There’s a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the “make money online” industry that nobody wants to talk about. If you’re going to teach people how to become wealthy, you face an impossible pricing dilemma: the people who most need your help are the ones who can least afford to pay what your knowledge is actually worth.
Think about it. If you’ve genuinely cracked the code on building wealth and you want to share that knowledge, you’re immediately confronted with a stark reality. Your ideal customers are people who don’t have much money yet. That’s the whole point. They’re seeking your guidance precisely because they haven’t figured out how to generate significant income on their own. But this creates a pricing trap that distorts the entire industry.
Let’s say your coaching program could legitimately help someone build a six-figure business within a year. What’s that worth? Conservatively, you could argue it’s worth at least twenty or thirty thousand dollars. After all, you’re essentially handing someone a blueprint for financial transformation. The return on investment would be enormous. But here’s the problem: the person who needs that blueprint doesn’t have twenty or thirty thousand dollars sitting around. If they did, they probably wouldn’t be desperately searching for ways to make money in the first place.
So you’re forced to underprice. You might charge two thousand dollars, or five hundred, or even ninety-seven dollars for a course. You tell yourself you’re making it accessible, democratizing wealth education, giving everyone a fair shot. And maybe you are. But you’re also doing something else: you’re devaluing your own expertise to meet the market where it actually exists.
This creates a strange dynamic where the coaches who are most successful at selling their programs aren’t necessarily the ones with the best money-making strategies. They’re the ones who’ve become experts at selling to broke people. They’ve mastered payment plans, psychological triggers, urgency tactics, and emotional storytelling. They know how to make someone who has three hundred dollars in their checking account feel like they absolutely must invest in this opportunity right now, even if it means putting it on a credit card.
The uncomfortable truth is that premium pricing only works when you’re selling to people who already have money. The truly wealthy don’t need your course on how to start a dropshipping business or build a coaching practice. They’re already winning at the money game. So the coaches who charge five figures or more for their programs have typically pivoted their target market. They’re no longer teaching struggling individuals how to escape poverty or build their first profitable business. They’re teaching already-successful entrepreneurs how to scale to seven figures, or they’re working with executives and professionals who have steady six-figure incomes but want to optimize their wealth-building strategies.
This is why the landscape of financial education looks the way it does. At the bottom, you have thousands of courses and programs priced between fifty and five hundred dollars, all competing for the attention of people who are struggling financially. The quality varies wildly because the pricing doesn’t allow for much substance. How much can you really deliver for ninety-seven dollars? Maybe some basic frameworks, some motivational content, maybe access to a Facebook group. The creators aren’t scamming anyone necessarily, but they’re constrained by economic reality.In the middle tier, you find programs ranging from a few thousand to maybe ten thousand dollars. These require payment plans to be accessible, and the target market is typically people who are earning something but want more. Maybe they have a small business that’s plateaued, or they’re employed but dreaming of entrepreneurship. They can scrape together the money, especially spread over several months, and they’re desperate enough for change that they’ll take the risk.At the top, you have the ultra-premium coaches who charge twenty-five thousand, fifty thousand, even a hundred thousand or more for their programs. But notice who they’re serving: people who are already wealthy or who have businesses already generating substantial revenue. The pitch isn’t “learn how to make your first dollar online.” It’s “scale your existing seven-figure business to eight figures” or “optimize your investment portfolio for maximum tax efficiency.”
The paradox deepens when you consider that the people at the top, charging premium prices to wealthy clients, probably do have more valuable knowledge than those charging ninety-seven dollars. They’ve likely achieved more, learned more, and can provide more sophisticated guidance. But their knowledge is priced out of reach for the very people who would benefit most from a genuine roadmap to financial success.
This creates a perverse incentive structure. If you’re a talented coach who genuinely knows how to help people build wealth from scratch, you face a choice. You can either underprice your services to make them accessible to your actual target market, which means you’ll need volume to make a living, which means you’ll need to master marketing and sales rather than focusing on delivering the best possible coaching. Or you can charge what your expertise is actually worth, which means pivoting your entire business model to serve people who already have money, which kind of defeats the original purpose of teaching people how to make money.
Some coaches try to split the difference by offering a low-priced course for the masses and a high-priced mastermind or inner circle for serious players. This can work, but it often means your best knowledge stays locked behind the higher price point while the affordable option provides just enough value to feel legitimate but not enough to truly transform someone’s financial situation.
The people who escape this paradox most elegantly are those who target a very specific niche with specific money-making strategies that don’t require much capital to implement. They can charge reasonable prices because their students can actually generate results quickly, which means testimonials, which means social proof, which means they don’t have to rely entirely on hope and hype to make sales. But even then, they’re constrained by the fundamental reality that their customers are, by definition, people who don’t have much money yet.
None of this is to say that financial education is worthless or that all coaching programs are scams. Some are genuinely valuable. But the industry is shaped by this inescapable economic logic: the people who most need to learn how to make money are the people who have the least money to spend on learning. And that creates a strange, distorted marketplace where price signals don’t work the way they do in other industries, where marketing sophistication matters more than substance, and where the people with the best knowledge often can’t charge what it’s worth unless they stop serving the audience that needs them most.
