Curated by Vinod Kumar Jain & Amit Jain · All Frontier Global · free, no login
An online course looks cheap until you price the hours. Enter the fee, the hours it takes at whatever your time is worth, the benefit you expect, and — the field most tools omit — how likely you actually are to finish it. The benefit is your estimate; this arranges it rather than validating it, and the completion field is there because most enrolments never reach the end.
The arithmetic, in order
Cost of your time = hours × what an hour of your time is worth · Total cost = fee + cost of your time
Expected annual benefit = benefit you estimated × probability you finish
Net over the horizon = expected annual benefit × years − total cost
ROI = net ÷ total cost × 100 · Payback = total cost ÷ expected annual benefit, in months
The fee is sunk whether or not you finish; the benefit is weighted by completion, which is why a low completion probability hurts the answer so much.
Honest limits
The hours cost more than the fee, almost always. A forty-hour course at any realistic value of your time dwarfs a typical certificate fee. That is the finding this tool exists to make visible.
Completion rates for open online courses are low, and the honest default here is well under certain. Be pessimistic: the version of you who enrols is more optimistic than the version who has to finish it in week six.
The benefit figure is a guess and drives everything. Courses rarely produce a traceable salary change on their own; if you cannot name the specific job, client or task the course unlocks, the honest benefit number may be zero.
Not everything worth learning shows up here. Curiosity, a foundation for later work, and enjoying the material are real returns this arithmetic cannot see — a negative net is a reason to be clear-eyed, not necessarily a reason not to enrol.
Sources
None. No course catalogue, completion statistic, salary figure or platform benchmark is embedded, fetched or implied — every input, including the completion probability, is your own.