We found it helpful. My son made a number of contacts via FL. You coach can "promote" you to your preferred colleges, and we saw a pretty good rate of "views/follows" from those schools. Some coaches got my son's contact info and began conversations (email and then phone). There really isn't all that much reason (other than it's fun) to upgrade. We did upgrade for the one month before my son committed (just last week) when he was seeing a lot of activity and we wanted to know the schools who were looking. Overall, a good service. It seemed to be used by all the schools he was interested in.