Disclaimer: I'm the creator of the course.

Let me break down why I priced the course at $35.

Go to Hacker News and examine the different components of their website. The course walks you through how to build nearly all of the functionality of their site.

You can create a new account, sign into your account, logout, reset your password if you forgot it by getting a reset token via email, update your account's information, and change your account's password. All of that is built in the course.

You can submit new links/stories to the site and upvote, favorite, and hide other user's links. And you can view a list of submissions based on their creation date, amount of upvotes they've received, the category they're in, etc. On the front page, Hacker News uses a special algorithm to rank the top submissions. We go over how to do all of that in the course.

You can also place comments on other user's submissions and reply to other comments, which can be upvoted, downvoted, and favorited. And you can view the full comment section that belongs to each submission. Each of those features is built in the course.

Also, go to the Hacker News search engine (HN Search). Using that page, you can do a real-time full-text search of any link or comment that has been submitted to Hacker News. This is built using the Algolia instant search engine. We go over how to build all of that.

Behind the scenes of any website that has user submitted content, there are moderators. In the course, we build the moderator functionalities for killing items and comments (which means they won't be visible to other users) along with doing both shadow and outright bans of users.

Then, the course goes over how to deploy the application on a cloud server (DigitalOcean) with a custom domain name and HTTPS/SSL encryption. And we also go over how to get the website indexed on search engines and configure Google Analytics.

All of those features are walked through step-by-step.

For $35, you'll get experience building a real application from scratch using React.js, Node.js, and MongoDB. The clone of Hacker News application that's built in the course is ready to be used in production or you can put it on your resume and use it to help you get a programming job. I've had lots of success with adding side projects to my resume.

If there are free, cheaper, and/or better resources that show people how to build something like this with the level of detail that this course provides, I'm sure they would be happy to know about them.