The short answer
Meaningfully less than human coaching — Acely, for example, runs roughly $588 for an annual plan ($49/month billed annually), with monthly options at $99–$149. That price buys access to material. The number to check before celebrating it is the completion rate of a sixteen-year-old left alone with an app for a school year.
Self-paced platforms are the cheapest real prep on the market, and the pricing is refreshingly public.
The going rates
Acely’s annual plan is roughly $588 — $49 a month billed annually — with monthly options at $99 to $149 depending on commitment. Other self-paced products price in the same general territory: a few hundred dollars a year, sometimes with tiers for more features. Compared to any human-delivered option, it’s not close.
What the price buys, precisely
Access. Practice questions, explanations, an adaptive engine choosing what’s next, sometimes an AI chatbot for when your student gets stuck. All genuinely useful — to the student who logs in.
That’s the number the sticker price hides: the product only works multiplied by usage, and usage is supplied entirely by your sixteen-year-old. Not finishing a self-study program is the normal outcome, not the exception. Mia was a strong IB and AP student, exactly the profile these products imagine — and what her family actually got for months was a nightly argument about whether prep had happened. She reached a 33 once Boosted Brains put a coach on the calendar instead of an app.
The honest math
If your student is the self-driven type, $588 is a bargain and you should take it. If they’re not — and you already know — then the cheap option’s real price is a lost semester and a test date, which is the most expensive thing on this page. The cost comparison isn’t app versus coaching. It’s app-that-goes-unused versus a score that actually moves.
