[jphoward]

$49 seems a surprisingly high amount for something aimed at students and learners - I appreciate the content may be good, but it's effectively 3 times a Netflix subscription.

It's meant to be something you stick with in the "long term" by its nature, and yet an annual subscription is $500 - this is just completely unrealistic for any student. Someone in a lower end job hoping to "up skill" is going to really struggle with this.

[serial_dev]

I get why some people would not want to pay this, but it’s also not at all unreasonable to pay 50 USD.

It might be 3x a Netflix subscription, but Netflix is, for many, just wasting our time, whereas learning math could mean you can get a better job (higher salary, more interesting projects, future proofing yourself), then suddenly the 50 dollars per month is negligible.

I also get that in the end all this is available for free scattered around the internet and libraries, but having guidance, having a system that helps you actually do the learning is also very valuable.

[jpcompartir]

I believe their rationale is that a private tutor costs more than this per lesson, and they're targeting the people who will pay for a tutor once/twice a week for themselves or their children.

I tend to agree with you, it seems like they could be wayyy more competitive on price but I also understand where they're coming from.

[mtts]

They’re not a private tutor, though. They don’t explain very much and there certainly isn’t a way to ask questions. As I said elsewhere, to me they’re about twice as expensive as they should be.

[viraptor]

> They don’t explain very much

That's not really the case. Each separate step of each lesson is explained and practiced many times. Repeated failures across multiple students are noticed and explanations reworked. If it's not enough, you can report your issues. And there are MA communities to check with if you really get stuck for some random reason.

[zelos]

The explanations are very limited compared to actual maths lessons, though: in my experience they were very often something like "it turns out that the formula for this is...".

[mlyle]

IMO it's scaffolded and explained a bit more than an average mathematics lesson, though teachers vary a lot.

There's a whole lot of "here's the formula" and not so much "here's the derivation" in most classrooms.

The math classes that I taught: I tried to do a lot more of the why, either rigorously or using proof by gesticulation. But there were still absolutely times that I just handed something over and was like "do this, for now."

[mtts]

I’m currently doing the Calculus I course and while there are explanations interspersed throughout the problems, these mostly seem to be the bare minimum you need to work the problems. When I compare it to the calculus textbook I keep alongside it (Stewart’s “Calculus Early Transcendentals”) it barely seems enough.

[tptacek]

Private tutors are much more expensive and not uniformly effective. Math Academy is an extremely low-risk bet for parents of math students (you'll know before the first usage period whether it's working out). I like the business model here a lot --- I also just think it's like something concocted in a mad scientists lab to annoy HN people, who always have a really hard time intuiting market/pricing segmentation.

[jpcompartir]

Yes, they are not a private tutor, and they do not claim to be. That is just the market they are going after.

They believe they can help people reach better outcomes for less. Whether they're correct or not is another question.

[viraptor]

There are cases where it's not the student who is paying. Definitely all the younger students, since that's covered by parents by default. I got it covered for a while under work's learning budget. I'm sure there are other groups I can't think of right now.

[dmpk2k]

Having once been poor I understand you, but this is missing the bigger picture. If you're going to improve at mathematics you need to put serious time into it.

Instead of an hour of extra work every day, you're doing math instead. At minimum wage that's around two grand lost over a year. Even if MathAcademy was free.

Also, I recall seeing MathAcademy being free if you can demonstrate financial need.

[AlanYx]

The latest trend in educational software seems to be relatively high pricing. See e.g., Mentava, which sells for $500 USD/mo (not a typo). AoPS online courses are $28/lesson (though Beast Academy can be had for $100/yr). By comparison, this ($49) is in the realm of reasonable.

If this kind of pricing helps these services be sustainable over the long term, it's probably not a bad thing.