Well considering Chris’s role in creating Phoenix it’s not exactly apples to apples comparison 
It’s obviously up to each entrepreneur to decide what he wants to charge. At present books do offer pretty much optimal value + there is a lot of good free material. I’d say Elixir in action is especially good value :). Hope @sasajuric is considering writing more books.
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There is often (not always, but often) a huge difference between self published books and those published by tech publishers such as Pragprog. The professional editing and guidance alone can make a massive difference.
That’s not to say self-publishing is a bad idea. If you are an experienced writer or a good teacher, then go for it! However you need genuine reviews from people who are willing to recommend the product at the price point you want to sell at.
I would expect self-published books to be around 9 to $15 - infact that is what I have paid for most of my Pragprog books as I wait for the sales then buy in bulk 
As @andre1sk mentioned, it’s up to content creators how they price their stuff - but - it’s up to everyone else whether they buy, or not. If you have spent a lot of time on something, surely you want to maximise sales?
If you were asking me for feedback on pricing I would say price it similar to @kujua’s book at $10 Erlang and Elixir for Imperative Programmers (book published) and also give out review copies to the first XX so that you can get some genuine reviews and feedback. $249 for just a years access to very limited content seems expensive, even $29 a month is a lot for just one course.
JMO - you are of course free to price your course as you see fit 
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Alright @andre1sk @AstonJ, you’ve convinced me. I’ll give away free access to 25 people on the Forum via Stripe coupon once my PR is merged. I will also give some serious thought to a price reduction.
I agree 100% that $249 is too expensive, but the advice I got from a friend of mine who runs a similar site was, “Always include an expensive option. Even if it isn’t better, some people will buy it just because.” To my surprise, about a quarter of signups so far have been for the annual plan. I guess he was right!
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I usually like to combine (e)books and video’s when learning new stuff. At the moment I have all three PragProg books about Elixir and Phoenix and I am currently looking for videos about Elixir/Phoenix. (So I am very interested in trying out your website and giving feedback if need be ).
Just some FYI:
I am sure you have done your research, but I will share this in case you havent come across laracasts.com before. It started as an laravel.com focussed website, but the author (Jeffrey Way) is now doing all sorts of topics within the eco-system. It’s priced at 9 dollars a month! With almost guaranteed weekly and almost daily new content. He also has other sub options like “Teams”.
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I’m also watching Learn Elixir TV and Learn Phoenix TV to my study, precisely the way you like to do.
I wouldn’t recommend any of them by themselves though. They better be paired with some of the books.
@samcorcos Hey mate I just tried to sign up to the site and was happy to pay the $29 but once I add my stripe payment information in a spinner pops up and doesn’t leave. Opened up the console and there is a 500 error there. Might want to have a look into it
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@harrisonl Ahh, good call. In my rush to implement coupons I managed to make it impossible to buy something without one! Should be fixed now. Thank you for the note.
Cheers mate, i’ll subscribe today. I am a little iffy on the monthly price for what looks like a book - is there continuing content coming out? Also is there a slack channel? I’m mainly subscribing for the react side (no 0 react) and have been going through the free tutorials ATM and have found a few spelling mistakes, so having a slack channel with may an errata channel would be useful. Also being able to ask you or others questions, would help justifiy the continuing price more.
@harrisonl I’m planning on putting out a lot more content
As of August 16th, there are 44 completed lessons. By the end of the year I would like to have >100. Over the last week, I’ve been publishing at the totally-unsustainable rate of 2 lessons per day. I expect that number will slow down to a couple lessons per week once the demo app is actually finished and the topics get more complex.
On the frontend, I’m planning to dive into React Native development and deployment to both app stores, as well as webpack and React performance optimizations.
On the backend, I’m planning to go into some more advanced scaling techniques with Phoenix and Elixir—admittedly, these will be contrived since the demo app will not reach any meaningful level of use.
Are there any particular topics you’re interested in? If it fits in with the series, I’m happy to add a lesson on it; if it doesn’t, I could write a blog post.
Regarding Slack, I hadn’t thought of opening a slack channel. I’m currently on elixir-lang.slack.com (at)samcorcos. Do you think it would be worthwhile to open a new slack channel? Or would it make more sense to piggyback off the existing Slack channel? Alternatively, I’m very responsive to email at sam@learnphoenix.io.
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Nice. I think a good topic would be to cover, in a contrived example, how you’d perform a load test using Tsung and htop to cover the topic of scale/scaling.
@samcorcos cheers mate, just signed up then.
In regards to topics maybe some with non-paas deployment?
Currently at the moment I’m hosting my app with vultr and have set up the deployment with edeliver which works well but it would still be good to see some other approaches to it as well as setting up nginx ect.
In regards to the slack I reckon it would be better to have our own one. Piggy backing of the elixir-lang one might not work as well. Mainly because everyone in the slack will be apart of the site and have knowledge of the common issues that newbies will be going through.
Also it can be a selling point “get access to our exclusive slack channel where you can get help …” (clearly I’m not a copy writer but you get the idea.
Also - I agree with what @sudostack suggested. Currently, my stress testing consists of running ab -n 1000 -c 100 http://domain.com which doesn’t even work for channels only normal rrequests
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The problem with the elixirlang Slack is that it is cut at 10,000 messages so you would lose dialog very fast.
What I would suggest is pro-actively (!) making a GitHub issue per episode and linking to that below each video.
This shows your willingness to have an open dialogue about improving your content, does not require people to sign-up for another Slack and keeps the conversation preserved in a central, organized place.
Just my .02
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If you like learnelixir.tv there is now https://www.learnphoenix.tv/22 by the same author but it covers each part of phoenix individually rather then building a whole app from scratch and doesnt cover react/redux etc.
LearnPhoenix.tv will have a series on building apps. I’m building the groundwork right now. However, those episodes will still focus mainly on Phoenix rather than Javascript, because I want the videos to stay relevant a bit longer. 
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Alright, I think the site is ready for some review copies. I created a coupon for a free month with a limited number of redemptions: elixir_forum_EwS9q (UPDATE: All 25 have been claimed)
There are no conditions. I only ask that you send me a message if you come across any bugs, and if you find the content useful, spread the word
The coupon still requires a CC for note. ^.^
Yeah, it’s just a Stripe coupon for 100% off for a month. It was easier than hacking around my current customer subscription setup to handle non-Stripe customers.
But the feedback seems to be pretty universal that I need to spend a few hours changing my model to make non-Stripe customers a thing. If you’re not comfortable putting in your credit card info, I’ll have this changed in the next few days.
On the other hand, it’s only been up for 2 hours and 3 people have already signed up for review copies So it’s going well so far! I will keep you posted.
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Woot, yeah I try to minimize using a CC online through channels that I do not have better control. ^.^
A phoenix powered backend admin panel would be great for that, like ex_admin 
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I just signed up to check it out. I’m new to Elixir (front-end dev – React/Redux/etc in my day job). I have a blog (## http://www.elixirdev.io) that I just setup to journal my journey into this functional world, so I’ll try to do a review post on my findings as time permits.
Thanks for the code. I’m looking forward to checking this out.
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