> I'm all for being frugal, but from my few interactions with Nick's blog, he appears to like to nickel and dime almost everything

I don't think those are fair comparisons but if you did buy my course, thanks for the support (it really helps).

Now for the fun stuff, let's break down those posts you linked!

I built the standing desk because it fits my exact use case for what I want in a standing desk and I have the ability to build it, so I built it. Price wasn't even a factor, it just so happens you can build something cool for $50 so I did it.

I wanted a 3 tier desk:

A top tier for my 2 monitors

A middle tier for my keyboard and mouse to fit exactly at the height where my posture is perfect

And finally a bottom tier for my regular desk with enough room where I can use a laptop and do other "desk things" without the standing portion getting in the way. I also happened to have this regular desk beforehand and think it's a great size for my office. I had no reason to switch it.

Very shortly after building it, I built a 4th tier where I now have a stylus / drawing pad hovering over my keyboard on a ledge and it doesn't get in the way so I can draw live slides in my courses. You can see a picture in another blog post you missed where I built an 8x4 whiteboard for $15[0] (:D). Oh and my mic's boom arm latches on from the side now where it doesn't get in my way at all and minimizes keyboard rumble.

There's no standing desk at any price point that accomplishes all of the above in a way that works for me. To me what I built is the perfect desk because it addresses everything I need it to address. The fact it was only $50 (well $60 now due to adding that 4th tier) is just a nice side effect.

[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/build-your-own-8x4-foot-white...

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As for the Toshiba Chromebook. After dozens of hours of research and a few recommendations I picked it up because it's an amazing piece of hardware. A 1080p display, IPS panel, good keyboard, good trackpad, upgradeable SSD, weighs less than 3 pounds, SD card, USB ports, 3.5" jack (!), decent battery life and it runs native Linux.

Why wouldn't I use it? Sure it costs $350 (fairly cheap in price) but why would I purposely spend more money for something equal or worse just for the sake of it? I still use it all the time 3+ years later and it's working fine for what I use it for (a portable computing device where I can do on the road dev work or comfortably read outside or in bed).

If you squint you can see that Toshiba getting some usage when I went to Cloud Field Day last year. I'm in the back left: http://nickjanetakis.com/assets/blog/cards/coming-back-to-cl...

> IIRC he also has a course where he teaches you to build a SaaS app with flask, but you don't build it from scratch - he starts with a fully built app and walks you through it/has you implement parts of it. It's a project he used for clients, and instead of investing time to reimplement it from scratch he just made a course based on the existing app (which is fine and better than no course, but an example of his frugality)

We don't build it from scratch because it's a very involved app. It has 4,000+ lines of just Flask code. You can't make a video course and code something like that up line by line from scratch. It would be an unreasonable amount of video (possibly even approaching 100 hours of video), and when I asked thousands of people if they would rather have an 80+ hour course or a ~10 hour course they all picked 10 hours.

This is also made aware on the course description's FAQ at https://buildasaasappwithflask.com (near the bottom, 2nd FAQ item down from the top) so I'm not trying to hide it and we also do cover every single line of the code and you get to see it all come together from 1 file to the final app in stages, and you have git diffs to see what changed between each section. There's also 50 to 100 hours worth of coding exercises to add features into the app to get experience building specific things.

That decision wasn't due to frugality. It was out of necessity and user feedback. It also took me almost half a year of full time work to make the course. If anything it would have been faster to do it live from scratch because then I wouldn't have had to break things up so carefully into sections. The course is based on -some- existing production code I used in the past, but that's not a negative thing. It just means I used well tested code in the course instead of building some untested toy example for the sake of the course.

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Lastly, just to wrap up, you skipped commenting on my audio / video set up. I spent close to $1,000 on everything and the reason I spent that much is because I felt it made a big enough difference in the quality of my audio to warrant spending that amount.

I could have just bought a Blue Yeti for $100 bucks and called it a day (I actually did this in the past, which I didn't factor into the above cost since I don't use it anymore) but I didn't stick with it because I believe the set up I use now produces better audio than my older videos. Basically I spend money when I feel like it makes a positive difference.

If there were a $100 keyboard that's better than the one I'm using now in every way shape and form with zero compromises I would instantly buy it, but I don't feel like typing is my bottleneck and I haven't found such a keyboard.