What this site does, and the numbers it refuses to print

What this site is for

First Commit exists to answer one narrow question well: if you want to learn to code, what will it cost you, and is the free version worse? Everything else here is in service of that. We do not teach programming, we do not run a course, and we have nothing to enrol you in.

The question is narrow because the useful answers are. Whether a particular course suits your brain is not something anybody can tell you from outside, and sites that claim to are describing themselves. What can be established from a chair is what each provider charges, on which billing panel it admits it, what its certificate is in its own words, and whether an excellent free alternative exists. That is checkable, it changes often, and almost nobody writes it down carefully.

The Five Checks

Every paid platform here is put through the same five questions. They are published so you can disagree with them, or run them yourself on something we have not covered.

1. Is there a genuinely free way in, with no card?
2. Is the full price printed, in every billing term, without clicking anything?
3. Is the price free of a discount badge or a countdown?
4. Does the page say exactly what its certificate is, in its own words?
5. Can you leave on your own, without contacting anybody?

Two points a check, so a platform scores out of ten. Notice what is missing: nothing in that list is about teaching quality. The score measures candour about money, and we say so everywhere it appears, because a number in a coloured box gets quoted out of context otherwise.

How a price gets onto this site

A price here has been opened in a real browser and clicked through, not fetched and skimmed. Every billing control on the page is operated in turn and each panel is read separately, because a pricing page routinely shows one number and holds three. Then the figure, the term, the discount badge if there is one and the day it was read all go into a file that the site is built from — so a chart and the sentence beside it are drawing on the same number and cannot quietly disagree.

If a price cannot be read, it does not get softened into a range or an estimate. It gets left out, and the reason gets published. There are two of those already: one platform prices by the country you are sitting in, and another would not load for us at all.

What we will not print

No salary figures. No completion rates, placement rates or "nine in ten learners" claims. No estimate of how many weeks it takes to become employable. Not one of those exists in an audited form we can read, and an invented number reads exactly like a real one — which is precisely why it does damage.

Several platforms covered here publish claims of that shape about themselves, some of them very confident. They stay on their own pages. The only time-shaped numbers on this site are a course's own statements about its own size: how many steps, how many projects, how many weeks of material. Those are facts about the course, not forecasts about you.

We also publish the refusals that cost us money. Four programmes this site could have earned from are not linked anywhere on it, each for a stated reason, and the reasons are written out on how this site is paid for rather than buried.

Who writes it

A small independent editorial team. We have no commercial relationship with any platform beyond the affiliate arrangements listed on the disclosure page, no platform has seen a page before publication, and nobody has ever been offered a placement here. If that changes, it will be written on the disclosure page before it is acted on, not afterwards.

Corrections are welcome and unglamorous: if a price here is wrong, tell us which page and what you saw, and it gets fixed with a new date. Where to send that.