Why Do Some Certifications Cost Extra?

SkillCat is $10/month, and we do our absolute best to make everything fit into that $10/month subscription.
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Our entire mission is to help people get into the trades as affordably and conveniently as possible, and then help them keep growing and building skills throughout their careers. We don't want people taking on thousands of dollars of debt just to learn a trade.

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Sometimes, though, there are fees outside of our control that we have to pass on to our users. This usually happens when a certification is offered by a third-party organization that charges SkillCat for every student who gets certified.
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Whenever this happens, we try our absolute best to negotiate the lowest possible rates and pass those savings directly on to you.
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Think of SkillCat as the Costco hot dog of the trades training world. Our goal isn't to make extra money on certifications. It's to make them as affordable as we possibly can.
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In fact, SkillCat does not make more money when you take these certifications.
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Here's how it works for each certification:
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Your EPA 608 course, exam, and certification are fully included in your SkillCat membership.

The only thing that costs extra is an optional physical certification card. Producing and mailing the card costs us extra, so if you'd like one, we charge $60 per card.

You do not need to purchase the physical card to become EPA 608 certified through SkillCat. If you already have your certificate, then you can order your card from here.

NATE is a separate organization from SkillCat, and NATE charges us a fee for every student who takes their certification exam.
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We pass essentially that exact cost on to you.
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The App Store and Google Play Store also charge fees on transactions. We account for those fees when setting the price, but SkillCat is not trying to make money from the certification itself. The money we collect goes toward the costs of providing you the NATE certification.

OSHA training works a little differently. At the moment, only a limited number of organizations are authorized to provide official online OSHA 10 and OSHA 30 training, and SkillCat is not currently able to become a direct provider.
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We're working on this, and eventually we would love to offer OSHA training ourselves.
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In the meantime, we purchase OSHA courses from an approved third-party provider. We negotiate bulk discounts to get the price as low as possible, then pass those discounted rates on to SkillCat students.

BPI also charges separately for its certification materials and exams.

Instead of making you purchase their study materials separately, we built the training directly into SkillCat, so you can prepare for the certification as part of your SkillCat membership.
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For the certification exam itself, BPI charges a fee. We negotiate the cost where possible and pass that fee on to you rather than marking it up.

Whenever we can include something in your $10/month SkillCat membership, we do.

When an outside organization charges us an unavoidable fee, we may need to charge separately. But even then, we're going to fight to get the lowest price we possibly can.

Our goal is simple: help you learn the trades, earn the certifications you need, get a great job, and build a great career without taking on a bunch of debt.
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