I've got some bittersweet news to share. After a lot of internal debating and thought, as of today, Adocasts Plus is being sunset effective immediately.
Adocasts has been a huge part of my life for the past five years, and the people who've subscribed to Adocasts Plus have made it possible to keep the lights on and keep producing content. So, before anything else, thank you! I mean that dearly. You put your trust and faith in me, and I don't take that lightly.
You might remember a post I put up a couple of months back where I said I was taking a break, and went out of my way to say I wasn't quitting. I meant that when I wrote it. The plan was a roughly 90-day reset to recharge and figure out a way forward. The truth is I never actually started that break. Instead, what happened is I unintentionally slowed way down on releasing new Let's Learn AdonisJS 7 lessons, and I ended up spending that quieter stretch weighing my options for the road ahead. That slow drift, more than any clean reset, is really what brought me here. So, as much as it stings to walk back what I said then, here we are.
Let me walk you through what this actually means, why I landed here, and most importantly, how refunds will work for current members.
Why I'm Making This Call
In truth, there isn't one single reason but several reasons that join together. I also can't overstate how much I've teetered on this decision, and I continue to do so to some extent even now.
The biggest piece is time. I've always run Adocasts part-time, alongside a full-time job, and producing long-form content the way I want to takes a lot of hours. As touched on in my last post, I just haven't had the hours or effort to give, and putting out work I'm not proud of isn't something I'm willing to do.
There's also a bigger question hanging over long-form content in general. The way people learn is shifting, and I've spent a long time wondering whether the long, detailed format Adocasts is built on is something I can sustain into the future. I don't have a clear answer here, but it's a real concern and factored in.
The last piece is more personal to where I am in my career. Over the past couple of months, AI has become a much bigger part of how I work, more than I expected when I wrote my last post. This has also shifted my day-to-day role a decent bit. Instead of sitting hands-on in the editor, I'm finding myself directing and managing AI more often than not. It feels a little off to keep teaching from a workflow I've largely moved on from, like I'd be sharing AI's process more than my own.
For a while, I seriously considered pivoting Adocasts toward something more interactive with hands-on learning rather than watching and reading. I still think that's a genuinely exciting direction, and it may be something I come back to one day. However, building something like that properly is an enormous amount of work, and I couldn't see a realistic way to do it side by side while also keeping new Adocasts content flowing. Trying to do both at the same time would mean doing both poorly.
So after circling this decision over and over again, I've concluded that it's time to stop.
The Content Isn't Going Anywhere
Sunsetting Adocasts Plus doesn't mean the content is going to disappear. The whole point of Adocasts was to help people learn AdonisJS, and locking the library away the moment I step back would have undercut the entire reason it existed. So, I'm happy to announce that the entire Adocasts library will be free to all, and this will go into effect here in the next day or two.
There's one piece of unfinished business I do plan to see through, though. I still want to get the Let's Learn AdonisJS 7 series to a proper finished state. I'll be trimming it down from what I currently have planned, but I'd rather land it somewhere that feels complete than leave it hanging. Those lessons will keep coming as a trickle, the same slow pace as anything else from here on, but they will come.
Beyond wrapping that series, you may still see the occasional new lesson pop up from time to time. I'm not committing to a schedule, and I'm not promising anything regular, but if I have something worth sharing, it'll land, free, on Adocasts.
How Refunds Will Work
Since the content everyone paid for is becoming free to all, it didn't sit right with me to keep anyone's money for access that's no longer exclusive. So, all active subscriptions have been canceled, and you won't be charged again. I'm also issuing prorated refunds to Adocasts Plus members, and yes, that includes forever purchasers as well.
The refund is prorated based on how much of your access period you've used: roughly the days you've had access divided by the length of your plan. Monthly and annual members are prorated against their plan length. For forever purchasers, I figured it would be most fair to treat it the same way, refunding the unused portion of your access. I'll be measuring it against a three-year window, since "forever" has no natural end date to calculate against, and three years is what the price was originally based on. To be clear, this isn't me buying back access; the library stays up and free, and you keep everything you always had. It's me returning the slice of a long-term plan that, in fairness, went unused. The math is applied the same way across every tier, so it's as fair and even-handed as I can make it.
A few notes on the mechanics and timing:
Refunds go back automatically to the original payment method you used. You don't need to do anything or reach out; I'll be processing these one-by-one on my end.
Most refunds should land within a few business days, though your bank or card issuer can sometimes take a little longer to post it.
If your original card or account has since been closed, the refund may bounce back to me. If that happens, I'll reach out directly to sort out another way to get it to you.
If something looks off with your refund once it arrives, please get in touch with me via email at tom@adocasts.com, and I'll make it right.
Thank You
Adocasts mattered a lot to me, and the people who supported it mattered more. Watching folks learn AdonisJS through something I built has been one of the most rewarding things I've ever done.
I especially want to thank Harminder Virk and the entire AdonisJS Core Team for being super welcoming and supportive of Adocasts and me. Words can't express how appreciative I am of that. I genuinely think AdonisJS is the option in NodeJS development, and I've been nothing but happy to watch its popularity rise.
The doors to Adocasts aren't locked, the library is free and staying up, and I'm not ruling out a comeback down the road, maybe even in a new format. In the meantime, thank you all very much for being a part of this journey.
