Is Grokking Modern System Design Interview Worth It?
Short answer: it is worth it if you already pay for an Educative plan, or if you want to study distributed systems in breadth. It is poor value if you want one purchase with lifetime access, or if your interview is a few weeks away. The course has 206 lessons and 8 mock interviews, and it shows no one-time price. Access comes through an Educative plan, which starts at $149 a year.
Disclosure: Design Gurus sells a competing course, Grokking the System Design Interview. Every number below was read from Educative's own public pages, so you can check each one.
Before you decide either way, read some of it. 75 of the 206 lessons are marked free in the course sidebar, with no trial and no card. That is the most useful fact about this course, and it is not advertised loudly.
Quick Overview
| Point | What Educative lists |
|---|---|
| Course name | Grokking Modern System Design Interview |
| Size | 206 lessons, 140 quizzes, about 26 hours |
| Practice | 8 mock interviews |
| Free to read | 75 of the 206 lessons |
| Structure | 18 building blocks, then 17 design problems |
| Method | RESHADED, an eight step structure for a 45 minute answer |
| Credited to | Fahim ul Haq and the Educative team |
| Price | no one-time price; plans start at $149 a year |
What the course covers
The material runs in three stages. First come the concepts: consistency models, failure models, availability, reliability, scalability, and back-of-the-envelope estimation.
Next come 18 building blocks. A building block is a reusable part of a large system, and each one gets its own short chapter.
They cover delivery with DNS, load balancers, and a content delivery network. They cover storage with databases, a key-value store, and a blob store. They cover movement and control with a messaging queue, pub-sub, a task scheduler, and a rate limiter. The rest are a distributed cache, distributed search, distributed logging, monitoring, and sharded counters.
Last come 17 design problems. Nine are familiar products: YouTube, Quora, Google Maps, Yelp, Uber, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Google Docs. The rest are a newsfeed, TinyURL, a web crawler, typeahead suggestions, a deployment system, a payment system, LeetCode, and a ChatGPT style system.
What an Educative plan costs
| Plan | Price shown | List price |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | $13 a month, billed annually, so $149 a year | $298 |
| Premium | $17 a month, billed annually, so $199 a year | $398 |
| Premium Plus | $21 a month, billed annually, so $249 a year | $498 |
Educative labels Premium as best for interview prep, and it adds three AI mock interviews a month. All three prices carry a 50 percent discount at the time of writing.
Educative has more than two thousand courses. A plan is good value if you will study several of them, and expensive if you want one course and then want to stop paying. For current trial and refund terms, see free trials, pricing plans, and refund policies for grokking system design platforms.
Where the course is strong
- Building blocks before full systems. Teaching a rate limiter once, then reusing it across five designs, is sound teaching. A candidate who knows the parts can assemble an unfamiliar system.
- Breadth. 206 lessons is a lot of material, which helps if you want the knowledge for the job and not only for one interview.
- Mock interviews. Eight are listed, including a distributed cache, pub-sub, a blob store, TikTok, Uber Eats, and a newsfeed.
- A free sample large enough to matter. 75 free lessons removes most of the risk of buying.
Where the course is weak
- You rent it, you do not own it. Access ends when the plan ends. Two years on the Standard plan costs about $298 at the sale price, and you keep nothing afterward.
- The size works against a near interview date. 26 hours is a long study plan. If you interview in two weeks you will not finish it. See how long does it take to finish grokking.
- The AI coverage is thinner than the marketing suggests. Their course FAQ says the modern version covers how AI-native companies like Anthropic and OpenAI scale their systems. The published outline has four AI topics, which are about nine of the 206 lessons.
- No video walkthroughs are listed. The course page lists lessons, quizzes, and mock interviews only.
Is it the same as Grokking the System Design Interview?
No. They are two different courses on two different sites. Educative sells Grokking Modern System Design Interview. Design Gurus sells Grokking the System Design Interview, and an earlier text version of that course was once available on Educative.
This matters when you read reviews. An old five-star review may describe a different course than the one you are about to buy. Our post on Grokking Modern System Design Interview vs. the Original Course shows how to tell them apart in a few seconds. For the wider family of courses that share the name, see what is the grokking series.
How to Prepare
- Read three free lessons first. Pick one concept lesson, one building block, and one design problem. Do this before paying for any system design course, including ours.
- Try one problem cold. Cover the solution, write your own requirements and first design for ten minutes, then read theirs. Understanding someone else's design is a different skill from producing your own under time pressure, which is why memorizing system design answers does not work.
- Match the payment model to your date. If you interview in three weeks, buy the shortest course you will actually finish. Our own Grokking the System Design Interview is one purchase of $59 with lifetime access. It runs interview approach, then trade-offs, then fifteen complete designs.
- Start with fundamentals if the concepts are new. Grokking System Design Fundamentals covers the basics first, and this comparison explains which to take first.
- Compare the other options too. See Grokking vs ByteByteGo and Best System Design Interview Courses Compared.
GET YOUR FREE
Coding Questions Catalog
$123
$197
$72
