Checked 24 Sept 2026
What a coding bootcamp costs, and which schools will tell you
Tuition read off each school's own page and dated. Audited outcomes from the three schools that publish them. What deferred tuition really takes. And the cheaper routes, priced the same day.
Codesmith prints $22,500 on its own course page. A year of Zero To Mastery at $299 and Treehouse at $250 is what sits in the other pan; the pages each came off are listed in what a bootcamp costs.
The file so far
Every guide
What happened to the bootcamps people ask about
We opened fourteen school websites on one day and wrote down what each returned. Two are gone, two changed customers, and several widely reported closures are still trading.
What a coding bootcamp costs
Every tuition figure we could read off a school's own page on 24 September 2026, the schools that publish none, and what the same money buys elsewhere.
Coding bootcamp versus a computer science degree
The costs are published by both sides and wildly different. The outcomes are audited by neither. And the official description of the job mentions a degree.
What a free coding bootcamp actually is
Free means four different things here — funded, earned back, self-taught, or deferred — and one of them is a credit contract wearing a different word.
Front-end coding bootcamps, and what the job titles show
Almost nobody sells a front-end-only bootcamp, the audited job-title data explains why, and front-end is the easiest thing to learn without paying anyone.
How people pay for a coding bootcamp
Upfront, employer-funded, instalments, a loan, or deferred tuition — what each one takes, with a regulator's account of how one income share agreement actually worked.
What this site does
It reads the price off the school's own page and writes down the date. That is the whole method, and it turns out to be unusual enough to build a site on: of the schools we opened on 24 September 2026, several publish a tuition figure, and several publish nothing at all and route you to an admissions conversation instead.
Around that sit the things a price alone will not tell you — what an audited outcomes report contains and how few schools file one, what a deferred-tuition contract takes out of a salary you have not earned yet, what United States law gives you if a school stops teaching mid-cohort, and what the same money buys if you spend it on yourself instead.
What it will not do
It will not rank bootcamps. Nobody here has enrolled in one, and a score from someone who has not is decoration. It will not quote a placement rate that a school has not had audited. And it does not link to a single bootcamp — not the ones with live affiliate programmes paying per enquiry or per enrolment, and not the ones without. A school that could pay us for your decision cannot also be weighed by us.
Asked before the cheque is written
Five questions, answered from the source
- Does a coding bootcamp publish what it costs?
- Some do and some do not. On 24 September 2026, Codesmith printed $22,500 on its own course page and Flatiron School printed $14,900 on its tuition page, while General Assembly's own Tuition & Financing page carried no figure at all and Le Wagon's course page sent you to an advisor. See what a bootcamp costs for each page we opened.
- Is an income share agreement a loan?
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said one was. In its 17 April 2024 order against BloomTech, the Bureau found the school had told students its income share agreements were not loans when they were, carrying an average finance charge of around $4,000. How people pay for a bootcamp sets out the mechanism and what the FTC's Holder Rule gives you if a school stops teaching.
- Which coding school does this site get paid by?
- None of them. No bootcamp is linked here at any price, including the ones that run live, paying programmes. The two paid links on the site go to self-paced subscriptions, and the disclosure page names them and the ones we turned down.
- Are the job-placement rates bootcamps advertise real?
- Only a handful of schools submit to an audited standard. On the day we checked, the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting listed reports from three schools. Everything else you read is the school's own arithmetic — how to vet a school shows what an audited report actually contains.
- Is self-paced study really cheaper?
- By a wide margin on price, and it asks much more of you on discipline. A year of Zero To Mastery was $299 and a year of Treehouse Courses $250 when we read them. What that buys, and what it does not, is on the cheaper routes page.