The site looks great and very user friendly, but as others have pointed out, the paid-tier-only seems too restrictive. Specially given the motto of treehouse is "Millions of people can't afford a quality technical education, or if they can, it's out of date immediately when they graduate. We aim to change that."

How can this compare to MIT (and other) Open Course Work and hundreds if not thousands of good free tutorials on the internet Vs $25/$49 a month?

FWIW, I learned basics of web development/design totally free, just took a bit of searching to find good resources, and once I was confortable with basics, the further education came through just googling-on-demand, videos only helped in the beginning.