Magoosh ACT® Review: The Budget Leader, Honestly

Read time: 4 min  ·  Last updated: June 21, 2026

Magoosh is the cheapest serious option in ACT® prep, and unlike most of its competitors, it doesn't pretend to be anything else. The price is on the website. There's no sales team that calls you. There's no tutoring upsell. At $129 for a year of access, there is genuinely very little to criticize — so this review spends less time on what's wrong and more on whether it's the right tool for your student at all.

The short version: Magoosh is excellent at exactly one thing, and it's honest about the fact that it does only that one thing.

What Magoosh Actually Is

Magoosh is a self-paced online course. Think of it as a structured curriculum plus a large bank of practice questions, delivered through video lessons and two strong mobile apps. It is not a tutoring service. There is email and chat support from test prep experts when a student gets stuck, but that is help, not teaching. Nobody is sitting across from your child explaining a missed question in real time.

It's also worth knowing that the ACT® is not Magoosh's headline product. The company's bread and butter is graduate-school prep — GRE and GMAT — along with the SAT®. The ACT® course is real and maintained, but it gets less ongoing development attention than their core lines. Most independent reviews of Magoosh are actually reviewing the GRE product.

Why It's So Cheap (And Why That's Reassuring)

Magoosh is a small, profitable, independent company — founded in 2009 in the Bay Area and never acquired. That's unusual in this space. Nearly every other competitor I've reviewed is either corporate-owned or venture-scaled, which means there's pressure to grow revenue per customer: sales calls, premium tiers, upsells.

Magoosh's founder has publicly committed to running the business on profitability rather than growth — spending only the money they have and funding new product lines from successful ones. That structural choice is the actual reason the price is a fraction of everyone else's. There's no machine that needs to extract more from each family.

One more data point that matters more than it looks: Magoosh has a 4.7 out of 5 employee rating on Glassdoor, with 96% of employees recommending it — the strongest of any company in this series. Employee morale shows up in product quality. People who like where they work build better things.

What You Get for $129

The Premium plan runs $129 for 12 months of access (a 4-payment plan is available). For that you get:

• 250+ short video lessons, typically 5–15 minutes each.
• Roughly 1,300+ practice questions, each with both text and video explanations.
• Four full-length practice tests plus an online diagnostic.
• Two mobile apps — one for lessons and practice, one for flashcards — widely considered the best mobile experience in the category.
• Email and chat support from test prep experts.

If your student wants live structure, the Premium + Classes tier is $399 and adds 16 hours of instruction across eight sessions, available live or on-demand. Reviewers who attended praised the instructor, and the recorded option means a student can watch on their own schedule.

The Generous Stuff Nobody Else Matches

Two things set Magoosh apart on terms, not just price. First, there's a free 7-day trial before you pay anything. Second, the refund window is a full 7 days with complete money back — more than double Kaplan's 3-day full-refund window.

The score guarantee is equally clean: complete the Premium program and see a 4-point increase over your old score — provided you started at a 30 or below — or get your money back. No "master 49 skills" maze, no buried conditions. Simple terms are rare in this industry, and Magoosh's are about as simple as they come.

The Enhanced ACT® Question

Here's a wrinkle worth being honest about. Magoosh's own page states the lessons, questions, and practice tests have been updated for the changes to the ACT®. A competitor's review claims the updates are surface-level — that some math questions were converted to the new four-option format by simply dropping an answer choice, and that some video lessons still contain errors about scoring and section length.

Both can be true at once. The course is updated in the sense that it reflects the new format; it may not be updated in the sense of a full ground-up rebuild. The source making the stronger claim is a competitor, so weigh it accordingly — but if you're buying Magoosh specifically for the Enhanced ACT®, it's fair to spend part of the free trial checking the math explanations and the scoring details yourself.

Who Magoosh Is For

Magoosh is built, by its own description, for students scoring in the 10th–90th percentile, and it's most suited to the middle of that range. Concretely, that means:

• Motivated self-studiers who already know roughly where their gaps are.
• Students currently scoring somewhere around 18–28 looking for a 4-point gain.
• Mobile-heavy learners who study on their phone.
• Families who want a budget option that isn't free Khan Academy.

It is not for:

• Students chasing a 34+. They'll outgrow the material.
• Students with foundational skill gaps. Magoosh teaches the test, not the underlying content — it assumes the math and grammar are already there.
• Students who need accountability, or someone to explain a missed question in the moment.
• Parents who want a person to call. There isn't one.
• Students who learn better from physical books — everything is digital, no print materials.

Where to Read Magoosh Reviews Yourself

• Magoosh's own ACT® plans page — pricing, features, and the score guarantee terms, stated plainly.
• TestPrepInsight — firsthand review of the ACT® course and classes.
• Sojourning Scholar — pricing, refund window, and digital-only limitation.
• Glassdoor — employee reviews (4.7 stars), a proxy for company health.

The Bottom Line for ACT® Prep

If your student is self-motivated and you want to spend $129 to see whether self-study alone can move the needle before committing to anything bigger, Magoosh is the most defensible cheap option on the market. The free trial means you can confirm it fits before paying.

But understand what the real decision is. If your student needs more than a curriculum and a question bank — if they need someone to actually teach the material, hold them accountable, and explain a missed question while it's still fresh — then every other paid competitor is going to charge you ten to fifty times more for what is fundamentally still a course-plus-practice product. The question that matters isn't "Magoosh versus the next course." It's self-study at any price point versus an actual specialist who teaches your child directly.

If that second path is the one you're weighing, here's how I work with families and what's on this site for free — much of which covers the underlying content Magoosh assumes a student already has.

See how one-on-one ACT® tutoring with a specialist works

→Kaplan ACT® Prep Review: What Parents Are Actually Paying For