Why I canceled my subscription on Pluralsight

Right before the CSSLP exam I had found out that there’s a great course on CSSLP on Pluralsight by Kevin. I’ve bought a subscription to prepare for exam & I wanted to share my experience there.

Joining pluralsight

Pluralsight membership is filled with those tiny * all over the membership with a disclaimers.

• Free 10 day trial - as a guest you cannot see any videos from a ISC - that’s expected to prevent from unauthorized downloads. When you join and attach a payment card - you are getting a free 10-day trial. Well except that it’s only 100 minutes of content & you cannot watch it offline, which they fail to mention.

Apps & overall experience

• Mac player - So during my exam preparation, I was using Mac dual-wielding notes app on one side & Pluralsight app on the other. Every time you pause, control pops op in front of slide & you cannot stop & read text. You need to go there, click on the app and after that it’ll continue. Waste of time.

• Linux Performance - Also I had my Linux machine where I used browser to watch videos. Due to some codecs or just player, performance was a nightmare. I have a decent dell laptop with a 8 cores & 32 gb of ram, but for some reason when watching videos & typing in terminal it was sluggish and unresponsive.

• Speed sync - One more thing that I didn’t like, as I went with CISSP course - that you cannot sync watch speed between machines. I felt comfortable watching at x2 speed, but every time you log in - you need to change player settings.

• Video Quality - That’s probably more complaint to video creator - but sometimes he had uploaded videos with 720p quality, sometimes 1080p, and player had freaked out on that - just refusing to play some of my videos. I had to contact support to resolve it, since it refused to play 2 videos whatever I did.

• Badges and gamification - that’s just distracting. It works in browser, but does not in application. You cannot just watch video one by one, after each chapter it stops to congratulate you.

Terminating membership

• membership degradation - So I decided to terminate my membership. I went through the form & stopped it. Then I found another funny thing - as any other service, after terminating membership, you have some amount of days left till the 30-days subscription period. But your membership was already degraded, so for example I found out about online tests as part of CISSP course which I was not able to access anymore.

TLDR

I wish I could just spend some money & buy specific course to have it available offline (just like you buy DVD’s or movies in stores) instead of requiring monthly subscription.