The 86%-Off Course and the 44%-Off Course Cost the Same. The Cheaper One Looks Like the Worse Deal.
A dated read of Udemy's development shelf shows the discount badge tracking the strikethrough price, not the price anyone actually pays.
Two courses sit side by side on Udemy's development page. One says 86% off. One says 44% off. The 44% one is cheaper.
That is not a glitch. It is the whole business model of a strikethrough price, and it is visible in a single screenshot.
The deal-tracking site Zoutons read Udemy's development catalogue on 1 September 2026, logged out and on Indian pricing. All 22 courses sold between Rs. 449 and Rs. 609 — a spread of about 1.36 times from cheapest to dearest. The struck prices printed above them ranged from Rs. 799 to Rs. 4,229 — a spread of 5.3 times.
So the real prices barely move. The reference prices move fivefold. The badge is measuring the second thing.
Fifteen of the 22 showed a discount of exactly 86 per cent — the long-running catalogue bestsellers: the Python bootcamps, the web developer courses, React, Angular, Java, the data science tracks. The newer AI and agent titles carried struck prices of Rs. 799 or Rs. 819 and showed 35 to 44 per cent — while costing the same or less.
The punchline: the cheapest course on the page, at Rs. 449, showed 44 per cent off. The dearest, at Rs. 609, showed 86 per cent. The badge runs opposite to the price.
It held. A re-read on 10 September found the promo still live in the same shape: 16 of the 22 at exactly 86 per cent off list prices of Rs. 3,199 to Rs. 4,229, with eight courses at Rs. 459, seven at Rs. 509, and one each at Rs. 449, Rs. 579 and Rs. 609.
Worth noting what Zoutons itself concedes: it cannot verify that anyone has actually paid the high struck price. Which is the point. An anchor does not need customers. It only needs to be printed.
Every creator who has ever put a line through a number is running the same machine, just with one product instead of 22.
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Editor’s note: Ninety seconds inside the anchor-pricing trick the biggest marketplace in the industry runs at scale — and every reader with a strikethrough price on their checkout page is doing a smaller version of it.
