Is It Cheaper to Pay for a Bootcamp or Date for a Year?

On the day you pay, dating costs less up front. A Bootcamp is one large price, and dating is a lot of small ones. But the two are not the same purchase. The Bootcamp trains the skill of meeting women in person. A year of dating spends money on dates, whether or not that skill ever improves.

So the useful comparison is not price against price. It is what each one leaves you with when it ends.

A Cold Approach Bootcamp has public prices. Group is three consecutive days at a 3:1 student-to-coach ratio, and it costs $3,000. Private is fully one-on-one, and it costs $1,750 for one day, $3,000 for two days or $4,000 for three days.

Every training day is two four-hour blocks in the field. You approach women in real places, your coach is beside you, and you get feedback after every set. At the end you leave with a written practice plan.

Nobody can give you one honest number here, because it depends on how you date. So count your own. Take a pen and add up these lines for twelve months:

• Subscriptions to dating apps, and any paid boosts on top.
• Drinks, coffees and dinners on first dates, including the ones that go nowhere.
• Transport and parking to get to those dates.
• Clothes, haircuts and anything else you buy because a date is coming.
• Your evenings, which are not free even though nobody sends you an invoice.

Most men have never added this up. The total is usually larger than they guessed, because every small charge feels too minor to track.

Here is where the comparison tilts. A year of dating with no change in how you meet women tends to cost the same amount again next year. You pay each time and learn little, because nobody is watching what you do.

A Bootcamp is a one-time purchase of feedback. A coach sees the hesitation before you walk over, the first thirty seconds, the way you end the conversation. a dating coach says that "sometimes major mistakes you're making in the field can be corrected with literally one comment." You cannot find that comment alone, because you are inside the mistake.

If the skill changes, every later year costs you less than the one before it. That is the case for paying once.

The year wins in a few cases. If you are already meeting the women you want and getting the dates you want, you have nothing to fix. If you will not go out and approach no matter who stands beside you, a Bootcamp will not help either. Nobody can walk up to a woman for you.

It also wins if the price would put real strain on your money. A Bootcamp is worth buying when you can afford it and will use it. It is not worth a loan.

It tends to win for the man who has been trying alone for a long time and has the same results he had a year ago. He has already spent the year, and the receipt shows it.

It also wins for the man who locks up. Approach anxiety does not shrink by paying more for dates, because the dates never start. a dating coach says most men "lose the girl not because they did something wrong. They hesitated." A coach beside you works on exactly that moment.

Finally, it wins for a man who values his time. Years of trial and error cost evenings, and evenings are the thing you cannot buy back.

The Bootcamp does not replace dating. It changes how you meet the people you go on dates with. You still take the coffees and dinners afterward, only with more of them coming from women you chose to talk to.

No honest coach can promise a number of dates, a girlfriend or any specific result. What you can count on is the training, the live correction and the written plan.

Write down what you spent on dating in the last twelve months. Then write down what changed in how you meet women over the same period. If the first number is large and the second is blank, you already know which one is costing you more.