Chess Course Price-Per-Hour Calculator
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- Chess Course Tools
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Calculated from the figures you entered. Listed hours are not study time.
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Enter a course's price and its listed hours and the calculator gives the cost per listed hour, then the cost per hour you finish if you tell it what share you expect to complete. Treat the result as a way to compare two courses on the same terms. It is not a measure of value or a prediction of how long learning takes.
Two warnings before you start
Listed hours are not study time. A seller's hours are normally the running time of the video. They do not include the time you spend on exercises, replaying a section, reviewing positions or taking a break. Where a course has puzzles or lines to repeat, your study time can be a multiple of the footage, and a seller's page rarely says what the multiple is. The calculator lets you enter your own.
Chessable base prices do not include full video. A Chessable course page can show two prices, one for the interactive course and a higher one with the full video. In our catalogue, 25 Chessable courses show both, and the video price is more than three times the base price in all 25 (calculated from the listed figures, as of 8 November 2026). The Woodpecker Method, for example, listed $39.99 for the base course with 1 hour 55 minutes of video and $199.98 with 23 hours 59 minutes. Use the price and the hours from the same version, or the result will be wrong.
How to use it
- Pick a course from the catalogue to fill in its price and hours, or type your own.
- Choose the price you would pay: list, or sale if the page shows one.
- Enter the share of the listed hours you expect to finish. The default of 100% means every listed hour.
- Optionally enter how many study hours each listed hour will take you, and your weekly study time.
The calculator reports four figures: the price per listed hour, the price per listed hour you finish, the time to finish at your weekly pace, and the cost per week while you are studying it. If you have no basis for the percentage, run it at several values and read the spread.
What the results do not say
A low price per hour does not mean a good course. A two-hour course with the one lesson you need can be better value than a thirty-hour course you will not finish. A coach's hour is not a course hour, as chess coach or course explains. The calculator uses one price and one set of hours, so it cannot compare a subscription with a course, which is the job of the subscription break-even calculator.
ChessMood is a particular case. Its course rows show the Essential annual plan price, which covers the whole library, so dividing the $948 yearly price by one course's hours is meaningless. For the four ChessMood courses that also show a standalone price, the calculator uses that price. For the plan, see ChessMood pricing, plans and refunds.
Where the default figures come from
The figures in the course picker come from our catalogue, read on 8 November 2026. Prices and hours can change, so confirm them on the price and refund tracker and on the seller's page. Several catalogue rows have no hours at all, and the calculator does not guess them. It asks you to type the figure in. To find courses to compare in the first place, use the course finder or the repertoire course mapper, and read how to choose a chess course for the other checks that matter. See the tools hub for the rest, and how we review for what this site can establish. Nobody at ChessCourseFinder has taken any of these courses.