We Spent 13 Years Making LSAT Prep Affordable. Now We're Making Private Tutoring Obsolete.

Dear fellow members of the prelaw community,

In 2012, if you wanted serious LSAT prep, you had one real option: pay $1,500 for a 10-to-12-week in-class course. If you lived in a major city and could rearrange your schedule around a prep company's timetable, you were in luck. If you didn't—if you were working full-time, living in a rural area, or simply couldn't afford it—you were on your own.

That reality bothered us. Not because it was a market opportunity, but because the LSAT is the single most consequential factor in law school admissions. A test that determines the trajectory of someone's legal career shouldn't be a game that only the privileged can afford to play well.

So we built LSATMax.

What we set out to do

LSATMax was the first mobile-first LSAT prep course. Lifetime access. Every officially licensed LSAT question. 99th-percentile instructors on video. One-on-one tutoring support. All delivered through your phone, available anywhere, anytime at a fraction of what the incumbents were charging.

It wasn't a popular move with the establishment. We'd already seen this playbook when we launched BarMax to take on Barbri's stranglehold on bar exam review. Incumbents don't compete on product when a new entrant threatens their margins. They compete on access—exclusive contracts with law schools, manipulation of the channels where students discover their options.

The LSAT prep space was no different. Over the years, the largest online community for LSAT students—Reddit's r/LSAT subreddit—became a place where LSATMax reviews were systematically deleted, our students were banned for sharing their experiences, and a single moderator with documented ties to a competing company controlled what 300,000+ prelaw students could see and discuss. This wasn't a conspiracy theory on our part. A completely unrelated LSAT prep company, LSAT Demon, independently documented the same pattern of suppression.

But here's the thing about trying to silence a product that actually works: the students who used it knew the truth. Over 4,700 students rated LSATMax 4.7 out of 5 on the App Store. Hundreds more left verified reviews on Trustpilot. The evidence was everywhere, just not on the one platform that had been compromised and promoted to the top of Google's search algorithm.

What we accomplished

I'm proud of what LSATMax achieved. When we started, comprehensive LSAT prep cost $1,500 and required you to show up to a classroom. Today, any student in the world can purchase every real LSAT question ever released from LSAC for $120 a year through LawHub Advantage or get it entirely free with an LSAC Fee Waiver. Free access to LSAT prep courses through Fee Waiver scholarships? That was our idea too.

The price of LSAT prep didn't drop on its own. It dropped because companies like ours proved that technology could deliver a better experience at a lower cost, and the market had no choice but to follow.

That mission is accomplished. The content problem is solved.

And we didn't stop there. In the summer of 2020—before the world had any idea what was coming—we pioneered remote LSAT tutoring over Zoom, replacing the traditional in-person model entirely. Why sit in traffic and limit your options to tutors who happen to live near you? When COVID hit months later and the entire education industry scrambled to go online, we were already there. Today, virtually all LSAT tutoring is remote. That shift started with us.

So we'd removed two barriers: we made the content affordable, and we made expert tutoring accessible regardless of geography. But one barrier remained and it was the biggest one of all.

The last frontier

Cost.

Today, a 99th-percentile LSAT tutor charges $200 per hour. A serious tutoring package—20 hours, which is modest by most standards—costs $4,000. For many students, that's more than the content course itself ever was. And unlike content, there's no LawHub equivalent. There's no Fee Waiver for a human being's time.

This means that the students who need the most help—those who learn best through dialogue, who need someone to explain why answer choice B is wrong, not just that it's wrong, who get stuck at 2 a.m. with no one to ask—are the ones least likely to be able to afford it.

That's the problem we're solving next.

Solomon doesn't replace your study materials. You'll still get your questions from LSAC through LawHub Advantage ($120/year) or free with a Fee Waiver exactly as it should be. What Solomon provides is the layer that has always been missing for students who can't afford private tutoring: on-demand, expert-level explanations and strategies, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from anywhere in the world.

Ask Solomon why you got a question wrong, and it won't give you a textbook answer. It will diagnose the specific reasoning error you made—the same way a great tutor would—and walk you through the logic step by step. Ask it to explain a question, and it will teach you the approach the way our 99th-percentile tutors taught thousands of students before you.

The cost? $99 per month. Not $200 per hour. Not $4,000 for a package. Access to expert tutoring for less than the price of a single session with a human tutor.

Why now

People will ask why we're launching Solomon now. The honest answer is that the technology finally caught up to the vision. We've always believed that the expertise of a great LSAT tutor could be made accessible to every student, not just those who could afford $200 an hour. AI has matured to the point where we can deliver on that belief—not with a generic model, but with one trained specifically on 13 years of our own teaching methodology.

We've been here before. In 2010, people said a $999 iPhone app couldn't replace Barbri's $4,000 "in-class" bar prep course. In 2012, people said a mobile app couldn't replace in-class LSAT instruction. They were wrong both times—not because the technology was magic, but because the incumbents had been overcharging for something that could be done better and more affordably.

Private tutoring is no different. The expertise is real. The delivery mechanism was just waiting to be reinvented.

If you're currently preparing for the LSAT, or know someone who is, I'd invite you to be among the first to experience Solomon. We're opening our beta to a limited number of students before the full launch, and the first students in will receive free access during the beta period.

We didn't build LSATMax to make money. We built it to fix something that was broken. We succeeded, and the LSAT prep market is fundamentally better for it. Solomon is the next chapter of that same mission—and this time, no algorithm, no moderator, and no incumbent can stand between a student and the support they deserve.