The tools existed everywhere
except where I needed them.

I came into finance from university, where good study tools were everywhere and mostly free. Practice sets, spaced repetition, worked examples, communities — whatever way you happened to learn, something existed for it, and you could get at it.

Then I started studying for the CFA and that whole ecosystem simply wasn’t there. What existed was heavily paywalled. What was free wasn’t much help — scattered question dumps, decks nobody maintained, and content that told you whether you got it right without ever telling you why.

The gap that actually mattered wasn’t volume. It was that nothing joined up. A question bank in one place, flashcards in another, a study plan you built yourself in a spreadsheet, and no honest signal about whether any of it was working. Different kinds of practice, all disconnected, none of it adding up to understanding.

So I built the thing I wanted: one system where the practice types reinforce each other, and where you can see what you actually know.

Then I studied with it myself — around a demanding full-time role, which is the only way I have ever had to do it. That constraint shaped the whole product. Sessions are short because some nights you get forty minutes and not four hours. The plan works backwards from your exam date because the real question is never “what should I learn”, it is “what should I do tonight”. Weak topics resurface on their own because you do not have the spare hours to work out what to revise.

That means a question bank, spaced-repetition flashcards, formula drills, mock exams and a plan calibrated to your exam date — all sharing one view of your progress. You stop re-answering what you already know. And the readiness score tells you where you stand rather than flattering you.

And it is one payment. Not a subscription.

That is the part I feel most strongly about. Being charged monthly rent on my own revision was the thing I resented most, so building it back in would have been absurd. You pay once and it is yours: no renewal, no expiry, no countdown, no second invoice if you defer a sitting and come back next window. Preparation should not have a meter running on it.

AnalystForge is new, and I’d rather say so than pretend otherwise. There are no pass-rate statistics yet because nobody has sat an exam with it — including me, at the time of writing. What I can tell you is that the questions are reviewed against the current curriculum, the free tier is real and permanent, and if something doesn’t help you, I want to hear about it. I read every email.

— Peeter Mirlieb, Founder