Been following the Nick Bester / Best Athletics stuff for a while now as a Brit.
He's actually followed a similar YouTube path as someone like SJD - initially a fairly humble & quirky guy, lots of talent, interesting to follow. Obviously that went to his head and he went off the deep end as most youtubers do.
Even this time last year I'd heard about the INSANE cost of his plans. At this point I think it was something like £75/month for a copy/pasted plan, £100/month with some amount of communication with Nick. So already, mental.
Nick then saw personal success and growth of "the Brand" in 2022. The plans went up (and the person I knew on one stopped due to this) but obviously demand remained.
Then in autumn 2022, in the midst of Berlin/London/whatever other marathons he was doing, the prices went astronomical. £180/month + £20/month for membership of Best Athletics (for contrast, a typical UK club affiliated with UK Athletics is about £30/year), plus kit costs.
This started some waves on social media. What on earth could you be getting for £180/month through online coaching? The "coaching roster" expanded too, so you potentially wouldn't even be "coached" by Nick. I'd suggest taking a look because it honestly gets worse haha.
Nick advertises on his coaching page that he's a "certified run leader". That's the "Leadership in running fitness" (LiRF) course that anyone wanting to lead a group run and be insured through England/Wales/Scottish/Northern Irish Athletics has to have. I've done the course, 30% of it is about risk assessments, another 30% is about safeguarding. The running specific content is almost entirely focussed on warm-ups for large groups of new runners at C25k level. So it's interesting to see (Sweat Elite has followed up in comments) that for this cost Nick is still copy/pasting plans.
There's been various discussions about this taking place on "uk running twitter" - but I think this has been the straw that's broken the camel's back in terms of people coming in to the running scene and being absolute snake-oil salesmen. I don't disagree that Sweat Elite's plans are also questionable in value, but Nick really went a step beyond in the past few months.
Am very keen to see how this unfolds.