1. Monetizing CodeGym
Once upon a time, when CodeGym was less than one year old, it was free. We had a small team, and we were working for an idea. By the end of its first year, CodeGym had only 20 levels, but we already had the IDEA plugin and a WordPress-based forum.
The great reviews and gratitude warmed our souls, but money was running out. It was necessary to either abandon CodeGym, or finally take money for our work. The option to abandon the project wasn't going anywhere, so we decided to start by trying to monetize the site.
A good educational product is worth a lot. Learning is hard, much harder than making money. A product that makes learning many times easier is worth searching for. Learning requires money, effort, and time. As it turns out, money is the least of the problems. After all, each of us has a smartphone ?
Money can be set aside, saved up, and borrowed. Changing yourself is much more challenging. You can't ask someone to learn a foreign language for you or to go to the gym for you to lose weight. You have to do it yourself. What if you have small children?
That said, CodeGym can help you learn it.
2. Premium subscription
I think you already understand that CodeGym is monetized. The subscription price is $49/month. Less than two dollars a day. If you want to study, study. If you don't want to study, study grudgingly ? What exactly do you get if you buy a Premium subscription?
Access to all levels on CodeGym.
With the free subscription, only Level 1 is available to you. The Premium subscription has no such restrictions. You will still have to proceed through the course sequentially. You cannot buy a subscription and immediately start solving tasks on Level 40.
Instant task verification
Almost all tasks can be verified in less than a second. You click, and then a second later your task has already been checked. That's super convenient. You'll never get that with a human teacher.
Detailed task verification results
After checking the task, you will see the status of each task requirement as well as the validator's recommendations for your solution. Feedback on your solution is very important when you're first getting started. And it will cut the number of hours you will want to bang your head against the wall down to just minutes ?
Plugin
To become a real programmer, you need to learn how to write programs in an IDE, which is a specialized program for writing programs. CodeGym has a handy plugin for IntelliJ IDEA. It lets you retrieve a task in a couple of clicks, and than submit it in one.
You can read more about this subscription in the "Subscriptions" section.
3. Premium Pro subscription
A Premium subscription gives you access to almost every CodeGym feature, and a Premium Pro subscription gives you a few additional perks.
Style check
Our validator checks your code against a Java style guide. Don't think you can write your code however you want just because it's your code. Code is written to be read by other programmers.
There are standards, strict requirements, as well as recommendations. How many spaces for indentation, whether to wrap strings, where to curly braces... There are even requirements for variable names! Not to mention names of methods and classes.
ReCheck
In general, on CodeGym you cannot submit a task for verification if it has already been solved. But if you really want to and you have a Premium Pro subscription, then you can experiment with different solutions for 3 days after you first solve a task.
You can read more about this subscription in the "Subscriptions" section.