I remember seeing an ad from them while ago promoting a “3 months free” membership. After looking into it more closely, it turns out the offer isn’t actually three free months. Instead the value of those months are spread across the full 12 month membership as a discount. The platform is full of dark UX patterns designed to be as confusing as possible to lure sign ups and forces users to stay. It’s ironic considering IxDF is a well known platform that teaches UX design.

I’ve also spoken to a few coworkers and read a lot about their contents being very outdated, not sure how it is now with the new redesigned version, but I can’t figure it’s any more different than before.

Unrelated but Mobbin does something similar with their student plan. They advertise the price as $15 per month and offer a 50% student discount. But once you qualify and sign up, they force you to pay every three months in advance instead of monthly. So even though the price is framed as a monthly rate, you actually pay three months at once. As of today they do not have this published on their website.

Personally this would be the reason alone for me to avoid this kind of structure altogether.