is skillshare a scam

Is Skillshare a Scam? – 100% Legit But…

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The first thing should be said about the Skillshare is that it’s a training platform that contains many different types of learning materials but is Skillshare a scam that wastes your valuable time or you should really get valuable information for every single cent you pay for it?

Skillshare entered to a highly competitive market (online learning) which has big leaders like Udemy, Educadium or WizIQ but some great features included in this platform makes it worth to give it a shot.

I’ve tried to cover all parts of this platform in my review to let you know what are the advantages and disadvantages of this learning website, also by reading the conclusion section, you’ll find out if it fits your needs or not.

Just keep in mind that this review does not contain the opinion of other experts and it’s just written from my personal view. You may find other reviews of Skillshare with different opinions but I guess the final verdict would not be much different in all reviews.

To know everything about the Skillshare and find out if this training program can help you improve your knowledge in a wide range of topics significantly, I’ve gathered all the pros and cons of this company and put them all in one place so you don’t need to do anything except than reading this article completely.

I’m sure that you’ll be satisfied with all the facts you find about Skillshare here and the final decision you make will be totally logical.

Now, let’s start!

Summary

Product Name: Skillshare

Official Website: https://www.skillshare.com

Owner: Malcolm Ong & Michael Karnjanaprakor

Type: Online Learning Community

Cost to Join: 1 Month Free-Trial then $15/m

Recommended? Yes if you don’t have access to free sources

Overall Rating: 6 out of 10

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what is skillshare

Intro

Many online learning programs and platforms are available in the web world and Skillshare is just one of them which has a subscription of $15 monthly when its free 1-month trial is finished.

Doing some quick research about the background of the creator of Skillshare shows us that Michael Karnjanaprakorn has built a successful startup business called Turing Capital in the past and a team of experts with extensive experience has supported him in this business. This successful experience plus corporating with some of the most well-known persons in the tech industry like Jeff Chang (founder of Pinterest) or Lane Rettig (Ethereum developer) let us make sure that it’s a trustworthy training program

Marketing, Programming, Web Design, Technology, Finance, Writing, Entrepreneurship, etc. are only a few of classes offered by Skillshare in a wide range of different topics.

What Is Skillshare All About?

In simple words, Skillshare lets people access to many types of educational videos through a learning community. According to what Wikipedia says, this company is founded in 2010 but what is written in their official website says that it started providing online classes in 2012. During the past 10 years, the number of courses offered by this platform has increased from 500 to +23,000 and the number of people who enrolled in courses of Skillshare passed +4,000,000 which is really impressive!

And it’s more surprising to know that similar well-known platforms like Teachable or LearnWorlds have started to offer this type of online courses earlier but Skillshare could get more success in a shorter time.

One of the things I liked in Skillshare is that you can join the platform as both a student or teacher so if you are experienced in topics like photography, filmmaking, business, Illustration, etc. you can simply create a class and start teaching people in something you have knowledge about.

This is the main way of having an online income from Skillshare but if become an online teacher is not something you are passionate about then you can try your chance with survey sites like Swagbucks. It has one of the simplest options of making some extra money online and of course, it has its own pros and cons that you should know it well before giving it a try.

Just don’t forget that working on survey sites NEVER be replaced with your full-time job and it’s totally different from what learning platforms like Skillshare offer. However, some people prefer to don’t put all their Eggs in only one basket and that’s why they would like to have multiple income sources instead of one income source.

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how skillshare works

How Does Skillshare Work?

Luckily, there’s no doubt about the legitimacy of the Skillshare and there are several facts that prove this. First of all, this training website was established more than 8 years ago and it’s got an average rating of +9 out of 10 from popular review sites like TrustSpot, BBB or Trustpilot.

Of course, like any other online training platform, it is not without flaws. For example, there are some complaints from people who could not get their money back when they wanted to use the refund option for any reason.

I’ll talk about this negative point as well as other cons of Skillshare later and I just wanted to say that this platform is not 100% perfect.

How Much Does Skillshare Membership Cost?

  • 30-Day FreeTrial

It’s good to see that you can join Skillshare as a member without paying any fee at the beginning. You can use the platform for a month for completely free and check lessons and classes to see if it worths or not. Just keep in mind that you should cancel your membership BEFORE the first 30 days otherwise, you’ll be billed automatically every month.

  • Premium Membership

For $15/m, you’ll have unlimited access to all features of Skillshare and you can enroll to all classes. Also if you decide to get yearly membership, your monthly fee will be decreased to $8.25/monthly and you’ll be billed $99 annually.

skillshare review

Skillshare – Likes & Dislikes

What I Liked,

  • Experts with Extensive Experience

Some members who sign up in the platform as a teacher or coach are already famous entrepreneurs and since they’re sharing their own experience with you, the offered courses/classes are very useful and informative.

  • Risk-Free Training Platform

You can join Skillshare and leave it anytime without paying a single penny within the first 30 days of the registration. Generally, programs, companies, and platforms that are completely sure about their services offer this type of free-trial because they know that people will come back to them or upgrade their membership as soon as they see the quality of the program

  • Available for Both Android & iOS

You don’t need to worry about the supported platform because programmers of Skillshare’s app designed it for both Android and iOS users. That would enjoyable to open Skillshare app and start to learn new things while you are on your way to work or university.

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What I Didn’t Like

  • Making Money IS NOT Easy with Skillshare

You know how many coaches and teachers are offering courses on the platform? More than 20,000. They all want to have a side-income from Skillshare and they’ve more experience than you because they’ve started to offering courses sooner.

Anyway although it’s not impossible but this big 20,000 community makes it really hard to stand out from the crowd. So think twice before jumping into the program and creating your classes.

  • ANYBODY Can Be an Instructor!

Don’t get me wrong! I don’t mean that quality of classes on Skillshare is low vice versa there are tons of high-quality courses but the problem is that Skillshare DOES NOT have any placement test to evaluate knowledge of the teachers.

This opens the doors to ALL people to become a teacher in the platform and offer their training classes in any subject. This means a person can create classes and teach graphic design even if he/she has no idea about Photoshop!

  • Risk of Losing Money!

When you want to make money but you lose money instead, this called “You’ve got scammed!”. It’s sad to say that this happens for some coaches in Skillshare. I’ll explain more about this later but for now, I just say that there’s a black method is used by Skillshare which does not let members (especially teachers) receive the real amount of money that their classes generate.

  • You May Pay $99 Instead of $15!

There are some complaints and negative feedback about the charging process of Skillshare. According to what some clients say, Skillshare charged them $99 instead of $15 at the end of the 30-day free trial.

On their website, it clearly says that your free membership will be upgraded to premium membership after the free trial period but it never say that you’ll be charged annually instead of monthly which is completely unfair because you may not interested to use the platform or classes after 3 or 4 months so you should have the option to pay monthly fee and use it as long as you like not charging you yearly fee at once without noticing you!

This is one of those issues that hurt their credibility from the customer’s point of view.

Is Skillshare Another Version of YouTube?

I’ve mentioned to several famous online training platforms that are the main competitors of Skillshare and to be honest, when it comes to the comparison, Skillshare is my winner platform because you pay much less and you get much more!

Since the training of Skillshare is based on a multimedia format like video, this question may come in your mind: Why you should pay to access to video training while you can watch video training for free in sites like YouTube?

The answer is simple; You get what you pay for! You can go for YouTube or any other video stream website but do not expect to see videos training with the same quality as Skillshare. Unlike video creators in YouTube, persons who offer online classes in Skillshare are professional and they know how a new course or training should be structured to be easy-understand for people and this is what we normally don’t see in the YouTube. Another positive point of Skillshare is that it won’t be annoying you with ads while playing training videos.

And the last but not least, the amount you pay as membership fee in Skillshare encourages you to enroll to new classes and LEARN new things because you feel that you’re paying for every moment of your time so it should not be wasted but when you’re in a free platform like YouTube, learning and teaching are the last things you are thinking about and you look at it as an entertainment more than a training program.

What Are the Opinions of Other People About Skillshare?

In Skillshare, you progress based on the lessons you learn. This means nothing forces you to join classes and only your interests are determinative.

Many positive feedbacks have been submitted for Skillshare; for instance, over 80% of the TrustPilot’s members were satisfied with their progress in Skillshare and they’ve rated it 5 out of 5. Quality of the lessons, experience of teachers, a user-friendly platform and classes with a varied range of topics turned Skillshare to #1 Recommendation for many of the customers.

This shows that most of the students who enrolled in classes recommended it to others after finishing the course and this makes us share that Skillshare knows how to get the satisfaction of students and teachers.

Anyway, these are only happy clients and of course, this company has also unhappy members who are not satisfied for different reasons. For example, I’ve read several complaints from members who said that Skillshare charged their ban account after they’ve canceled their membership! This is not good at all, especially when we talk about an international training site like Skillshare.

I really hope that they pay attention to these kinds of complaints and solve this problem asap because it may hurt their reputation seriously in the future if they continue like this.

All in all, comparing the total number of satisfied and dissatisfied members shows that most of the people who use this training platform will be satisfied with the result at the end and this confirms that Skillshare is still a top-notch platform and learning/teaching field.

is skillshare scam

Final Word – Is Skillshare a Scam?

Can we call Skillshare a scam for those several complaints about the subscription charges? Of course not! There are complaints about big brands like LG, Microsoft or Apple and to be honest, finding a program, service or product that got 100% satisfaction of the customers is impossible; especially in a world of highly competitive businesses.

So I guess that would be fair if we label Skillshare as a legit company and when we see the big names like Seth Godin or Gary Vaynerchuk as teachers over there, we can trust it easier.

Again, I repeat that there’s not a 100% positive program; this means Skillshare has also its own goods and bads and the truth is that you never are able to create a totally perfect platform because there are always somethings that are out of your control. (like the problem with subscription charges in Skillshare that Michael and Malcolm could not solve it yet.)

Anyway, Skillshare could get the trust of teachers and students and there’s no reason to stop your learning if you are already a member of this platform or if you want to give it a try.

Conclusion

That’s it. My Skillshare review is done now and I hope I could give you what you were looking for about this high-quality training program and with all that being said, it’s not hard to guess that like other 20,000 students, I’m a fan of Skillshare community.

Although offered courses are not equal in quality but paying $15 monthly and having access to thousands of training materials makes it worth trying. Even if you are not willing to pay $15, you can take advantage of its 30-Days free trial offer first to see what type of knowledge is provided by the platform and if it can exceed your expectations or not.

That would be very beneficial, especially if you have not decided about the subject and topic you want to learn about. Just be careful about that subscription charges problem that many people had complaints with.

Finally, this online learning community has always something new to offer and it’s really up to you if you’re a curious person who wants to know inside and outside of EVERYTHING or if you don’t take anything seriously.

If you’re in the first group, you’ll definitely benefit from Skillshare training platform but if watching fun online videos on video-sharing websites is more important than learning something new or making money from your knowledge through teaching people then you should try your chance somewhere else because Skillshare will disappoint you if you look at it from this point of view.

Thanks a lot for spending your time and read this Skillshare review. I hope you enjoyed reading it and found it useful. Now you can easily decide if Skillshare fits your needs or it’s better to get a coffee from Starbucks instead of paying that $15 monthly fee. ; )

See you in the next review and feel free to share your opinions in the comments below )


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7 comments

  1. I can confidently call Skillshare a big scam for teachers. Wait until you get that unjustifiable email informing you that your account has been suspended for suspicious activity. Lost $6,000 because of that and many teachers faced the same. Funny you get the email few days before the payout day! Their score on TrustPilot is actually 1.6 starts out of 5! Check it here https://www.trustpilot.com/review/skillshare.com

  2. Hi Ali, thanks for posting this article, it’s very useful for learning about Skillshare and how to use it. Although overall it is a good article, I have some critiques for you:

    1. Your title shouldn’t include the answer to the readers’ question. The whole point of posing a question in the title is so that people will read on to find out, but if you just say right away from the start that it’s not a scam, people will be less inclined to read the whole article to find out.

    2. Use a service such as Grammarly to get help with the grammar of your writing. I noticed quite a few grammar errors that make sentences sound awkward

    3. Hold off on a verdict of whether the product is a scam or not until the very end, following a logical thesis like order throughout your article leading up to your conclusion

    4. I couldn’t really get a flow of your argument, with a long article like this, I would recommend using logic to build your argument with real facts and figures instead of your opinions, because your opinions will not be a good argument against those who say Skillshare is a scam and that might hurtb your authority figure.

    Those are my tips for improving your articles, hope this helps you and good luck on your future endeavors.

  3. Hi Ali, thanks so much for such an in-depth review of Skillshare, it is very useful.
    We make decisions every day and don’t have enough time to sift through all the available info on the net- I found your review great as this summarizes for me all the pros and cons.
    I think I would like to give Skillshare a go as it does not sound bad at all. I tried Udemy as a customer but not as a teacher, I wonder how would they compare. I’ll let you know what I think when I try it. I was thinking for a while about selling my skills in a form of lectures so it would be good if I can also make some money on it.
    Anyway, loved the review, thanks a lot!

  4. Thank you so much for the awesome article!

    There are indeed lots of different educational platforms to learn online marketing and affiliate marketing.

    There a tons and tons of membership site out there churning out tons of content and tons of video training.

    The question is how do you get started after reading so much information and watching so many videos?

    With information overload so common this days, we are just reading stuff, watching stuff and perhaps ask afew questions here and there.

    It literally paralyzed us, block our minds from taking action.

    With so much information, it stopped our ability to identify which is the right information and therefore lead to no action.

    When we get desperate, we invest money in high ticket coaching programs and hope for the magic to happen.

    We invest lots of money into Solo Ads and Banner Ads hope to get lot of traffic and make lots of affiliate commissions.

    The truth is you only need one mentor, one system and one strategy to succeed in affiliate marketing.

    A system which is tested and proven by an expert. Someone who is getting results for their business.

    You only need to create one system and apply one strategy.

    So how do you find that one mentor?

    Great post!

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