What you must pay for
The exam registration is expensive and non-negotiable. Almost everything else is a choice, and the commercial packages that cost several hundred euros are sold on the assumption that you cannot tell which parts you actually need. You can.
Exactly one thing: the exam registration with CFA Institute. That fee includes access to the official curriculum and the CFA Institute Learning Ecosystem, which contains the readings, practice questions and mock exams written by the people who write the real exam.
You already own the highest-quality materials in the market before you buy anything. Every third-party provider, this one included, is a supplement to that.
What a paid supplement is for
There are two honest reasons to spend more money, and they are not the ones usually advertised.
1Volume
The official question bank is finite. Most candidates exhaust the questions that matter to them before they run out of study time, and re-answering a question you remember teaches you nothing.
2Diagnosis
Knowing you scored 68% is useless. Knowing that 68% hides 85% on equity valuation and 41% on income taxes tells you what to do on Saturday morning.
If a product does not give you one of those two things, you are paying for packaging. A full video course can be worth it if you are starting from no finance background at all, but that is a teaching problem, not a practice problem, and it should be a deliberate decision rather than a default.
CFAQuiz's own Level I plan is €19.95 a month (VAT included); see pricing.
Practise on the real exam timing
Create a free account and keep every question you miss in one review list.
A plan that costs almost nothing
1Months 1 to 3: read once, and move on
Read the official curriculum at a pace that gets you through it, not at a pace that makes you feel you have mastered it. You will not remember most of it. That is expected and it is not a problem: the reading builds the map, the questions build the recall.
2Months 4 to 5: questions, and only questions
Work by topic, not by chapter. After every session, look at what you got wrong and write one line about why: not the correct answer, the reason you picked the wrong one.
3Month 6: mocks under real conditions
Sit at least two full mocks in one sitting, timed, with no notes. Then sit the CFA Institute mocks, because those are the calibration reference.
Common mistake: re-reading. It feels productive because the material becomes familiar, and familiarity is not knowledge. A candidate who has read the Ethics volume three times and answered forty questions on it is in worse shape than one who read it once and answered four hundred.
Practise each topic by weight, starting with the heavy ones: Ethics, Financial Statement Analysis, Equities and Fixed Income. The one-line notes on your mistakes are the most valuable thing you will produce during your preparation, because the same three or four mistakes will account for most of your losses. This is the phase where a cheap question bank earns its price, and where our free topic questions will tell you within twenty minutes whether the style suits you.
The Level I exam is two sessions of 135 minutes, 90 multiple-choice questions each, 180 in total, three options per question, no penalty for guessing. That is roughly 90 seconds per question, so practise under that time limit before exam day. See how to tell whether you are ready.
Where saving money becomes expensive
Two false economies do real damage.
| The saving | What it costs you |
|---|---|
| Free question banks of unknown provenance | A wrong answer key does not just cost you that question. It teaches you a wrong fact that you will confidently apply on exam day. If you cannot find out how a bank's questions are written and checked, that silence is the answer. |
| Skipping Ethics | Ethics is weighted 10 to 15% from the 2027 exams (15 to 20% in 2026), it needs no mathematics, and CFA Institute has publicly described using ethics performance to decide borderline candidates. It is the cheapest marks on the exam and the most commonly deferred. |
The one-line version: pay for the exam, use the official curriculum as your source of truth, spend a small amount on question volume and diagnostics, and put the money you saved into sitting more mock exams.