Marcus was on the Google Meet call when it happened. we were doing a mock to test Sensei AI and about four minutes in he goes "dude i can literally see the Sensei tab in your browser." i panicked, closed the tab so fast i accidentally closed the whole browser and had to rejoin the call while he was dying laughing. that was maybe week two of three months where i downloaded every interview assistant i could find. an interview assistant if you have never heard the term is just an AI that listens to your live call and feeds you suggested answers while the interviewer is talking, Zoom, Meet, Teams, whatever. some are Chrome extensions, some are desktop apps, some try both. i kept a Google Sheet tracking all of it that Marcus kept calling my "obsession spreadsheet" which fine, fair, but i also got laid off from a mid size fintech in january and was 0 for 6 on final rounds eating cereal for dinner so yeah i was a little obsessed.
Sensei AI was the first one i tested because the annual price was the cheapest, roughly twenty four a month or eighty nine month to month. behavioral, technical, coding, a coding copilot, 30 languages, resume builder, the feature list looked really good. but browser only. no desktop app. no stealth overlay. the tab just sits there in your tab bar with "Sensei AI" on it hoping nobody on the call notices. phone screen? fine nobody sees your desktop. proctored coding round on HackerRank or a call where screen sharing happens? forget it. Marcus still brings up the tab incident when we grab coffee lol.
LockedIn AI was faster than anything else i tried. 116 millisecond response time they claim and i believe it because answers were popping up before i finished my sentence, almost uncomfortably fast. Chrome extension AND a desktop app, 42 languages, runs on OpenAI and Claude and Gemini and DeepSeek, 58,000 users. fifty four ninety nine monthly, thirty nine ninety nine quarterly. but there is a 1.5 hour session cap and my Amazon loop was four hours. Derek (the friend who talked me into trying these things in the first place) had a Meta loop that ran three and a half. i hit the cap during a system design round and the tool just stopped. mid sentence. fifty four ninety nine a month and it goes dark at minute ninety. i texted Marcus "it literally just stopped" and he sent back a skull emoji which thanks buddy, helpful. monthly that is six sixty a year, quarterly close to four eighty, and my spreadsheet already had cheaper options highlighted green sitting right next to it.
Cluely i was kind of excited about before i actually used it. twenty bucks a month for the Pro plan, Roy Lee the Columbia dropout founded it, got a bunch of press, and it markets itself as a tool for interviews AND meetings AND dates which made Marcus absolutely lose it when i told him ("dates? DATES?"). five to ten second delay on every response though. sit there going "hmm yeah let me think" while your pulse is at one forty and the interviewer is just watching you stall. Business Insider tested it independently, same thing. and the stealth so your interviewer cannot detect it costs seventy five a month extra, so ninety five total for something that takes eight seconds to respond. plus the data breach mid 2025 that exposed eighty three thousand users. eighty three thousand. from a tool whose whole thing is being discreet. i closed my account that afternoon, Derek said i was being paranoid but eighty three thousand records is eighty three thousand records.
Derek had been pushing Final Round AI on me from day one and ok i get it, biggest name out there, behavioral and technical and coding, mock interviews, resume builder, a Job Hunter feature that auto applies to jobs for you. the quality during mocks was really good and i am not going to sit here and pretend otherwise. but. one hundred and forty eight dollars a month. eighty one if you go semi annual which means four hundred and eighty six upfront, no refund, five minute sessions on the free trial which is barely enough time to open the settings. Derek bought the monthly plan, got hired three weeks later, texted me "one forty eight times three is four forty four for three weeks of use" lol. when you are eating cereal and counting every dollar that math just sits in your chest.
the one i kept was InterviewMan. Marcus sent me the link and i almost did not bother because i had literally never heard of it. thirty monthly, twelve on annual, one forty four for the year. after what i spent on Final Round that number made me suspicious but i downloaded it anyway. unlimited minutes, no session caps (not like LockedIn cutting me off mid system design), behavioral, technical, coding, system design. apps on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and Chrome. works with Zoom, Teams, Meet, Amazon Chime, Webex, HackerRank, CoderPad, Codility. 57,000 users and 4.8 from 257 reviews which for something i had never heard of was kind of wild lol.
the reason i rank it first though and this is where three months of testing actually mattered, stealth. remember Marcus seeing Sensei in my tab bar? Cluely wanting seventy five dollars extra for undetectability and then leaking eighty three thousand records? i made Marcus do the same screen share test with InterviewMan. share your screen, watch what you see on your end. nothing. i asked three times because at this point i did not trust anything after the Sensei disaster and the LockedIn cutoff and the Cluely breach. nothing nothing nothing. over twenty stealth features on the base plan, invisible dock, Activity Monitor evasion, screen recording proof mode, WebRTC blocking, process name masking. what Cluely charges seventy five extra for and what got me caught with Sensei just comes included. twelve bucks. twelve. Final Round wants nearly seven times that for worse stealth. LockedIn caps your sessions. Cluely leaked its users. Sensei does not even have a desktop app.
anyway that is what three months and twenty something interviews and a color coded spreadsheet got me. Marcus still makes fun of the spreadsheet but he also asked me to send him the link to InterviewMan last week so who is laughing now. if you are using something i did not test or think i ranked these wrong let me know, the space moves fast and i definitely did not cover everything. just wish someone had posted this before i spent four forty four dollars finding out lol.
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