Thanks to the Internet, learning new skills and hobbies has never been easier.
One of the best ways to learn a new professional skill is on Udemy.
Udemy is a marketplace that sells online courses taught by experts in those fields.
Considering that YouTube also has experts that teach you skills for free, you may wonder what it is about Udemy that makes it expensive.
Why Is Udemy So Expensive? (10 Reasons)
Udemy courses cost between $10 and over $200.
How Udemy makes money, the fact that it has experts that sell courses on the marketplace, and its special Udemy Business program are all factors that influence the price of Udemy’s courses.
Let’s look at these factors in more detail.
1. Frequent Sales
One reason why Udemy is expensive is that its courses are frequently on sale.
It’s rare that you ever need to pay full price for a course on Udemy.
Instructors are aware that there is a lot of competition among them for access to students.
To help bring traffic their way, they’ll often cut their course cost in half or run some sort of discount.
This makes Udemy far cheaper.
Of course, the instructor still needs to earn money.
To ensure they’re still getting paid something, they’ll list an expensive price to start with.
Then they’ll discount it.
It’s cheaper than the original price, but the instructor still gets paid a decent amount.
Udemy encourages its instructors to discount their courses, too.
It helps them gain more traffic.
If you see a Udemy course listed at full price, it’s worth waiting a bit.
There’s a good chance that the instructor will discount their course eventually.
Udemy is expensive because its instructors regularly discount their courses to make them cheaper.
2. Udemy Fees
Another reason Udemy is expensive is because of its fees.
Udemy is a marketplace.
It doesn’t make the instructional content itself.
Instead, it provides a place where instructors can upload their courses and make money from them.
Udemy earns money by charging a certain fee to its instructors, which is a certain percentage of their earnings.
Since Udemy takes out a portion of their money, instructors need to list their courses at a high enough amount to earn what they want.
For example, if a Udemy instructor lists a course at $50 and Udemy takes out $10 from each sale, then the instructor only earns $40 on each sale.
If the instructor wants to earn $50 from each sale, then they may need to increase their price to $60 or more.
It may seem like they’re charging an expensive price, but it’s only because they’re trying to earn a certain amount of money after Udemy takes its cuts.
This is similar to many other marketplaces.
The company takes a cut of the seller’s profits.
To ensure that they can reach certain financial goals, sellers have to sell their products or services at higher rates.
This not only ensures that Udemy gets its cut, but that the instructor also earns the amount that they want to earn.
3. Large Appeal
Another reason Udemy is expensive is that it appeals to a lot of people.
No matter if you’re interested in guitar lessons or learning a programming language, you can likely find it on Udemy.
It has beginner courses and advanced courses for just about everything.
The fact that a lot of people use Udemy reinforces its prices.
If people stopped using Udemy because of its prices, instructors would likely lower their prices.
It’s price reinforcement.
People pay the price that they’re willing to pay.
If they perceive a lot of value in a certain course, they’re going to pay for it.
Udemy keeps its expensive prices because enough people think that they’re getting enough value at that price.
It’s also important to remember that the rules of supply and demand don’t quite apply here.
Anyone can sign up for a course.
There isn’t a limited number of seats.
An instructor records their videos, then posts them on Udemy.
Anyone at any time can purchase the course and start learning.
It’s different from college classes because they have a set number of seats.
Once those seats get filled, they’re unable to add any more students to the course.
Even online college courses have a limited number of seats.
Udemy doesn’t, so supply and demand remain in check.
The supply is accessible to everyone.
Since the instructor doesn’t have to worry about lowering or raising prices based on demand, they can set whatever price they want.
If a lot of people buy their course, they may choose to raise its price because it’s popular.
4. Focused Lessons
Another reason Udemy is expensive is that each of its courses has focused lessons.
Each Udemy course essentially teaches you one thing.
There may be several parts of that one thing, but it’s one thing.
In game development, for example, you may have several lessons, but it’s all under the umbrella of learning a certain game engine.
This makes the marketplace expensive because it isn’t always easy to find marketplaces that have such focused material.
When you sign up for college, for example, you have a huge list of classes that you need to take.
Several of those classes don’t even have anything to do with the particular career that you want to follow.
Yet, you have to pay money to take those classes to graduate.
You may even need to spend a lot of money just to get to graduate school where you can finally start learning the skills you need for your chosen profession.
That’s a lot of money you end up spending just to finally learn one course’s worth of information.
Udemy skips all the fat and gives you the meat.
You only learn exactly what you need to learn.
To a lot of people, that’s an investment worth making.
They save a lot more money learning the skills that they want to learn in a lot less time.
As such, they can get started with their careers a lot faster.
Compared to college, Udemy is exceptionally cheap.
Its use of focused lessons on specific topics sets it apart from many other educational programs.
Because it saves people a lot of time, they don’t mind spending a lot of money on a course.
5. Independent Instructors
Udemy is also expensive because it uses independent instructors.
Udemy doesn’t have professors or hired instructors.
They may pull a few experts from the marketplace, but they’re not in the business of teaching, themselves.
Instead, they rely on independent instructors to make courses and submit them.
Because of this, independent instructors can set whatever price they want.
Udemy doesn’t control how high they put their price.
It might suggest a certain price, but it’s ultimately down to the instructor to decide how much they want to sell their course for.
If an instructor believes that their course is valuable, they’ll probably put a high price on the course.
The amount of competition among instructors matters, too.
If there are a lot of instructors all teaching the same thing, you can be sure that they’re going to have lower prices.
Each one is trying to outbid the other.
If an instructor can teach something that few other instructors can teach, they’ll have more expensive prices.
The quality of the instructor also impacts Udemy’s price.
If the instructors aren’t titans of their particular fields, they probably have cheaper prices.
If they’re well-known in the industry, they probably have expensive prices.
Udemy has both expensive and cheap instructors.
The marketplace is sometimes expensive because its instructors are all independent and all list the prices that they want to have.
6. Customer Reviews For Legitimacy
Udemy is expensive because it’s legitimate.
There may be some people who are wary of buying courses from people who aren’t well-known in the industry.
They may be unsure if a certain course is a scam or not.
The fact that Udemy allows customers to leave reviews means that it’s a bit more legitimate.
Customers can tell future customers whether they found the course worthwhile or not.
If previous customers didn’t like it, future customers can avoid the course and look for something else that is a better tool to learn from.
This makes Udemy expensive because it stands apart from other educational marketplaces that offer the same experience.
Udemy isn’t the only marketplace where instructors can upload courses.
However, not all of those marketplaces are as legitimate as Udemy.
Some don’t allow customers or students to review the course, for example.
As such, future students have no way of knowing if the course is worth their time and money or not.
Udemy does offer that service which means it puts itself at a bit of risk.
If students come in and start writing terrible reviews on courses, it could make Udemy’s reputation plunge.
Few people would use the marketplace because its reputation would be that it had poor instructors on it.
It’d lose money.
Since it does offer customer reviews for people to read before they purchase a course, instructors need to have a high enough price to cover that risk.
If an instructor gets even one bad review, it can turn away some customers.
They may not trust that they’re going to get enough value from the course.
To ensure the instructor makes as much money as possible, they have high prices on their courses.
Udemy is expensive because it puts itself at higher risk with customer reviews that legitimize the site.
7. Expansive Genre Of Skills
Another reason Udemy is expensive is that it offers an expansive genre of skills that you can learn.
There are instructors for virtually anything on Udemy.
Whether you want to learn to code, make games, run a successful business, or even just play the guitar, it has everything.
Because it has tons of courses, Udemy has a reputation for being a valuable place to learn new hobbies or skills.
That said, having so many skills and courses available does come with its share of costs.
Udemy has to pay for expensive servers to host everything.
It handles tons of data and memory since videos aren’t exactly cheap to store.
The more courses that get added to the marketplace, the more space that Udemy needs.
The type of software and hardware they need to keep the site functioning perfectly is expensive.
To cover those costs, Udemy encourages its instructors to sell their courses at higher prices.
Since Udemy earns money through sales, they need instructors to sell at higher prices to get a higher percentage.
Having a large collection of different skills makes using Udemy appealing.
Because a lot of people trust and use Udemy, more instructors choose the marketplace to host their courses.
That requires Udemy to take on more costs to support those new instructors.
Udemy is expensive because of how popular it is and the number of courses that it has.
8. Udemy Business Plans
Although you can get typical courses on Udemy, if you run a business, you can also sign up for their Udemy Business program.
The Udemy Business program puts together experts in different fields that help business owners teach their employees new skills.
Udemy has several different plans from which businesses can choose.
All of them are expensive to anyone outside of business.
The advantage of putting your employees through these courses is that they came out of it with more skills.
They may know a new coding language.
They might be able to communicate with one another more effectively.
They might even become leaders.
There’s value in it, but because these courses target business groups, they have a higher price tag.
Udemy also has more of a hands-on approach for these particular courses.
Since there’s more involvement, it costs them a bit more money.
To make that money back, they charge high prices for their programs.
Udemy is expensive because of its business programs.
9. Marketing Costs
Udemy isn’t the only online marketplace for educational learning.
Masterclass is the main competitor.
To ensure it stands out from the others, Udemy spends a lot of money marketing itself.
It has several reasons to market itself, too.
For one, it has to convince new customers that the instructors on its site are legitimate.
Some people may feel wary about buying a course from someone that isn’t affiliated with a college or university.
Secondly, they need to convince customers that they have a course for them.
Some people may think that Udemy is only for people looking to learn how to code.
Udemy needs to show that it has courses for practically everyone.
Finally, Udemy has to prove why learning from the instructors on its site is better than at its competitors’ sites.
To do that, Udemy has to spend a good amount of money on marketing.
To cover those costs, they need to have high prices.
10. Experts Aren’t Cheap
A final reason why Udemy is expensive is that they enlist a lot of experts.
A lot of people who have real experience in certain fields make courses on Udemy.
They share valuable lessons that they learned throughout their experiences.
Those are lessons you can’t get anywhere else.
Because you’re learning from an expert, you can expect to pay a high price.
You’re basically taking a college-level course without actually going to college.
Udemy is expensive because some of its instructors are experts.
Conclusion
Udemy is a great place to go if you need to learn a new skill.
Udemy can be expensive due to the factors above, but the good news is that Udemy regularly has sales on its courses, so you can get the education you need at cheap prices.
NEXT: Why Are Closing Costs So Expensive? (10 Reasons)