March 2026
Why we built CodeWithPurpose
What began as a frustration with $15,000 bootcamps became a movement to make coding education free for every student, everywhere.
A few years ago, one of us looked up the price of a coding bootcamp. Fifteen thousand dollars. For a high schooler, that number might as well be a million. We kept thinking about all the kids who would never even get to find out whether they loved this stuff.
So we did the most student thing possible: we decided to teach it ourselves, for free. We recorded lessons after homework, ran workshops on weekends, and put everything online where anyone could reach it.
The first few students showed up. Then a few hundred. Then we started getting messages from countries we had to look up on a map. That was the moment CodeWithPurpose stopped being a project and became a mission.
Today we're a nonprofit fiscally sponsored by Hack Club, with 4,000+ students in 130+ countries. The plan hasn't changed since day one: keep it free, keep it real, and keep showing up for the next student who wants in.
Written by the CodeWithPurpose team