Great question, I hope this helps you understand why...
We offer free written and video tutorials, as well as free technical support. The trainings, however, are a way to get small group training - and directly with our President, who is a Dreamweaver guru and qualified trainer.
The training curriculum often goes outside the box - how to do something custom with the products. Sometimes this includes steps outside of the products or custom code. Take double opt in verification, for example. Ray will be teaching those in the user registration webinar how to develop double opt in. This is not a 1-step interface type of job and we have a 40 minute video tutorial on this if you want to do it on your own. But if you want to learn how to do this, working with our President, and being able to ask questions live, it might be worth the money to you.
Sometimes the trainings also cover other web technologies; for example, our last training curriculum included infinite scroll with AJAX.
We have every intention of helping people develop websites more efficiently and proficiently at an affordable rate, but just like we have to charge for our extensions because of the time involved in building them, we also have to charge for our time developing and providing the trainings. You do not NEED this training to learn how to use our extensions, but our trainings will bolster the rate you learn... and we think that has inherent value to folks.
Some of our customers have told us that they like attending the webinars to give us some real world dev scenarios they are working on so we can either answer their questions in person or understand ideas they want incorporated into the products.
To Jamie: You are correct. Your support means VERY much to us. Your support fuels our development and funds our time to bring you new features and free tech support.