Scrimba Pricing
Scrimba has a free tier with about 24 full courses, no credit card required, and a Pro subscription that unlocks the four career paths, unlimited coding challenges, Pro-only Discord channels, and path certificates. Start on Free; upgrade to annual Pro once you have shipped two or three small projects and want the path structure. Exact prices live at scrimba.com/our-pricing (opens in a new tab), since they shift by region and promotion.
Should you pay for Scrimba Pro?
Pro buys a structured route from "I cannot read an error" to "I shipped a portfolio app": the four career paths, unlimited challenges, and the Pro Discord channels. Free is enough to test whether the format works for you first.
Low risk: 7-day refund on first purchase, cancel anytime, progress saved if you pause.
Scrimba supports purchasing power parity (PPP), so a price in a lower-income country should already come in lower automatically. The third-party site paritylist.com/products/scrimba tracks how much the platform discounts by country.
Already decided on Pro?
Our partner link applies the 20% discount at checkout on top of regional pricing and the annual rate. The banner it triggers is dismissible and nothing is charged until you choose a plan.
7-day refund, cancel anytime.
What the free tier gets you
The free tier is not a trial. It is a permanent product with real courses. If you came looking for a Scrimba free trial, that page lays out the four free ways in, including the student free month. The most-taken free courses are:
- Learn React with Bob Ziroll. 15.1 hours of video, 358 lessons, built with Mozilla MDN's input. All six sections and both capstone games (Tenzies and Assembly: Endgame) are free. This is the course most people land on Scrimba for, and it is the strongest argument that the free tier is worth opening even if you never pay.
- Learn JavaScript with Per Borgen. 9.4 hours, 238 lessons. The passenger counter, blackjack, Chrome extension and Firebase modules are all free, deploys included.
- Learn TypeScript with Bob Ziroll and Rachel Johnson. 4.2 hours, 79 lessons, free.
- Learn HTML and CSS with Per Borgen. 5.7 hours, 121 lessons. Free, and so is its final solo project, the Hometown Homepage.
- Learn Python. 4.1 hours, 133 lessons, with no Pro items inside it at all.
- Intro to Mistral AI (1.4 hours) and Build Serverless AI Agents (Langbase) (50 minutes). Quick AI intros, free.
You also get ten interactive coding challenges total. That is the cap, ten across the whole platform, not ten per course. Once you hit it, you are nudged toward Pro. Scrimba Explain, the AI explainer button inside every scrim, gives a free account 10 explainers for the life of the account.
Inside the free courses, the one thing marked Pro is the solo project. In Learn JavaScript that means the basketball scoreboard, the password generator and the unit converter, each with a Figma file, a written spec and stretch goals. In Learn React it is the Digital Business Card and Quizzical. Every lesson around them plays without a card.
You do not get the four career paths, the Pro-only Discord channels (basic Discord access is free), unlimited challenges, or certificates of completion for paths.
What Pro unlocks, and what you use it for
Pro is one subscription that includes everything paid on the platform. The four career paths are the centre of the value, and they are why most people upgrade:
- Frontend Developer Path, built with Mozilla MDN. Roughly 82 hours of lessons across 13 modules. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, accessibility, React, working with APIs, a portfolio-building module, and a getting-hired module. This is the most-enrolled path and the one that frames most "did Scrimba help me get hired" discussions.
- Fullstack Developer Path. Roughly 108 hours. Folds backend, databases, TypeScript, and a chunk of AI engineering onto the frontend foundation.
- Backend Developer Path. Roughly 36 hours. Node, Express, SQL, Supabase, cybersecurity, DevOps. Assumes you already know frontend.
- AI Engineer Path. Roughly 11 hours so far. Agents, RAG, MCP, Vercel AI SDK, Cloudflare deployment. The smallest path and the most actively expanding.
Some standalone courses are Pro as well, with only a few sample scrims open: Advanced React (18.8 hours, three samples), React Router, Learn Responsive Web Design (15.1 hours, four samples), Learn CSS Grid and Learn Flexbox (three and four samples), Intro to AI Engineering and Prompt Engineering for Web Developers (five samples each), and JavaScript Interview Challenges (two samples).
You also get unlimited coding challenges (not the ten-total cap), the Pro-only Discord channels (code reviews, instructor and career channels) on top of the basic Discord access every free account has, certificates of completion for paths you finish (LinkedIn-shareable), and any Pro courses Scrimba adds during your subscription period. Pro also raises the Scrimba Explain quota from 10 AI video explainers for life to 100 a month, and the monthly allowance renews.
Annual vs monthly
Annual billing has the lower per-month rate, roughly half of the monthly rate. Check the exact ratio on the official page since it moves with promotions. Study consistently for three months or more and annual pays for itself.
If you want flexibility (a sabbatical month, an exam period), the monthly plan has no commitment beyond the current month and can be cancelled from the account settings. You keep access until the end of the paid period and your progress is preserved if you come back.
Refunds
Scrimba publishes a seven-day money-back guarantee on first purchase. See the official refund article for the canonical policy, or our refund policy summary for the readable version.
Where you can save
Four legitimate ways to pay less:
- Annual billing. The simplest and largest discount versus paying monthly.
- Student discount. Available with a valid academic email. The discount percentage varies by promotion; the student discount guide walks through the eligibility check.
- GitHub Student Developer Pack. One free month of Pro for verified students. Worth claiming if you are eligible.
- Partner discount. The affiliate link on this page applies a discount at checkout (typically 20% off Pro). A one-time banner confirms the discount when you land on Scrimba; you can close it and keep exploring courses for free, no purchase required. It works for new subscribers; verify the final price before paying.
There is no universal public coupon for Scrimba. Coupon-aggregator sites that promise "Scrimba 50% off codes" are recycling expired promotions or affiliate partner links. If a number looks too good, it is.
How Scrimba compares to a coding bootcamp
A typical bootcamp in 2026 costs between roughly $10,000 and $24,000 for a few months of full-time instruction, plus career services, with the average landing around $14,000. That range tracks the long-running market data published by Course Report, whose surveys have put the average full-time bootcamp near the middle of that band for years. That is the comparison most "is Scrimba worth it" discussions have in mind.
Scrimba is two orders of magnitude cheaper, and it has none of the things bootcamps charge for: real-time instruction, a cohort to study with, a designated career coach, employer relationships. Self-motivated learners with momentum can substitute Scrimba for a bootcamp. Learners who need accountability, or who would not finish a self-paced course without external pressure, get more out of a bootcamp's structure.
A useful side-by-side is on the Scrimba vs Bootcamps page.
Where Pro isn't worth it
- JavaScript-centric. Scrimba is built around the JavaScript and TypeScript stack, with Python as a second-tier option. If your career goal is Java, Go, Rust, mobile (Swift/Kotlin), or data science, skip Pro.
- No live cohorts. Self-paced video plus Discord, not a scheduled bootcamp.
- Module-by-module breakdowns are not available for every course. Where this site has a full module list it shows one; where it does not, the page says so. Always confirm the current curriculum on Scrimba's own course page.
- Course counts drift. Old courses get retired, new ones launch. The catalog tracker on this site is updated nightly from Scrimba's structured data and may reflect a different count than Scrimba's own marketing pages on any given day.
Decide on the format first, not the price
Pricing on Scrimba shifts by region and by promotion. Try a real scrim before reading another comparison. 7-day refund on first purchase, cancel anytime, progress saved if you pause.
FAQ
Really free. There is no time limit on the free tier. About 24 full courses (including Learn React and Learn JavaScript) and up to ten interactive challenges across the whole platform are available without paying. You do not need a credit card to use the free tier.
Two orders of magnitude cheaper. A typical bootcamp in 2026 costs $10,000 to $24,000 (averaging around $14,000) for a few months of instruction. Scrimba Pro is a subscription at a fraction of that. The bootcamp pays for instructor time, cohort structure, and career services, which Scrimba does not provide.
Yes. Cancel from your account billing settings. You keep access until the end of the paid period and your progress is preserved if you resubscribe. Refunds within seven days of first purchase are documented in the official Scrimba help centre.
Yes, if you qualify for both. Verify the final price at checkout before paying; promotions and student verification flows change.
Start with the free tier. About 24 full courses including Learn React and Learn JavaScript are enough to build a portfolio if you treat the lessons as practice rather than entertainment. Then re-evaluate Pro once you have shipped two or three small projects on your own.
Annual billing is the single biggest saving versus monthly. Stack a student discount or the GitHub Student Developer Pack if you qualify, and the affiliate partner link applies a further discount at checkout for new subscribers. There is no universal public coupon; ignore "50% off code" aggregator sites.