CFI's two plans are $245 apart. Which one do you need?

Self-Study at $347.90 is the right plan for almost everyone. Full-Immersion's extra $245 buys one thing that matters — a human reading your models — and it's only worth paying if you'll actually submit them.

Compare both CFI plans →

Or read on for the reasoning ↓

You already have the code — I sent it in Thursday's roundup, and I'm not going to spend this email re-selling you a discount you're holding. What Thursday didn't have room for is the decision that actually costs you money, which isn't whether to buy CFI. It's which of the two plans to buy. They're $245 apart, CFI's own page doesn't really explain the gap, and I think most people are talking themselves into the wrong one.

1. What the extra $245 actually buys

Here's the whole difference, as of this morning. Self-Study is $347.90 a year and gets you the entire library — 5,000 lessons across 200+ courses, 7 certifications including the FMVA, 15 specializations, and CFI's model and template files. That is the complete curriculum. Nothing about the FMVA itself is locked behind the higher tier.

Full-Immersion is $592.90 and adds three things: a course-integrated AI chatbot, a set of partner discounts CFI values at $300+, and — the only one I'd actually pay for — 1-on-1 guidance and human review of the financial models you build. Ignore the first two when you're deciding. The chatbot is a nice-to-have that every platform now ships, and partner discounts are only worth $300 if you were independently going to buy those partners' products, which you almost certainly weren't.

So the honest framing is: $245 for someone to look at your models and tell you what's wrong with them. That is a genuinely good deal — a single hour of that kind of review is worth more than a month of lectures, because modeling errors are invisible to the person who made them. But it's worth exactly $0 if you don't submit anything, and the people most likely to buy the upgrade are the ones buying reassurance rather than a plan to use it. Be honest about which you are. My full breakdown of the tiers and what the certification costs is in the FMVA cost guide.

2. What the 30% code is really worth (less than it looks)

I want to be straight with you about this, because I got it wrong earlier this summer. For two roundups I gave you a code called COURSEING20 for 20% off. It turned out to be worth nothing at all — not because it didn't work, but because CFI's public pricing page was already showing everyone that same 20%. The code changed the number on your screen by exactly $0.

So I checked this one properly before writing to you. I loaded CFI's pricing page twice this morning, once clean and once with the code. Clean, the site offers Self-Study at $397.60 and Full-Immersion at $677.60 — 20% off, applied automatically to anyone who lands there. With AFF30, those become $347.90 and $592.90.

That means the code is real this time, and it's worth $49.70 on Self-Study or $84.70 on Full-Immersion. Not the $149 or $254 you'd get by measuring against CFI's list price, because you were never going to pay list — nobody does. One more thing you should know: AFF30 isn't mine. Impact labels it an affiliate-exclusive, but it went out to the whole partner list, so anyone reading a CFI review this week has it. I'd rather tell you that than let you think I negotiated something. Enter it at checkout.

3. The part I can't promise you about September

When I pulled the clean pricing page, I noticed the discount everyone gets is applied by a code named AUG2026. That's a month stamped into a coupon, which strongly suggests CFI rotates it — but I want to be careful, because I checked one month, not twelve, and I'm not going to invent a deadline out of a naming convention.

What I can tell you is exactly this: today the public offer is 20% and the partner code is 30%, and that 10-point gap is the entire reason to use AFF30 rather than just clicking through to CFI yourself. If September's standing offer comes in deeper, the gap narrows and the code matters less. If it comes in shallower, the code matters more. I don't know which, and anyone telling you they do is guessing.

Which is a long way of saying: don't rush this because of a date I've made up. Rush it — or don't — based on the question from section one. If you know you'll build the models and send them to someone, Full-Immersion at $592.90 is defensible. If you're honest that you'll work through it alone, take Self-Study at $347.90 and put the $245 somewhere it'll actually get used. The plan you'll finish beats the plan that impressed you at checkout. If you're still deciding whether CFI is the right platform at all, that's a different question and I answer it in my full CFI review.

Two plans, $245 apart, and the cheaper one contains the entire certification. Buy the upgrade for the model reviews or don't buy it at all.