You do.You can opt out from those massive price drops,where all thr courses become 9.99 or so. Whether it will work or not, I'll leave it for your marketing strategy to decide.

Good point, I should take a look if it's easy to just opt-out. I'd be OK with these discounts in general, though they look really weird -- the course was just published, and is already "on (massive) sale" :)

Interesting.. I clearly remember the opt-out checkboxes when I was creating the course, but I don't see them anymore neither in the course, nor in profile settings. I can only change the price, but not to opt-out from the price drops. Will clarify with Udemy support.

What are your reasons for publishing on Udemy? It appears to me like the down sides vastly outweigh the advantages.

It's actually a good question. Udemy was just easy to setup, and with no subscription monthly fee. I'm considering cross-publishing it on other platforms as well. I'll be OK in general with monthly fees for publishers once I have several courses. Do you have suggestions for better platforms?