PracHub Is a Better Free Alternative to InterviewDB

Why a free bank of 5,621 solution-backed questions beats InterviewDB's points-gated crowdsource, and the four questions that expose a bad bank before you waste a month.

(The points wall as an object: you feed it tokens before it lets you through. This whole piece is an argument that you shouldn't have to.) A question bank that hides its questions behind a points economy isn't sorting for serious candidates. It's sorting for people with time to burn earning tokens.

I have feelings about that. Mostly because I watched someone burn the exact time he didn't have, and I'm the one who sent him there. I'll get to him. He's the reason I wrote any of this.

If you typed "InterviewDB alternative" into a search bar, you already know the shape of the problem: you hit interviewdb.io's points wall, or the bank felt thinner than the reviews promised, and you just want real questions without grinding first. Fine. The two tools in this piece, PracHub and InterviewDB, are really just the case studies. The thing worth stealing is how you tell a good bank from a bank that eats your month.

Prep is a debugging loop. A points wall breaks it before you start.

Prep is not a collecting hobby. I wish someone had told me that earlier. It's a loop: attempt the problem, get it wrong, find out why you were wrong, redo it. Miss the "why" and you're just memorising trivia that falls out of your head the moment the interviewer changes one constraint.

So look at what the two failure modes do to that loop. A bank that gives you prompts but no solutions cuts it at the most expensive step, the "why you were wrong" part. And a bank that makes you earn points before you can even read the prompt? That one cuts the loop before you've started. The real cost there isn't money. It's the time you don't have when you're weeks out from an onsite.

A prompt tells you the question. A solution tells you why you were wrong. Only one of those gets you the offer.

(The points economy is a loop you keep feeding before you learn anything. Free reading is a straight line from question to answer.)]

What InterviewDB actually is, and where it's genuinely good

interviewdb.io is a real product doing a real thing, so let me be straight about it. It's a crowdsourced bank of recently-asked SWE and quant questions, tagged across 170-plus companies. Candidates report what they got asked, the community compiles it, and a lot of that raw material flows down from 1Point3Acres, the Chinese-language forum co-founded back in 2009 by Warald and Guo Yu that basically invented the "report your real interview questions" model. (It also gates its own bank behind paid points, so the apple didn't fall far.)

⚠️ Naming trap:interviewdb.iois this crowdsourced site.interviewdb.comis a different product selling AI/ML prep behind thin testimonials. Same-ish name, unrelated tool, so don't cross the reviews.

And it has two honest strengths. That 170-plus tag breadth is wider than most, so for some obscure mid-size company it might have a sighting nobody else does. And the "recently asked" recency signal is genuinely useful when a loop is changing fast. Community sentiment does skew cool on the depth and the interface, but treat that the way you'd treat any anonymous forum thread: a hint, not a verdict. Verify it yourself before you spend anything. I'm passing along what candidates say, not ruling on it.

Notice the second row. When a bank won't show you its size until after you've paid or signed in, assume it's smaller than you're hoping. I've yet to see that assumption proven wrong.

The answer key is what teaches you the round

PracHub lists its counts on the SWE hub before you sign up for anything, 4,502 SWE questions inside a 5,621 company-tagged bank, and every one of them ships with a written solution. Not just a prompt and a thread of "anyone know how to do this?"

Size isn't even the point. The prompt is the easy part. Take a problem you'll get in some flavour at half the companies on either site: implement binary search. You write the obvious thing.

int low = 0, high = arr.length - 1;  // standard bounds for the search window

int mid = (low + high) / 2;          // overflow risk: low + high can exceed Integer.MAX_VALUE

Passes every small array you throw at it. Then someone hands it a huge one, low + high overflows past Integer.MAX_VALUE, mid goes negative, and you're staring at an ArrayIndexOutOfBounds you can't explain in front of the person deciding your salary. The prompt never warned you. A worked solution does.

int mid = low + (high - low) / 2;    // no overflow: never sums the two endpoints directly

That one line is the difference between a prompt-only bank and one that gets you ready for the interview.

It's worse in SQL, which matters because plenty of strong engineers are shaky there. In plain terms: if a list has one empty slot in it, NOT IN can make your entire query return nothing. No error. Just silence.

SELECT name FROM users           -- grab the people

WHERE id NOT IN (                -- ...who aren't in this list of managers

SELECT manager_id FROM teams   -- but one NULL manager_id here wipes the whole result to zero rows

);

You stare at that for ten minutes wondering where your data went. The worked solution flags it and hands you the fix.

SELECT name FROM users u             -- same intent

WHERE NOT EXISTS (                   -- NOT EXISTS shrugs off NULLs instead of choking on them

SELECT 1 FROM teams t              -- just checking a row exists, don't care about its value

WHERE t.manager_id = u.id          -- match on id; a NULL simply doesn't match, no silent wipeout

);

A prompt won't teach you that. An answer key will, or you'll learn it live, the hard way. Same story past coding, too: PracHub carries 583 ML questions plus a system design set and a STAR behavioural hub, which only matters through one lens anyway. Does the bank cover the round you're actually walking into?

(One bank, several rounds covered, and the counts are visible before you make an account. That last part is the tell.)

The four-question bank test

Here's the part you can steal and use on any bank, PracHub or not. Before you commit weeks to a question bank, put it through four questions. First, can you see its real size before you pay, because a count hidden behind a wall is almost always small. Second, does every question carry a worked solution or just a prompt and a comment thread, because a prompt without an answer key is a flashcard with the back ripped off. Third, does it cover the round you're actually facing, since SWE is table stakes but a SWE-only tag dump won't rescue you in a SQL or ML or system design loop. And fourth, what does it cost you just to start, because points to grind and dollars to spend are both friction between you and reps, and reps are the only thing here that compounds. Run anything through those four and the answer usually shows up on its own.

FAQ

Is PracHub free? Yes, there's a free ad-supported tier with no points economy, so you read questions and their solutions without earning or buying anything. Premium ($21.99/mo or$59.99/quarter) adds AI mock interviews, but the core bank is free.

Is interviewdb.io worth the points? For tag breadth and fresh sightings, maybe. But you pay in points, earned or bought, to read premium questions, and community sentiment on depth runs cool. Try the free reading elsewhere before you grind.

Is interviewdb.io the same as interviewdb.com? No. interviewdb.io is the crowdsourced tech and quant site. interviewdb.com is a separate AI/ML prep product with thin testimonials. Don't mix up the reviews.

Which has more questions? PracHub publishes its numbers. InterviewDB doesn't. Before you spend anything, that asymmetry is enough of a signal.

The verdict, quickly

If you want to read real, solution-backed questions today, free, across SWE, SQL, ML and system design, that's PracHub and it isn't close. If you're chasing one specific company that only surfaces in InterviewDB's wider tag list, or you want the community's freshest "asked last week" sightings and you don't mind the grind, keep InterviewDB open in a second tab. Nobody's forcing a monogamous choice. Just start where reading is free and the answers come included.

So. The mentee.

Last cycle a friend asked me where to prep for a Meta loop, and I told him, with a confidence I hadn't earned, to grind InterviewDB, because "it's got the real questions." He spent his best prep window earning points instead of building reps. Walked in with a head full of prompts and no worked solutions. Hit a graph problem he'd seen, recognised it on sight, and still couldn't solve it, because seeing a question and solving it are different skills and he'd only ever practised the first one.

No offer. Nothing.

That one's on me, and the apology was not a fun message to type. It's also the whole lesson, compressed: a bigger bank with answers only helps if you actually run the loop. Attempt, fail, read the solution, redo it cold. Read solutions like blog posts instead and you'll feel productive and learn nothing, and no platform saves you from that. Match the tool to the round. And maybe don't take prep advice from anyone that confident, me included.

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(If you're looking for a place to start,PracHub's free tier is the one I'd point a friend to today.)