I have been starting to learn how to write mobile applications with Xamarin to contribute to a friend's project and had not heard of Xamarin University until I saw this comment. Now that I have looked at it, I'm a little confused. I can understand charging for 1-on-1 help, interactive classes, and certification exams, but why wouldn't "recorded class videos, class labs and materials" be free? Don't you want it to be easy for people to use your software so that people will? Charging $1995/year for learning materials seems pretty steep.

The learning investment is what makes me most hesitant to use Xamarin. It was supposed to be less of a learning investment because we all have C#/.NET experience, but now I'm not so sure. It now seems like we're going to have to dive deep into learning iOS and Android specific UI concepts anyway, and on top of that learn Xamarin concepts and quirks, and if we want to continue using Visual Studio when the trial is up we'll have to pay $1000/year. Maybe we're just not the target market.