Today, we are announcing a new product that is the culmination of a vision five years in the making.
We're keeping it simple – we’re calling it the Covalence Community Membership. It's the most ambitious attempt we’ve made to deliver on that original vision, and it’s only going to get better over time.
What is the Covalence Community Membership?
It's your all-access pass to everything you can do with us at Covalence: learn from our courses, interact with our community, and level-up your career – in one centralized home on the internet.
So what's so special about this membership versus what’s been done before?
Well, for one, it's the only place you can find an AI-assistant, Higgs (named after the Higgs boson, of course), dedicated to helping you answer questions, solve problems, challenge your current comprehension, and dynamically generate quizzes for every topic that you're learning in real-time and in the same place as the time-tested curriculum that we have refined through nearly 8 years of continuous curation and facilitation of our career-changing education.
It’s also the only place you’ll find our exclusive events like group community tech discussions, coaching and feedback sessions, job opportunity exchanges, and pitch nights for your side project, day job, or next career move with your fellow, friendly Community Members.
And we’ll be adding to the virtual treasure trove of content and resources in Gravity over time – our YouTube video series so you can watch and learn without ads, exclusive interviews with students, alumni, and special guests, and priority access to new courses and features as they’re released.
So how much does all of this cost?
One of our previous iterations of this vision – our Atomic plan – only gave access to our Full Stack Development course at the time, and it was priced at $79 per month.
Similar offerings currently available in the marketplace – like Treehouse and Codecademy – range from $25 to $50 or more per month, with options increasing to $199 per month or more.
Some options are “free” (if you ignore opportunity cost), but they often lack the well-defined structure of our courses. This means you spend a lot of time wondering what to learn next or whether or not you’re understanding and applying that new concept correctly, and it can be difficult (or impossible) to chat with the instructor who also just so happens to be the creator of the content you’re learning.
You’ll probably be able to snag a Udemy course for about $10 in a forever flash sale, but if you never look at the course (much less finish it) after you purchase it, what was the real lesson here?
Colleges cost around $10,000 per semester – and what the hell can you do with only a semester of college, anyway?
There are some prep courses from our bootcamp competitors that cost over $1,000 – and that’s just for Intro to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript! – but it “guarantees” entry into their bootcamp. Right… just like they’ll sell you a “job guarantee” as long as you sign the dotted line without looking too closely at The Fine Print.
So… let’s do the math here:
Add in our new standalone React course that adds four new portfolio-worthy projects and a ton of additional tools and topics…
Plus all the updates we’ve made to our other curriculum over the past three years (and all the updates that have yet to come)…
An all-new AI assistant that generates quizzes, additional challenges, and can help you in real-time…
And an entire community and cornucopia of features and benefits that come along with it…
All from a small business that has been teaching this stuff for years.
What’s that worth to you?
$199 per month?
$99 per month?
Perhaps – maybe we’re selling ourselves short here.
But we settled on $25 per month. (And it’s even cheaper if you pay annually).
That’s about the same price as a good Chicago deep dish pizza – or four basic grande lattes at Starbucks.
This is a big deal.
Until now, we’ve never been able to lower our price to a point that nearly anyone could afford it – even though cost is almost always a major concern for any student.
We’re breaking down that barrier with a giant sledgehammer, and Higgs is helping us achieve that original vision we outlined over five years ago.
We envisioned an entire ecosystem for education that empowered anyone that joined it. Regardless of your previous experience, you can come in, learn from our content and expand your knowledge at your own pace through an interactive, immersive medium that minimizes the typical latency we all experience when learning something new for the first time.
With the most recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning that led to the advent of Higgs, we’re finally able to realize that vision, and we believe it’s our obligation to equip our students with the ability to learn faster and more efficiently with AI so they can understand and utilize its potential to help realize their own.
Instead of attempting to restrict the use of AI out of our own insecurities, we’re embracing what we believe will be the most transformative technology of this decade, and we’re teaching our students to do the same so they can remain competitive in the workforce and the marketplace of free enterprise and ideas.
Now, any one of our students can receive nearly instantaneous assistance from the same exact place that they’re learning our content for the first time.
You don’t necessarily need to come to office hours, or send us an email, or ask a question to anyone but your personal AI teaching assistant. If you don’t know what to ask or how to get help, start with the quick prompts that are already built-in: summarize, expand, challenge, and quiz me. Each action will generate a custom prompt that’s based on your current context within Gravity.
And if and when you do need help, you still have the entire Covalence Team, current students, and alumni available to help in Discord.
The best part is… this is only the beginning.
We have big plans for Higgs – and for the Community Membership.
What does this mean for Catalyst?
It means that Catalyst is also getting an upgrade – since every Catalyst student will be a Community Member.
Currently, the starting point for every Catalyst student is to apply, schedule a consultation, and then get access to some of our content and community through our Catalyst Prep course for $50.
But now, for the first time, all prospective Catalyst students will have the ability to browse our entire curriculum, labs, and community before starting their admissions process to enroll in Catalyst.
No other bootcamp, college, or educational institution gives full access to their course catalog for only $25/month.
Our bet is that within a month or two as a Community Member, you’ll understand a lot more about what we do, how we do it, and whether or not it’s a good fit for you – and whether or not you need the additional structure, accountability, and attention from a dedicated instructor that Catalyst provides – before you ever have to apply, talk to us on a consult, or take any other action in your admissions process.
You’ll still have only paid $50, but you'll have received so much more.
If you don’t like us, no hard feelings – just cancel your membership, and let us know what we could have done to make it better.
Of course, if you decide you need that additional support, we’ll be here.
Catalyst isn’t going anywhere, and many of our dedicated instructor resources will still only be available for Catalyst students since they are so personalized and bespoke. It will remain our premier Immersive Program designed for only one purpose: to help you master this material as fast as possible so you can make a career change.
One last thing…
Your support is paramount to our success as a small business, and we are very thankful for that support. We’re grateful that we’re still here eight years in to keep creating, teaching, and serving all of you in this Community.
If you haven’t done so yet, what are you waiting for? Go check out our all-new Membership, and let us know what you think.
Cheers,
Jackson & The Covalence Team
