I spent three years buying courses so you don't have to

One of the links below (Coursera) is an affiliate link but paid me nothing to be listed. The other four pay me nothing.

I've been doing this for three years now.

In that time, I have seen every guru pitch under the sun. The $2,000 YouTube automation course. The $497 "passive income with AI" funnel. The DM that opens with "saw your profile" and ends with a Calendly link.

Some of those coaches turned out to be straight scammers. A few turned out to be the real thing, generous, honest, willing to share everything they knew. The hard part is that you usually can't tell which is which until your card has already cleared.

That is the actual problem with the guru economy. It isn't that paid courses are bad. It is that the information asymmetry runs entirely in one direction before you pay, and entirely in the other direction after.

So here is the thing I wish someone had told me three years ago.

Most of what gurus charge for is already free, or safer to buy elsewhere

Five places I actually trust:

Google Skillshop. Free certifications in Google Ads, Analytics, and the rest of the Google stack. If you're going to spend money on ads, learn here first. The course is built by the people who built the platform. No middleman.

Meta Blueprint. Free training on Facebook and Instagram advertising. Heads up: the certification exam costs around $150 to $250, but the training itself is free. If you just want the skills (which is what matters), you never have to pay.

HubSpot Academy. This one is the dark horse. Free certifications in inbound marketing, content marketing, email, SEO, social media. The curriculum is genuinely good and the credential is recognized by people who actually hire. I keep recommending HubSpot Academy and people keep being surprised it isn't a paywall.

Coursera. Google publishes its own Digital Marketing and E-commerce Professional Certificate here. You can audit most of it for free. The full certificate covers Shopify, Google Ads, Analytics, email tools, the whole stack a side hustler actually uses.

Skillshare. More creative-leaning. Video editing, design, content strategy. Cheaper than a course and you can pause whenever.

And one more, because we should be honest about it.

YouTube. Yes, the irony. The platform a lot of gurus use to sell you their course is also the place where their best competitors are giving the same information away for free. The trick is filtering. Watch creators who show real numbers, real screens, real failures. Skip anyone whose thumbnail is them pointing at a Lamborghini.

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What you're actually paying for when you buy a course

If everything above is pretty much free, why do paid courses exist at all?

A real one (and they do exist) sells you three things free curriculum can't: structure, accountability, and access to the person who built it. A good coach compresses your timeline. They tell you which of the ten things you could do this week is the one that matters. That has real value, sometimes a lot of value.

The problem is that the bad ones sell you the same three words and deliver none of them. You get a Notion doc, a Discord with 4,000 people in it, and a coach who answers every Q&A with "great question, let's circle back."

You don't find out which one you bought until you're in.

The honest filter

Before you spend a dollar, run a course through these three questions:

✅ Does the creator have real education, actual past success, and verifiable results of their own (not screenshots, names)?
✅ Is the same material available free somewhere, and if so, what specifically does the paid version add?
✅ Would you still buy it if there was no refund policy?

If you can't answer all three confidently, the free path is better. You're not behind. You're just not gambling.

If you already bought one (or you're about to)

This is the gap I kept running into, so I built something for it.

review.courses is a site I made to bring transparency to this space. If you've taken a course (a good one or a bad one), your honest review helps the next person decide before they spend the money. If you're thinking about buying one, you can search for what real students said about it.

It is the thing I wish had existed when I started.

Drop a review of any course you've taken, good or bad. Every one helps somebody else avoid a $2,000 mistake or find a $500 course that actually changed their year.

The gurus will keep selling. That is fine. The least we can do is make it harder to hide.

Ryan

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