A few weeks ago we released several changes to our Pluralsight On-Demand! subscription plans and features. Since the transition, many customers have requested that we move forward with our new Monthly Plus option sooner than we had originally planned. We listened, acted quickly, and shipped Monthly Plus last week!

The new Monthly Plus subscription, which costs $49 per month, gives you the ability to watch all courses in the library plus the ability to download exercise files, course slides, and the previously recorded webcasts, at less than half of our old monthly price.

If you were a Standard Monthly subscriber before the change took place, you can upgrade your current Monthly subscription to Monthly Plus by simply sending us an email with your request. We’ll upgrade your account for the rest of your current term at no charge to you, and then you’ll be billed $49 on your next billing cycle.

Everyone else can sign-up for a free 10-day trial subscription to Monthly Plus in just a few clicks.  Happy learning!

Today we released our new website. If you take a look around, you’ll notice a few big changes that signal a shift in strategy for Pluralsight moving forward.

As part of this release, we lowered our pricing and restructured our subscription plans. We realize these changes may cause confusion for some of our existing customers, and we apologize for that in advance. We’ve tried to anticipate as many of your questions as possible and we’ve documented the answers below.

Please leave us a comment if you have additional questions and we’ll continue to update this post over the next week or two.

What happened? Everything looks different.

In an effort to simplify, we decided to rename and retire a few of our subscription plans. We believe these changes will provide a better user experience.

One of the biggest changes is that we’re no longer selling our Premium and Ultimate subscriptions that came bundled with Virtual Classroom training “vouchers”. After making that decision, we also realized that the old subscription names weren’t as descriptive as simply “Monthly” and “Annual”.

So we decided to simplify those with a little renaming. The following table shows how the old subscription names map to the new ones we just released today:

We also introduced a new Monthly Plus subscription that provides several download features not available with the Monthly subscription.

* Of course, we’ll continue to honor the Premium and Ultimate subscriptions for the next 12 months and provide all of the features and benefits associated with them.

Will these price changes take effect automatically? What if I have a subscription that auto-renews?

Yes, these changes will automatically take effect for all of our existing subscribers. If you were a Standard or Professional subscriber, you will now see the new subscription name associated with your account next time you login.

If you were a monthly subscriber before the change, you will now be billed the new Monthly rate ($29) on your next billing cycle.

You don’t have to do anything but enjoy the new price.

If you’d prefer to move to our new Monthly Plus subscription, simply email us your request and we’ll upgrade your account for the rest of your current term at no extra charge to you. Then you’ll be billed $49 on your next billing cycle.

We’ve also taken the liberty to disable auto renewal for all of our current Annual subscribers, just to avoid any unwanted surprises. If you’d like to enable auto-renewal for your Annual subscription, just drop us a line.

When signing up for a new Annual subscription in the future, you’ll be able to configure this up front. We’re also working on a few features that will make it possible to control credit card information and auto-renewal right within your account page.

What features come with the new subscriptions?

If you browse to our new subscription pricing page, you’ll notice it’s much simpler than it used to be. The main features of the new plans are highlighted here:

Both Monthly and Annual let you watch all courses found in the course library with unlimited viewing. There’s only one difference between Monthly and Annual: with Annual you save ~20% by getting two months for free when you pay for the whole year.

Monthly Plus let’s you watch all courses plus it includes downloadable exercise files, course slides, and previously recorded webcasts. Annual Plus gives you the same features as Monthly Plus and it also allows you to download course videos for offline viewing on your mobile devices including the iPad, iPhone, Windows Phone 7, Android, etc.

But I just bought a subscription last week!

As with anything, it kind of hurts when you buy something right before a price-drop. In order to make up for that, we’ve automatically applied upgrades to those affected the most. The following table describes the subscription upgrades we’ve applied:

Note: These upgrades have only been applied to paying subscribers. If you received a complementary subscription, you will not see an upgrade applied to your account.

Why are you retiring Premium and Ultimate?

By retiring Premium and Ultimate, we are effectively decoupling our Virtual Classroom experience from our On-Demand! subscriptions. This allows us to further reduce the cost of those plans, and makes them much easier for customers to understand.

When we say we’re “retiring” them, that means we aren’t selling them anymore. We will, of course, continue to honor the Premium and Ultimate subscriptions for the next 12 months and provide all of the features and benefits associated with them.

If you’re a Premium or Ultimate subscriber, you’ll still see “Premium” or “Ultimate” associated with your account the next time you login. And, more importantly, you’ll still have the ability to use your Virtual Classroom “vouchers”. We’ll continue to schedule Virtual Classroom training courses every month for this purpose.

Also, moving forward, anyone can sign-up for our Virtual Classroom training events on a course by course basis for $799 per seat.

In the end, Premium and Ultimate subscribers shouldn’t see anything different. You’ll enjoy the same benefits and features until your current subscription term ends, at which point you’ll choose one of the new subscription plans.

I used to be able to download “slides” and “demos” but now I can’t … why?

As we’ve listened to customer feedback for the past few years, we’ve learned that most customers would prefer lower prices for viewing the videos even if that means fewer features. So we’ve designed our new Monthly/Annual subscriptions with this in mind.

They’ve been optimized to provide full access to our On-Demand! course videos at very affordable prices, and we’ve reserved the “download” features for our Plus plans.

The ability to download exercise files (demos), course slides, and previously recorded webcasts is available through our Plus subscriptions.

Can I upgrade to a Plus subscription?

If you were a Standard Monthly subscriber before the change took place, you can upgrade your new Monthly subscription to Monthly Plus by simply sending us an email with your request. We’ll upgrade your account for the rest of your current term at no charge to you, and then you’ll be billed $49 on your next billing cycle.

If you’d rather upgrade to Annual Plus, we’ll let you upgrade for only $399, the same rate you would have paid to upgrade to our old Standard Yearly subscription before the change. You must contact us within the next few weeks to take advantage of this offer.

What’s the difference between “exercise files”, “demos”, and “hand-on labs”?

Most of the titles in our course library come with downloadable “demo” files. These files contain the source code, projects, and solutions shown within the course videos themselves. We used to make these “demos” available to all subscribers, regardless of the subscription plan, to provide a simple hands-on element. These demos no longer come with our Monthly/Annual subscriptions – only with the Plus subscriptions.

We’ve decided to beef-up what we provide in these demo files to make them more effective as an exercise vehicle. For example, we’ll now include a “before” solution as well as an “after” solution (when applicable), so it’s easier to follow along with the video and get from point A to Z. We’re also asking authors to include other helpful resources (such as setup instructions or links to related resources) when applicable.

We believe these additions will make them even more effective for “exercising” the concepts taught in the videos. Hence, we’re now calling them exercise files.

Using the exercise files, students can follow along with the video and build the same solution on their own machine, pressing pause or replay whenever they need to. We’ve ultimately found this to be a more effective learning experience overall.

Note: The downloads found in the library today have not be updated in this regard but all future titles will begin to move in this direction.

In addition to exercise files, some of our courses also come with full hands-on labs (HOLs) today that are similar to what you see in traditional classroom training with written step-by-step instructions. Unfortunately, we’ve only been able to make HOLs available for the On-Demand! courses that we also teach in the classroom setting, which is becoming a smaller subset of the course library every month.

These HOLs are only available to Premium and Ultimate subscribers today, and we will no longer provide them with future On-Demand! courses.

What happened to your “how-to” videos?

We originally provided the “how-to” video collection to make it easy for customers to find answers to specific questions. However, last year we introduced our video search capability, which makes it easy for customers to identify short 2-5 minute video clips throughout the course library based on the question at hand.

For example, if you want to find an explanation on “FaultException” in Windows Communication Foundation, you can use this search.

Then, if you click on the identified course, you’ll see the exact video clips highlighted for you to watch.

Search has completely removed the need to continue surfacing the how-to videos as a separate video collection. Now they’re just part of the course library.

We’ve also taken several major how-to video collections and bundled them into “By Example” courses, which you’ll now find listed in the course library.

Why aren’t “webcasts” listed as a feature anymore?

Due to popular demand, we’ve decided to make our weekly webcast available to the community for free! This gives both current and potential customers a way to get to know our authors and instructors in live interactive sessions. It also provides a way to pose questions about a course directly to the author who wrote it.

Although anyone can attend the live webcasts, only Plus subscribers have the ability to download and view the previously recorded sessions.

What happened to your “Guest Pass” and free samples?

Our old Guest Pass feature made it possible for customers to unlock the first few minutes of every course module by filling out a simple form.

Now, with our new free trial, you can sign-up for a 10-day full library subscription to watch whatever you want (limited to 200 min of viewing time).

How do these changes affect me as a corporate customer?

Your corporate subscription will continue unaffected with all of the same benefits and features. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact your Pluralsight sales representative and we’ll be happy to assist you.

What happened to your classroom training courses?

Although we no longer provide a separate list of classroom training courses on the website, we can deliver most of our On-Demand! courses in an onsite classroom setting. We can also create custom courses from a combination of On-Demand! topics.

We deliver these at your facility in order to better accommodate your teams, projects, and schedule. Our instructors will travel to your location, bringing their practical experience to your specific scenarios and challenges. Simply contact us for a custom quote on your next classroom training need.

We also host Virtual Classroom training events each month on our most popular On-Demand! topics. Our Virtual Classroom experiences provides the convenience of flexible online training with the personal touch of a live instructor. Have specific questions answered by an expert at the comfort of your own keyboard. No travel costs. No downtime. Pluralsight quality at an extremely affordable price.

We hope this answers your questions. Please contact us or leave a comment here if you have additional questions and we’ll do our best to respond.

Happy learning.

Change is in the air here at Pluralsight. It’s been an exciting few months as we’ve worked to roll out the changes we released today.

Check out the new www.pluralsight.com.

The year 2010 was a turning point for our company. As our team of highly-respected technical contributors continued to grow, we more than doubled the number of titles in our On-Demand! course library. We published ~70 new courses during the year on today’s most popular developer technologies, thereby increasing value every month.

But we realize it’s not  just about volume. It’s quality and relevance that matters most to our customers.  We fiercely guard our quality bar and only publish titles worthy of the Pluralsight brand. Our experienced curriculum team help guide where the library is going and what future titles make the most sense for our customers. We’re proud to work with such a talented team of developers and educators.

Each of our On-Demand! courses is designed to motivate, inspire, and effectively “tell the story” of a technology, in a language developers understand.

After all, Pluralsight is a company designed for developers, by developers.

We strive for those epiphany moments when the “light-bulb goes on” and everything just makes sense. And we know how that works for most developers.

You can see for yourself with our new free trial, which allows you to experience the Pluralsight difference for 10 days or 200 minutes, whichever comes first. What most customers immediately notice about our courses is how different they are from the other online resources available today. Our unique structure, pedagogy, and user experience produce a surprisingly effective online learning experience that can go head-to-head with traditional classroom training. But at a fraction of the cost.

As pioneers in On-Demand! developer training, we’ve spent the last several years figuring out the “sweet spot” for developer education.

And we believe this is it.

Because we are committed to this future, we’ve decided to double down our efforts to advance the On-Demand! training experience for developers and to make it even more cost-effective for our customers around the world.

If you visit our new pricing page, you’ll see we now offer a Monthly subscription for only $29 per mo, which is a 70% discount from our previous price.

In addition, our Annual plans just came down $200 per year.

We’ve also tried to simplify the number of subscription options available, which will make it easier for you to choose the plan that’s right for you.

If you’re a current subscriber, you should read this article that describes the various changes in more detail. And don’t worry, your subscription will continue uninterrupted.

We hope you’ll take a minute to check out the new www.pluralsight.com. And please leave us your feedback below.

Happy learning!

Pluralsight is focused on building an unparalleled On-Demand! course library for developers that you can access through one of our simple subscription plans.

The courses are authored by some of the most respected developers in the business, experts with a passion for technology and a gift for teaching.

Here’s a recent snapshot of our curriculum team: the core folks responsible for planning, designing, reviewing, and authoring courses around here.

Happy learning.

Welcome to the new Pluralsight blog! This blog serves as the official voice of Pluralsight, the hardcore developer training company located right here on the Web.

If you’re looking for our old blog or any of our staff blogs, browse over here.

We hope you’ll enjoy your time on our new blog. We announce new On-Demand! courses every week and we host a free weekly webcast on a variety of developer topics that you’re welcome to attend. Stay tuned to our RSS feed and you won’t miss a beat!

Happy learning.