Honest review of the paid Pirple.com programming courses

First of all, this article is not meant to be rude or be against the Pirple platform at all, it's meant to be an honest review and critique instead, so I'm not being a Karen (you'll understand why I'm saying that later)! This is quite weird, I know, but someone really needs to say something and publish a public opinion about this online platform that sells programming courses, from a programmer's point of view.

So, in order to publish an opinion about the platform, the courses, and their implementation, of course, I had to buy the courses bundle for around $30 USD. 

Are Pirple.com courses a scam?

They are not a scam, not at all. As soon as you buy access to their courses and you log in, the courses are there:

All of them have content and it's technical so it's all ok by now 👍. The guy that talked the whole course, didn't say his name, but the stuff that he talked about did make sense. It feels like, someone hired the guy (an engineer) to make the video and that's it. The programming fundamentals are indeed OK.

But before buying access to those courses, I strongly urge you to finish reading this article, please.

What's wrong with Pirple then?

There are some things wrong with this platform, and I'm going to explain everything that I've found and experimented with it until now.

1. Buying isn't an option, they are encouraging you to do it in no more than 40 minutes

The first problem with this platform is the invasive and oppressive methodology that they use to sell the courses. As soon as you land on the Pirple page, you will land on a flash sale message that notices you that there are only about 40 minutes remaining to buy the courses at little cost, take it or leave it!

If you let that time pass and visit the page once again, the price of each individual course will increase BRUTALLY (from $5 USD to almost $350 USD):

Note as well that the page detects your IP and outputs the price in your country's currency, which in my case is Colombia. $1,380,000 COP for a Frontend Fundamentals course, ARE YOU F****K KIDDING ME? The National Minimum Wage in Colombia is $908,526 COP, do these courses teach you how to cure cancer or what?

Of course, this isn't true at all, because if you try to buy one of those cancer-curing courses, they will tell you that the offer is still available and you can get access to all the courses for about $30 USD.

2. No refunds, seriously?

As mentioned on their refund policy page, they won't refund your money if you decide to buy access to their courses:

Yep, that's right, in plain 2021, even during a pandemic. All the important online platforms that sell courses allow buyers to get a refund, even though they may have had access to all of the lectures. Pirple decides for you whether their content is to your liking or not.

This is probably the main reason why many people complain and mistrust this website, because of their refund policy.

3. Many people have complained about Pirple

There are a couple of tweets like the following one:

And there's even a big discussion in Reddit. about a year ago as well, that mentions that he subscribed for about 2 months and he was extremely underwhelmed. It's at its best just another Udemy course but it's actually way worse because there is no Q&A section or anything of help except their Facebook group that is kind of dead, and there's no customer support at all.

So, some people are kind of unsatisfied with what they bought. And above all, the bitter cherry on the cake comes in the next point. It's worth mentioning that although there are bad reviews, there are good reviews as well.

4. Their FAQ for unsatisfied customers isn't precisely professional

I know that clients can get rude sometimes, but you as a company, cannot answer in the same tone to customers:

You cannot beat bullying by doing more bullying. However Pirple does this publicly in their FAQ 🤣.

5. Their course platform is generic

Pirple.com isn't a page that has been built from scratch and whose details have been carefully designed. Nope, Pirple is the result of a project built with Thinkific. A tool that allows users to quickly upload, drag & drop content to create the perfect curriculum of their platform to sell courses online.  The platform helps to keep students engaged with rich multimedia course content, supporting:

• Video
• Text
• Downloads
• Quizzes
• Survey
• Discussions
• Typeform
• Google Docs
• Captivate
• Articulate

This isn't bad at all, the point of this critique is that it lacks resources for developers to run code in the same platform just as many other platforms do. An inline code editor to solve programming tasks and so on. The markdown that they render on the tasks that don't include videos but just text, isn't made to display code properly.

Final words

So, why did I wrote this article? As they answer in their unpolite Angry Questions answer "We're sure that there are many people in the world who value your opinion. None of those people work here.". It's my blog and I will share my opinion with whoever google's more about the reliability of Pirple.com, simply because they're charging real money, from unsuspecting people who don't read the fine print on sites like this.

As an experimented programmer, I need to tell you this clearly, the content isn't bad, however, you will find for sure the same content of the Pirple courses for free on the internet and YouTube, seriously, and even if you still want to spend money for that knowledge, there are better premium courses on the web and other platforms like Udemy and Coursera. Just because, as of now, they are basically selling all the courses, which may be not want I want, because what if I don't have a god damn iMac to test my stuff from the Swift course (Mac and iOS apps)?. If you are just looking for knowledge about multiple things, then, the courses are indeed a good deal.

One of the positive things is that they offer those certificates that you can place on your Linkedin profile, that by the way are just proof that you finished the courses (they are not accredited), which makes it a very small plus on your resume, so, it's totally up to you. However, you, as the client, have the final voice in all this. If you got the money and you're sure that spending those $30 dollars won't harm your financial situation, do it, I'm sure you may learn something that you didn't know from the courses, as that's one of the reasons why people complain and condemn Pirple, because they have to pay and there's no refund available.