I've joined Domestika in 2020, I started off with buying a bundle on sale and a year or so later subscribed to Plus Membership.If I were to rate it back then I would have probably gave it a 4 star review, Unfortunately, For myself personally I have noticed that both the instructional quality and user experience have suffered a noticeable decline.ill start with the issues I had at the start:Scrolling through the courses was a nightmare (still is) the filters were very basic (and still are) by the time you selected a few save to a list of probable purchases hours have gone by, then you have to sift through the unreliable "reviews" that are always 90+% positive due to the 'Review course receive 20% Discount' offer that was always promoted. You cannot filter the reviews to find more honest or negative but had to click and scroll through hundreds if not thousands 3-5 word reviews.and the fact that you cannot preview the course before buying also made it frustrating.I hoped I could get around this by subscribing to Plus, as It claims access to "1,000+ courses that are free.. 100+ new courses are added every week."they don't tell you that you do not have access to these courses per say, but allowed to view the modules, no access to the community forums & resource files.also you only had a selection of courses to view on Plus that had a limited time span of approx. 1/2 weeks and they were unlisted, a lot available that was to view I had no interest in, but it was at least handy for when a course I had in my list of interest was added to Plus, I could watch and decide if it was worth purchasing.So From this year:I cancelled my subcription last year, due to not having the time to watch and complete the courses and I had built up a few credits that I had some moths time left to spend. I had intentions of returning to Plus this year but the first thing that put me off was that I hadn't noticed any change in the overall webpage layout which is fairly outdated and the issues above hadn't changed.also the monthly subscription a few months back was DOUBLED, I expect a price increase in any product and services every year or so, I wasn't expecting it to jump from €9.90 to approx. €22 a month, As of today it has risen AGAIN to €30.90 a month!.I've had issues with a course that was advertised as having English audio, It was a terrible AI generated voice over, that sounded appalling and also spoke gibberish at times. which according to a lot of reviews on the site itself under many courses this is happening a lot. they are cutting corners with the translated subtitles too. A lot of the courses just don't measure up to the older ones. The instruction isn’t as clear or engaging, and there’s a noticeable dip in overall quality, which I cant put my finger on specifically. I'm going to assume this is down to the production team or the corporate CEOs. flooding the site with lower standard courses, Also a LOT of repetitive subjects and mediums.this is unfair to a lot of genuine creators on the site who have very good courses, it completely undermines them and devalues their content and their courses are lost.they really need to over hall the content on the site, date they courses in chronological order, have honest reviews and have a minimum standard. and bringing youtube big names etc wont cut it, in my opinion.I forgot to mention that getting an exchange for a course has been difficult, I currently contacted them about a request I made to exchange and they just removed the course from my list and didn't offer a refund or exchange. Now they are just passing me on emails to contact for issues, don't know if its even worth chasing.Apologies for the long write up, I just wanted to point out my issues as I've noticed a lot of people got caught out with the yearly subscription.also (sorry :D) I notice they done away with the bundles offer, but are offering gift cards that look similar, I don't know if you can buy them for yourself?sorry again for long post, I currently do not recommend Domesitka, someone should really make a site promoting the best and worst courses on these platforms to help people decide on what to purchase on similar platforms, as there are good and great courses out there, but hard to know which is which.
