About

Why this exists

The Customs Broker License Exam is open-book, and most people still fail it. Recent pass rates have run between 12% and 30%. That combination is the whole story: if the answers are all in front of you and you fail anyway, the exam is not testing what you know.

What it actually tests

Speed of navigation, under a clock, through two large documents in a viewer that is deliberately bad at being searched. No jump-to-next-match. No copy-paste. One document at a time. Candidates who know the material perfectly well run out of time looking for it.

Every course we could find teaches the material. None of them make you practise the constraint. So we built the constraint first, and the material around it.

What we built

• The crippled viewer, faithfully. Same limitations, same friction, next to a timer. You can try it on the 19 CFR page without an account.
• 697 real past-exam questions with CBP’s official answer and a worked explanation that cites the exact provision — because the loudest complaint about existing prep is an answer letter with no reasoning.
• Spaced repetition. The questions you get wrong come back sooner. Widely used everywhere else, absent from this niche entirely.

Why it costs $129

Courses in this niche run from $695 to $5,999. One attempt at the exam costs $390. The material underneath all of it is public domain and free to anyone who will assemble it. We are charging for the assembly and the practice, not for access to government documents — so the price is a fraction of a single attempt, and one pass covers the retake most people need.

What we are not

We are not CBP, not endorsed by CBP, and not able to help with your registration, your score, or your license application. We do not use the word “official” about ourselves. We are not a substitute for a licensed broker on a real entry — the explanations here are exam preparation, and a live shipment needs someone looking at your actual paperwork.

We also do not claim a pass rate. When we have collected enough outcomes from people who actually finished a plan, we will publish the number and how it was measured. Until then, the absence of a statistic is the honest version.

Checkable, on purpose

Every explanation names the provision it rests on, and you can open that provision on this site. The methodology page describes how each one is produced and where the process still fails; sources lists exactly what we hold and from whom. If something is wrong, it is checkable, and we would like to hear about it.

CustomsPrep is operated by Northpine Labs LLC. Independent study product. Not affiliated with U.S. Customs and Border Protection or any government agency. Past exams, answer keys, 19 CFR, and HTSUS are works of the U.S. government (17 U.S.C. §105).