They don't mind if you do it on your own for free: https://github.com/codecrafters-io/build-your-own-x

> a compilation of well-written, step-by-step guides for re-creating our favorite technologies from scratch

This is amazing! Thanks for sharing

Makes sense, but if there is a slack channel where people are supposed to be responsive and answer technical questions, then that's value beyond just material and course work. And given there is a community, if you set the price too low you start to get spammers and people that are not truly interested in the content, bringing down the value of the community in the first place. I think the price is fair.

Counter-intuitively, a free community adds more value by attracting people of all levels. Paid communities attract beginners (who are incentivised to pay for education), but not experts ("Why am I paying for a Slack channel?"). Spammers are easily handled by enforcing community rules.

Hard disagree. There is incentive to pay for education (particularly the type offered by CodeCrafters) regardless of experience level, but the more engaged, more motivated, more mindful personality types will be more likely to make the connection that it's well worth the investment.

A free community is going to have more lurkers that aren't engaged, aren't committed, and may post one thing if they even post at all, before slithering away. Drive-by-comments would be more common. It would not add value, it would be like most of the rest of the public Internet.

Additionally, you might have missed this from the OP:

> First, we cater to people with programming experience. There are tons of introductory “learn to code” resources out there, but surprisingly little once you get past the basics. Good programmers want to get better and to develop in areas where they’re not strong yet, and that’s what we help with.

It seems like they are specifically targeting engineers at big co's with learning budgets rather than people paying out of pocket. Much cheaper than sending an engineer to a conference

True. From our research and speaking with customers, many tech companies have learning / professional development budgets in the range of $500-$5000. Often they're trust-based, and self-directed, so engineers are free to spend them on whatever they feel helps them most with their growth.

I think the reason that the charge is that high is because they are targeting 1. people who are already in the field i.e. employed and have source of income and 2. people who are serios about it.

Just my $0.02.

I think the reason that the charge is that high is because they are targeting big corp's training budgets

FTFY

Hmmm ... i think that could definitely be a part in this too.

People who are in the field will not have time for this.

I don't think this type of resource would be all that helpful for people trying to scrabble up the ladder. They would almost certainly be much better served by countless other resources.

If you are already a professional developer though, it's also questionable what is the added value. I'm willing to trust them that the quality is top notch, but it's basically a glorified tutorial; I have to agree with GP that the price point is way too high.

I think they're targeting professional developers with self-training/learning budgets. I'd be totally down for this if my company were willing to pay the time and subscription cost. I'd certainly rather do this than some F-tier shite about Agile or whatever.

Indeed, you're spot on!

Our current target is professional developers and teams with learning budgets.

Here are some reasons why experienced engineers have found value (the first expensed it, the second didn't):

1. One customer manages the Redis team at an infra company, and they used CodeCrafters as a starting point to get up-to-speed on Redis internals — to be able to do their job better. We ended up getting feedback from them on areas we could dive deeper on, to be useful to platform engineers in general.

2. A Distinguished Engineer at a Fortune 500 had built a database product before, and wanted to pick up a new language (Java, if I remember right). So they did our course because they preferred the "learning by doing" approach, and existing resources felt a bit too "hello world / todo-app"-ish.

The value is many devs know how to do their work but many might not know enough of the intricacies to build their own Redis for example. I do full stack and while I can make a website with a corresponding API, I don't know enough to rewrite Redis which includes more low-level backend knowledge than a typical fullstack engineer might have, so this would be useful for me.

From a customer call I had last night —

They were 4 years into their job, and felt that their job was mostly cobbling together a bunch of frameworks. Nothing wrong with that, but they constantly had the itch of not knowing how the pieces really tie together.

Their next goal is to explore platform engineering roles, which involves work that is one level lower in the stack.

Genuinely curious (both of us founders come from the early stage startup world where ladders are not in place yet) — what are the top resources for engineers trying to go up the technical ladder?

Thanks for your suggestion!

I've touched on the topic a little more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32345899

I think the prices are more or less in line with what they're offering. Based on the descriptions I expected low-to-high triple digits, which is in-line with Arden Labs golang training.

The subscription model is a bit annoying, though, I'd prefer to spend a bit more to get lifetime access to sets of tutorials so that you can come back to it at any time in the future. The future upsell would be new tutorials sold to existing users. And it'd be nice to be able to buy it sliced either by language or by target. Most likely someone is learning Python so then they want to buy the Python set of courses, then they come back later and they're learning Go so they buy the Go set of courses, etc.

Thanks for your feedback here! While we don't offer lifetime plans currently, our quarterly and annual plans are one-time.

It looks good, I probably would have pulled the trigger, but I'm going to be AFK for three weeks coming up with no electricity or running water... Did bookmark it to come back to it though.