Hi Lisa. As everyone else mentioned, SM provides a service...this service costs money (i.e., site bandwidth, paying the contractors for development and creation of the tutorials, etc.). Dave and Kev are more than fair with prices and you have to think about the tradeoffs....you get ppl who want the video tuts step-by-step, with no tweaks skipped....this amounts to a lot of parts and thus more points that have to be spent. They could make weaker and shorter content but would that be worth investing in? If you look at competitor prices, SM does as good if not better. And, lastly, like you already mentioned, Maya IS high-end software...if someone downloads PLE to try it out, there are plenty of freebie tuts out there (including ones at SM) that would get the person up and running enough to decide whether or not the software is worth buying, which is the point of PLE in the first place.