Why we made full-length TOEIC practice free to start

A good TOEIC score has always cost money

Before you answer a single question, the TOEIC costs money, and real preparation costs a lot more. Sitting the official Listening & Reading test runs about ¥7,810 in Japan and about ₩52,500 in South Korea (check YBM's official site for the current fee). That's just the exam. Prepare properly and the bill grows fast: official workbooks at ¥3,630 each (print edition, tax included), several practice-test volumes, and, for many people, private tutoring at ¥3,000–6,000 an hour.

Zoom out and the scale of private study spending is staggering. In South Korea, households spent ₩29.2 trillion (about US$20 billion) on private education in 2024, up more than 60% in a decade, according to Statistics Korea. Not all of that is TOEIC, of course; it's dominated by school tutoring. But it captures the norm that test preparation is something families are expected to buy, and buy heavily.

Why that quietly decides who scores well

When practice costs money, the people who can pay for more of it tend to score higher, and the TOEIC data shows exactly that pattern. A 2024 study of TOEIC's role in Japanese corporations found a striking gap: an annual-income difference of about ¥2.01 million separated people scoring below 499 from those in the 900 range. The paper warns that leaning so heavily on one test "can lead to discriminatory practices and exclusionary dynamics."

That's the uncomfortable part of a test used this widely. The TOEIC program runs in 160 countries through around 14,000 organisations; in Japan alone it's used by about 3,900 companies, schools and institutions (fiscal 2025). For a student trying to graduate, or a job seeker trying to clear a résumé screen, the score is a gate, and if the practice that opens that gate sits behind a paywall, the gate quietly favours whoever could afford to prepare. The people who most need a fair shot at the TOEIC are often the ones least able to spend ¥20,000 on getting ready for it.

Access to practice shouldn't be the hidden variable that decides an English score. The test is supposed to measure your English, not your budget.

What we built instead

We built the thing we wished existed: full-length, format-accurate TOEIC tests, with one of every kind genuinely free to take. Not a five-question sample, not a locked PDF, complete mocks across all four TOEIC tests, in the current official format, auto-scored on the real scales, in your browser on any device.

And critically, it includes the part that used to require a human: feedback. Every reading and listening answer is scored instantly, and every Speaking and Writing response is rated against the official criteria by AI, with specific notes on what to fix. That's the coaching that a tutor at ¥5,000 an hour would give you, built into a tool you can use on the free-forever plan.

Why AI makes "free" possible

The reason we can give away one-to-one-style coaching is that AI has changed the economics of tutoring. The gold standard has long been Benjamin Bloom's 1984 finding that individual tutoring lifts the average learner by about two standard deviations over classroom teaching, wonderful, but impossibly expensive to give everyone. AI is the first tool that gets close to that at scale.

The evidence is now concrete. A 2025 World Bank randomised controlled trial in Nigeria gave students a six-week after-school programme with an AI tutor for English. The result: overall learning gains of about 0.3 standard deviations (and around 0.23 on the English-specific assessment), which the researchers estimated was equivalent to roughly 1.5 to 2 years of ordinary schooling, and they ranked it among the most cost-effective education interventions ever rigorously measured. When quality coaching drops to near-zero marginal cost per student, giving it away stops being charity and starts being possible.

So why give it away, and how it stays free

We'd rather earn trust than extract early revenue. The fastest way to build a genuinely great TOEIC platform is to get it into the hands of thousands of real test takers, watch where they struggle, and fix it. A free-forever plan is how we do that, and how we make sure the people who most need affordable prep always have it.

We're also going to be straight with you about how it works, because trust is the whole point:

Notice what doesn't change. The free plan is free forever, because a fair shot at the TOEIC shouldn't depend on your budget. What we can promise is that it stays that way, with a Pro pass shown clearly up front for students who want more, and no dark patterns.

Frequently asked questions