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Comment by Timber-6539 | Hacker News Reader

From the "toggle info panel" button on one of the courses.

> Can I take this course for free?

- When you enroll into most courses, you will be able to consume course materials like videos and documents for free. If a course consists of labs, you will need to purchase an individual subscription or credits to be able consume the labs. Labs can also be unlocked by any campaigns you participate in. All required activities in a course must be completed to be awarded the completion badge

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<vent>

Ah, the classic "California Corporate" style of speaking:

    Q: Yes or no question about a specific case?

    A: Four sentences of condescending and convoluted explanation about how the
    rules work for the entire system, while simultaneously refusing to give a
    clear "yes" or "no" to the specific case being asked about.

It seems passive-aggressive to demand that every single reader piece together the logic of their "labs" and "campaigns" and "badges" to figure out if a given course is free or not. I'm all for shipping early and often, but it does feel like adding 2 if statements would have made the whole pricing answer about 100x more user-friendly.

</vent>

It's not that complicated. "Courses" are canned, one-way training material (comparison: books, lectures) that usually cost nothing. "Labs" are interactive exercises that require spinning up resources for each user (comparison: science labs with chemicals and beakers) so they usually cost something.

Yes, as a Qwiklabs user, you know this. But it is quite hard to decipher if you haven’t used the platform before. I agree with the GP that the current wording poses an unnecessary cognitive burden and should be more clear. Nothing wrong with e.g. “Mainly yes, but you’ll have to spend a few bucks on the hands-on labs”

Even after reading these comments I still don't know if the course is free or not. Either they charge for the labs, or the labs are free but require access to GCP resources. I still don't know which.

Fair point. The non-interactive parts are free. There are very few labs which require the purchase of credits. The labs are plug & play with all required resources provided (and deleted afterwards), so you don’t need an own GCP account.

I will ask chatGPT to respond in "California Corporate" style, to know it more.

I think this is standard corporate speak. Even in office my colleagues give long prose for just yes or no.

Because people too often jump to conclusions on hearing yes/no, imo. Not trying to defend the corporate speak though, obviously they should have put the yes/no up front and then try to explain later.

The first 8 courses cover only theory and are completely free. The last two require spinning up GCP compute resources and cost 1 credit and 3 credits respectively, where the baseline price of a Qwiklabs credit is $1 each.

Yeah there are 4 labs in this learning path. Meh.

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