What does it cost to teach AI literacy to a class of thirty?

For a class of thirty you can teach a full semester of AI literacy for somewhere between nothing and about fifty dollars, plus the adult hours. The tools are free at the tier a school needs, the devices are whatever you already have, and the only thing genuinely worth paying for is curriculum — material somebody else has written, sequenced and tested so you are not building it at eleven at night.

The costs that catch people out are not the ones on the invoice.

What is free and stays free

Google Classroom, Docs, Sheets and Forms are free for schools and usable by anyone with a Google account. The consumer tiers of the major AI assistants are free and sufficient for teaching — you are demonstrating capability and failure, not running production workloads. Nothing in a well-designed AI literacy course needs a paid model.

Devices are usually a non-issue too, because the subject runs fine on one shared screen for the first several weeks. If you have a Chromebook trolley, good; if you have a projector, that is enough.

What curriculum should cost

This is where the range is enormous. Per-seat platform subscriptions for AI or computer-science curricula commonly run into the tens of dollars per student per year, which for thirty students is a recurring line item somebody has to defend every budget cycle. At the other end, free open resources exist and are often excellent and almost always unsequenced — you get materials, not a course, and the assembly is your evenings.

The middle is a one-time purchase of a complete semester. For reference, ZEROTH is fifty dollars for a Classroom license covering up to thirty learners for a Semester, bought once, with no renewal and no account. Thirty dollars covers a Family license of up to six. We publish those numbers because the comparison is the argument.

The three costs nobody budgets for

Adult preparation. The real currency. A curriculum that needs ten hours of prep a week has cost more than any license fee, and it will be quietly abandoned by November. Ask how long a lesson takes to prepare, and be suspicious of any answer that assumes you already know the subject.

Training days. Some platforms require certification before you may teach their material. That is a day of your life plus a cover cost, and it recurs when the platform updates.

Lock-in. A subscription course stops working when the subscription stops. Student work inside a vendor platform usually leaves with the vendor. A course that installs into your own Google account and produces ordinary Docs and Sheets is still there in three years whatever happens to the publisher — including if the publisher goes away.

The questions to ask a vendor

Four questions separate real costs from advertised ones. What is the total for thirty learners for a year, including everything? What happens if we stop paying — do we keep anything? Where does student work live, and who else can see it? How many hours of adult preparation does a lesson actually take?

A vendor who answers all four plainly is worth talking to. A vendor who needs a call to answer the first one has told you the answer.

A worked comparison

Thirty learners, one semester, roughly eighteen hours of student work. A per-seat platform at twenty dollars a head is six hundred dollars, recurring annually, with a training day and student work held on their servers. A free open resource is nothing on the invoice and perhaps thirty hours of your own assembly and sequencing, which at any honest valuation of a teacher's time is the most expensive option in the list. A one-time semester purchase is fifty dollars, kept forever, installed into your own account in an afternoon.

The right answer depends on what you have more of, money or evenings. Most co-op leaders we talk to have neither, which is why the middle option exists.