I just passed my private pilot checkride and I paid way too much. I decided to use a well known flight school in the Austin area. They have good instructors and good planes, but the price is out of control.
The planes rent at $130/hr, and add $40 for the instructor. I finished with 90 hours, and 60 hours of instruction. Add in books, etc, and it cost $15,000 to get my ticket.
Maybe I'm just not the best pilot and needed the extra 30 hours. But I know of two other students at this school who had at least that many hours before taking their checkride.
I don't mind paying for the instructor, in fact I always encouraged them to round up on the hours. But I went through two instructors. The first one left just as I had finished all the FAA required flying. It took three months after that to schedule the checkride - the school was not very proactive in helping out on that because of instructor turn over and generally poor morale (they're all good instructors, just not super motivated to get you where you need to be).
My advice to anyone thinking about flying lessons: Try the discovery rides and take about 5 hours at a school to make sure you like and can handle flying (I was pretty queasy for the first 10 hours). But then find 3 or 4 other people and buy a 172 or 140 or whatever, or find a quarter share and buy in, and then find a CFI to do the instruction.
Never pay money up front for a full program. The first school I looked at went out of business during the time I was training. Of course I could have paid twice for that school and come out ahead.