I've passed thirteen professional exams, and I paid four-figure prep fees for every one of them. Some of that money was well spent and a lot of it wasn't. Now that ChatGPT costs $20 a month and will explain anything you ask it, a lot of candidates wonder whether they still need a course. I should mention that I run FreeFellow, which competes with these courses.
What you get from a course
The big providers do some things well, and those things cost money to build. Becker designs its simulations to look like the AICPA's exam software, so the interface isn't new to you on test day. Kaplan Schweser rewrites its readings every time CFA Institute changes the curriculum. Coaching Actuaries has been running Adapt since 2009, and a new company can't catch up on that many years of candidate answers.
When you compare prices, look at what the package covers. Becker lists its Advantage package at $2,499, and that's for all four CPA sections with 24 months of access. Kaplan Schweser's Level I packages go from $429 for Basic to $1,499 for Ultimate, and that's for one level and one exam window. I checked both on the providers' own sites on September 7, 2026. A lot of price comparisons online, including an earlier version of this post, put those two numbers side by side as if they bought the same thing.
The most common complaint I hear from people who paid full price is about support. They report a mistake in a question and never hear back, or they get a form reply weeks later that doesn't deal with what they sent. Errata threads go on for months with candidates confirming the same mistake to each other. This comes from the emails I get rather than a survey, and I'm sure some providers handle it well.
The rest of the price goes to video production, sales teams, affiliate commissions and printed books. I broke that down in why exam prep costs so much.
Where ChatGPT helps and where it doesn't
A chatbot is very good at explaining things. If you don't get why a currency swap has two notional exchanges, it'll explain it six different ways until one of them clicks, at any hour, and it doesn't mind if you ask the same thing twice. For $20 a month that's a great deal.
It works best when you ask about the exact step you're stuck on. "Why is this cash flow discounted from this date?" gets you an answer you can check against the curriculum. "Explain fixed income" gets you an essay. If the chatbot and the curriculum disagree, go with the curriculum. Asking the same model to check its own answer doesn't tell you much.
The trouble starts when people use it to write practice questions. Every question is new, so you have nothing consistent to measure your progress against, and nobody has checked the answer key. AI questions that haven't been reviewed tend to share the same problems: the right answer lands on one letter too often, numeric answers sit in the middle of the choices, and the wrong choices explain why they're wrong, which real exam questions almost never do. I listed the seven tells in another post, including some that my own early questions had. Models also mix up tax years and old accounting standards without telling you.
The bigger problem is that a chatbot can't tell you if you're ready. You can't tell how hard a question is by reading it. You find out by seeing how many prepared candidates get it right, and that takes real answers. FreeFellow won't change a question's difficulty rating until it has at least thirty candidate responses, and it had recorded about 870,000 answers through September 2026. A question ChatGPT just wrote has no responses behind it, so any difficulty rating it gives you is a guess.
What I'd do
The courses have added AI too. Becker has an assistant called Newt, and Kaplan Schweser includes an AI Tutor with some Level I packages. If ChatGPT was your main reason to skip a course, that reason matters less than it did a year ago.
If your employer is paying, take the course. If you learn best from video and want someone else to set your schedule, that's a good reason to pay too.
If you're paying yourself, here's how I'd start. Pick a topic you've already studied and do fifteen questions you haven't seen before, without looking at the solutions. That score is the most accurate read you'll get on where you are. Then go through what you missed and sort out why. Maybe you didn't know the material, made a math mistake, misread the question or ran out of time. Only the first one gets fixed by studying the topic again. Use the chatbot to work through what you didn't know, one step at a time, and check anything you're unsure about against the exam body's own materials. Later in the week, do a new set on the same topic. If you get through it, move on. If you still can't explain the idea out loud, that's when a lecture or a tutor is worth paying for, and by then you know exactly which topic you need help with.
For practice, use a question bank someone has reviewed. FreeFellow's is free for every exam it covers, with 45,000+ original questions across 40 credentials. They're drafted with AI, reviewed by people who hold the FSA, CFA, CPA, CFP and CAIA, and run through automated checks for answer-position balance, giveaway choices, duplicates and math that doesn't reach the stated answer. Anyone can try the sample questions. A free account gets you the full bank, the solutions, the written lessons, mixed practice and the readiness score. Fellow adds mock exams and a study plan for $39 a month or $79 a quarter per track, and the $199 annual plan is Fellow Plus. Prices are in USD, and each subscription covers one credential track. Check pricing for your track and country.