I did almost this very thing a few years ago and it has worked out very well for me. That said, I hardly ever recommend someone do a coding bootcamp except under very specific circumstances, precisely because they are so expensive.
Year: 2013
Bootcamp cost: $7k, program unaffiliated with anything, program was just starting out, so a bit of a gamble.
Length: 10 weeks (probably too short but it worked out)
Focus: Full stack, Ruby/Rails
My background: BS and MA in biology
Circumstances: I worked in an academic research lab and the grant for my position was running out, so my timeline was pretty compressed. I also had the savings to pay for the camp plus a few more months of living expenses.
Time Commitment: I didn't do anything for three months except code and network. I was a lot of work, but less than grad school.
Outcome: I got a development job with a month of graduating (start date within 3 months of graduating, thanks holidays) and a ~$20k raise (showing how little I was making before or how much developers can make, ymmv) and have substantially increased my income every year since.
Circumstances under which I recommend a coding bootcamp:
- IF you are time-compressed
- IF you know you generally like the work
- IF the cost of the camp can be 'recouped' in close to a year (or whatever timeframe makes sense for you)
- IF you have the money, or a reasonable way of getting it, plus enough to live on till you get the job
Otherwise, I recommend working through at least some of the free stuff online. My current favorite to recommend to people is
FreeCodeCamp, because they have a good roadmap with tutorials, exercises, and projects (I've done some of the material since I was looking to help a friend with how to learn some stuff), and what appears to be a good support model with their chat and forum for when you are just entirely stuck. (note that I've never used the forum or chat, but they looked reasonably helpful)
Also, just because most of the programming resources are focused on building web apps, that doesn't mean that's all the work out there. Despite all my 'training' being on web apps, I've never built a web app professionally. Also +1 to every job being different. My first job was a small startup, but minus the workaholism (granted, they weren't going anywhere fast), and now I'm at a reasonably sized company with an amazing product/project manager and have a ton of freedom in what I'm doing on a given day and minimal stress/pressure.
Also, there seem to be an increasing number of positions where you can combine knowing how to code with other backgrounds and skills and get something like data science. If I was doing it now, I'd be looking at data science or analytics positions because I have the background for most of the stats.
Good luck! It's a fun thing, if you like the problem solving and can handle the frustration!
TL;DR I think you are making a good choices to do some learning on your own first!