Short answer: LeetCode Premium is worth it for about three months, for people with specific target companies, in the final stretch before interviews. For everyone else, especially anyone still learning data structures, it’s a subscription to a gym you’re not ready to use.
We run a prep site ourselves, so we have an obvious conflict of interest when reviewing a competitor. We’ll flag our own product clearly when it appears below, tell you exactly where LeetCode beats us, and you can judge accordingly.
What LeetCode Premium Actually Includes
For ~$35/month or ~$159/year, Premium adds this on top of the free tier:
- Company-tagged questions. Filter problems by company and recency: “asked at Amazon in the last six months.” Tags are crowdsourced from interview reports, so they’re imperfect, but directionally, they’re the best public data on what companies actually ask.
- Premium-locked problems. Roughly a quarter of the catalog, including some real company favorites.
- Official editorial solutions. Consistently structured explanations with complexity analysis. Quality is good, though top community answers in the discussion tab are often just as instructive.
- Debugger and faster judge. Step-through debugging in the browser; nice, not necessary.
- Mock assessments. Timed sessions that imitate specific companies’ online assessments.
Notice what’s not on the list: any curriculum. Premium gives you better filters over the same unordered pile of 3,000+ problems. If you don’t already know what a heap is, Premium will not tell you: it assumes you’re there to practice, not to learn. (If that distinction stings, start with our data structures cheatsheet and come back.)
The Cost Math
The annual plan (~$159) works out to $13/month, but be honest about your timeline: most people need Premium for a 2-3 month window, which makes monthly ($70-105 total) the rational buy despite the worse sticker rate. The annual plan mostly monetizes optimism.
Frame it against outcomes and the price is trivial: a FAANG offer moves annual compensation by tens of thousands of dollars, so if company tags meaningfully improve your last month of prep, $70 is noise. The real cost isn’t money; it’s misallocated time. A subscription quietly nudges you toward “more random problems” when what most failing candidates need is ordered fundamentals and pattern coverage. Four hundred problems without a framework loses to 150 with one, a point we’ve made before in how long it takes to get a FAANG offer.
Who It’s Worth It For
Buy it if all three are true:
- You have named target companies (the tags are the product);
- Your interviews are within ~3 months (tag recency decays);
- Your fundamentals are already solid: you can solve most easy problems cold and know your patterns.
Skip it if:
- You’re more than three months out. Free problems are more than enough until the company-specific stretch.
- You’re still learning DS&A. Premium solves a problem you don’t have yet. Spend the window on a structured curriculum first (free options below, ours included).
- You’re prepping for smaller companies or startups, which draw from the same well-known free set anyway.
Not ready for company tags yet? Build fundamentals first: free, one topic per day
Free Alternatives, Compared Honestly
None of these is a drop-in replacement for Premium’s company tags. Nothing free is. What they replace is everything else you might be tempted to buy Premium for.
| Resource | Price | What it is | Best for | Weakness |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LeetCode (free tier) | $0 | ~2,500+ problems, judge, discussions | Practice volume; the de facto interview standard | No ordering, no curriculum, no company tags |
| NeetCode 150 | $0 | Curated 150-problem list with excellent videos | Pattern-based practice when fundamentals exist | Assumes you already know the data structures |
| Blind 75 | $0 | Minimal high-yield list | Final-weeks triage | Too thin as a sole plan |
| Tech Interview Handbook | $0 | Guides: process, resume, behavioral, negotiation | Everything that isn’t coding | Not a practice platform |
| Algorithms in 60 Days (that’s us) | $0 | 60-day sequenced curriculum, one topic per day with Python implementations | (Re)building fundamentals in order before grinding | No per-company data; smaller problem volume than LeetCode |
| HackerRank / Codeforces | $0 | Alternative judges and contests | Contest-style speed practice | Question style drifts from real interview loops |
Where we’re genuinely better than Premium: if you can’t yet derive solutions (if videos teach you to imitate answers rather than construct them), a sequence that builds arrays → time complexity → trees → graphs → dynamic programming in order fixes the actual problem. Where Premium is genuinely better than us: interview-week targeting. Company tags are unique, and we won’t pretend otherwise. The honest play is often both, in sequence, and the sequence matters.
For the wider landscape, including the paid options we didn’t cover here (AlgoExpert, Grokking-style courses, mock-interview platforms), see our tiered guide to FAANG prep resources.
Recommended Setups
“Interviews in 3+ months, fundamentals shaky”: $0. Algorithms in 60 Days for ordered concepts → NeetCode 150 for interview reps. Revisit Premium only in the final month, if your targets are FAANG-sized.
“Interviews in 4-8 weeks, fundamentals fine”: ~$35-70. Premium monthly. Live in your target companies’ tag lists, use mock assessments for the OA, cancel after the loop.
“Interviews this month”: ~$35. Premium for tags + Blind 75 as the safety net. Sleep more than you grind.
“Just learning, no interviews scheduled”: $0. No Premium. A curriculum plus free LeetCode covers everything at this stage.
Common Questions
How accurate are the company tags, really? Directionally good, not gospel. Tags come from self-reported interview experiences, so popular companies (Amazon, Meta, Google) have rich, current data while smaller companies’ tags can be stale or thin. Treat a tag list as a probability distribution: expect to see those kinds of problems, not those exact problems. Interviewers also rotate questions specifically because they leak.
Do the Premium-locked problems matter? Occasionally. A handful of genuine company staples sit behind the paywall, and it stings to hit one mid-prep. But every locked problem has free near-duplicates in the catalog, and the pattern is what transfers to the interview anyway. Nobody fails a loop because a quarter of LeetCode was locked; people fail because they never internalized binary search or BFS.
Is the discounted annual deal worth grabbing? LeetCode runs promotions that bring the annual plan down meaningfully. If you’re certain you’ll be interviewing within the year (say, you’re a student with a defined recruiting season), the discounted annual can beat three months of monthly. If your timeline is “someday,” it’s still the optimism tax, just smaller.
Does Premium help with system design or behavioral rounds? Effectively no. There’s some design content, but it’s not why anyone buys it, and it’s not competitive with dedicated resources. Premium is a coding-round product; budget your senior-loop prep separately.
Will Premium make me faster? Not by itself. Speed comes from pattern fluency plus timed reps, both of which the free tier supports fully. What Premium changes is what you practice in your final weeks, not how well you practice it.
The Verdict
LeetCode Premium is one of the few paid prep products with a feature you genuinely can’t get elsewhere, and the fair rating is: worth ~$70 for a focused two-month endgame; not worth $159/year as a security blanket. Buy it late, use it hard, cancel it.
And if you’re not at the endgame yet, don’t pay to skip the part that actually decides interviews. Fundamentals are free: start Day 1 of the 60-day plan, finish it, then give LeetCode your money.
Related Articles
- The Best FAANG Interview Prep Resources in 2026 (Free + Paid)
- How Long Does It Take to Get a FAANG Offer?
- The Data Structures Cheatsheet
- Day 1: Introduction to the 60-Day Challenge
Spend money on convenience if you like, just never on avoidance.