we weren't 100% happy with. Pricing isn't as obvious as it seems, as well. We raised our prices from 25/mo to 29/mo ages ago, which was a large net positive for the company from a revenue standpoint. We ran pricing tests a few times, as well, and anything below 29/mo performed much worse overall (we didn't get enough extra signups at a lower cost to break even). Sales & free weekends have a big impact, though. As I've watched the space coalesce it seems like the very successful companies will be the ones that create some kind of "degree" (accreditation doesn't matter, only how much the community trusts them) for individuals, or companies that chase down enterprises for continuing education dollars. Or both. Both tend to charge a premium over that 290/yr price point, which you need to in order to be wildly successful due to the massive churn in the education space. All that to say, from my perspective, $290 a year is very reasonable, and is probably the right price point. Source: was the CTO of Code School