Opened panel by panel, and dated
Learning to code costs nothing. Learning it comfortably costs money.
This site reads coding platforms' pricing pages properly — every billing panel, every discount badge, with the date it was read — and says plainly when the free route is the better answer, which on this subject it often is.
Every figure is a sum the provider itself charges for a year, read off its own pricing page on 24 September 2026. A teal dot is zero, not a short bar. Codecademy is absent because it publishes no annual total — only a per-month figure — and multiplying it by twelve would be our arithmetic, not its price. Boot.dev and Scrimba are absent because no price could be read at all.
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The best books to learn Python: one is free, one costs $49.99
What a book does that a course cannot, what the two standard recommendations actually cost, and why the free one is the better first read.
Codecademy review: the clearest pricing page we read, and what that does not mean
Four tiers, both billing terms printed together, no discount badge and a permanently free plan. Full marks for candour about money — which is not the same as being the best course.
Online computer science courses: the best one is free, and it starts with C
Computer science is not the same as learning to code. What the difference buys you, why CS50x spends five weeks on C, and what its certificate is not.
The free Python courses worth your time — and the one not to start with
A charity, a university and a volunteer project have produced better beginner material than anything on our paid list. Here is what each actually is.
Why a coding site starts with the free routes
Most pages answering "what should I learn to code with" are ranking subscriptions, because subscriptions pay. This one starts somewhere else, for a reason that is easy to check: on this particular subject, the things that charge nothing are genuinely the best answer for most people, and they are run by a charity, a university and a volunteer project rather than by a company with a funnel.
So freeCodeCamp, CS50x, The Odin Project, MDN and Python's own tutorial are named first wherever they win, and it is said plainly each time that they pay this site nothing. The paid platforms are covered properly too — five of them, with every billing panel opened — because for some people they are worth it, and because somebody should write down what they actually charge.
What we do differently with a price
Every price on this site was read in a real browser, panel by panel, on a stated day. That sounds like a low bar until you open the pages.
- Treehouse puts its annual figures behind a control on each plan card. Land on the page and you see $25 a month; click Annual and it is $250 a year, which is two months cheaper.
- Educative opens on its annual panel, headlining $8 a month. Its monthly price is $35. Both are on the same page; only one is showing when you arrive.
- Zero To Mastery crosses out $588 a year next to a 49% off badge. That struck-through figure is twelve months at its own monthly rate, not a price anybody was ever charged as an annual.
- Boot.dev priced itself to us in Armenian dram with a 74% purchasing-power discount, because of where we happened to be sitting. There is no Boot.dev price on this site as a result.
None of that is dishonest of them, exactly. It is just what a pricing page looks like when nobody outside is reading it carefully.
The numbers we refuse to print
There is no salary figure anywhere on this site, no completion rate, no placement rate and no estimate of how many weeks it takes to become employable. Not because those numbers would be unflattering, but because nobody publishes an audited one and an invented one reads exactly like a real one.
The time-shaped figures that do appear are all of one kind: a course's own statement about its own size. freeCodeCamp's Python certification counts 540 steps and requires five projects before its exam. CS50x describes eleven weeks of material. Those are facts about courses, not predictions about you, and the difference is the whole editorial policy.
Where to start reading
If you want the whole comparison at once, every route and what it charges is the page this site exists for. If you already know you want Python, the best way to learn Python is the same discipline applied to one language, including the free book and the official tutorial that most beginners are pointed at too early.