Five platforms pay us. Four could have and do not, and here is why

How the money works

Some links on this site go to platforms that pay us a share if you subscribe after following one. Those links are marked in the page's own markup as sponsored and nofollow, they go through a /go/ address, and there is a plain note beside each one saying what it is. Nothing is hidden and nothing is dressed as a recommendation it is not.

Everything else here — freeCodeCamp, CS50x, The Odin Project, MDN, the Python documentation, Automate the Boring Stuff — pays us nothing, and those are the routes we name first wherever they win. That arrangement is deliberate and uncomfortable, and it is the reason to trust the rest of the page.

The five platforms we can earn from

These are the only paid links on the site. Every one of them had its pricing page opened and read on 24 September 2026 before it was linked.

• Codecademy — the clearest pricing page of the five, and a permanently free tier.
• Treehouse — 7-day trial, and an annual price you have to click a control to see.
• Educative — good text-first teaching, sold at a discount that is always on.
• Zero To Mastery — long career paths, marketed harder than anything else here.
• Boot.dev — linked, but with no price quoted, because it charges by the country you read from.

Placement in any ranking on this site was decided before a single programme was applied for, and a payout has never moved anything up or down. Where a platform is criticised, the criticism stays in the same paragraph as the link.

The four we could have earned from and did not

This is the part that costs us, and it is published so that undoing it would have to be done in public.

Coursera — not linked

Our own lane notes listed Coursera as something this site could earn from. The programme table our group works from does not grant it to this site; it belongs to a sister site covering marketplaces. Where the two disagree, the table decides. So nothing is keyed, no Coursera link exists here, and the conflict is written down rather than resolved quietly in our favour. Three other builders in our group hit the same contradiction and made the same call.

Udemy — not linked

We opened one of the best-known Python courses on Udemy and its page rendered no price to us at all. A marketplace whose list price is almost never what anybody pays, on a page we could not read a figure from, is not something this site will send you to for money. Single-course marketplaces are also a different question from the one this site answers.

Scrimba — not linked

Scrimba's pricing page returned a Cloudflare 522 error on four attempts from two different clients on 24 September 2026, and a separate fetch returned the page title with no content, because its prices render in the browser. We could read neither a price nor its current terms. It is named in our writing where it is relevant and it is linked nowhere: we do not take money for sending you to a page we could not open ourselves.

DataCamp — not linked

DataCamp is permitted to this site only for Python-as-data-analysis, which is another site's subject in our group. That leaves nothing for it to do here, so it is not keyed.

There is also a blanket rule: no bootcamp is linked from this site at any price, and none is recommended. That is a group-wide position taken after several well-known bootcamps closed, and it is not for sale either.

What a paid link does and does not do

Following one costs you nothing extra; the platform pays out of its own margin. It does not get you a discount, it does not register you with us, and the /go/ address carries nothing about you because we hold nothing about you. If you would rather not use one, type the platform's name into your browser — every price and every claim on this site is checkable without touching a link of ours, which is the point of dating them.

Independence, in practice

No platform has seen a page here before it was published. None has been offered a placement, a score or a paragraph, and none has ever asked us to change one. If any of that stops being true, this page changes first and the change is dated. A published refusal on this page is a commitment, not a mood: reversing one means rewriting this section in public, with a date on it.

The method behind the judgements is set out on what this site does and refuses to do, and any of it can be argued with at the address on the contact page.