You get an interview date. You search "Amazon DSA questions," and every result funnels you to the same place: LeetCode Premium, roughly $35/month (or about ₹2,000–3,000 depending on the plan and region), with the company-tagged question lists locked behind it. Right when the pressure is highest, the paywall feels mandatory. It isn't. You can rebuild most of that signal for free — and this post shows you exactly how, plus the one thing Premium honestly does better so you can decide with clear eyes.

Premium sells you recency and convenience, not a secret. The pattern distribution a company favours is far more stable than its exact question list — and that distribution is reconstructable for free.

What you're actually paying for

Be precise about what Premium's company tags give you, because the value is narrower than the price implies. You're paying for three things:

• A list of questions tagged to a company — "these showed up in Amazon interviews."
• A recency filter — "...in the last 6 months / 1 year / 2 years." This is the genuinely useful part.
• Frequency sorting — roughly how often each question recurs.

That's it. It is not curated explanations, it is not a learning path, and it is not a guarantee those exact questions come back — companies rotate, and tagged data is crowd-sourced and noisy. So the real question isn't "is the tag accurate?" It's "how much of this can I reconstruct without paying?" The answer is most of it.

Where the free company-frequency data lives

Crowd-sourced company question data is widely available outside the paywall. You won't get LeetCode's exact internal frequency numbers, but you'll get something directionally close — and "close" is plenty for prep. The honest sources:

• GitHub "company-wise" question repositories. Search GitHub for "leetcode company wise questions" — several well-known public repos compile community-reported questions per company, often with rough frequency and a time window. These are scraped/donated archives, so treat them as directional, not gospel.
• Interview-experience write-ups. GeeksforGeeks "Interview Experiences," LeetCode's own free Discuss forum, and r/leetcode threads where candidates post their exact loop right after interviewing. This is the freshest free signal that exists — and it's the one thing a static tag list can't give you: context (which round, what follow-ups, how it was framed).
• Glassdoor and AmbitionBox for the behavioural and process side — round structure, OA format, what the bar feels like — even if the coding specifics are thin.
• Public "top questions for X" blog posts. Noisier and often SEO-bait, but cross-referencing three of them surfaces the genuinely recurring names.

Cross-reference two or three of these and the same 30–50 questions per company keep reappearing. That overlap is your free company tag. The signal is in the repetition across sources, not in any single list.

The trusted free sheets do most of the heavy lifting

Here's the part people miss while fixating on the paywall: a huge fraction of company questions are already on the free sheets you'd use anyway. Striver's SDE/A2Z, Love Babbar's 450, NeetCode 150 — these weren't assembled randomly. They're built from years of real interview questions, which is precisely why the "classic" problems (Kadane, Trapping Rain Water, LRU Cache, Number of Islands, the graph and DP staples) overlap heavily with whatever any company tag would show you.

So the free stack is: solve a trusted sheet for coverage, then use free company-frequency data to re-order which parts you drill first and hardest. You're not choosing between "sheet" and "company tags" — you're layering one on the other. If you're still deciding which spine to commit to, the Blind 75 vs NeetCode 150 vs Striver comparison breaks down the trade-offs, and the Striver vs Love Babbar vs Apna College post covers the India-favourite options.

Pattern-frequency reasoning beats question-memorising anyway

Even with a perfect leaked list, memorising specific questions is the wrong strategy — companies rotate them faster than you can grind. What's stable is the pattern distribution. Amazon leans on grids, graphs, and trees. Google leans on intervals, greedy, and clean problem-modelling. Microsoft leans on arrays, strings, linked lists, and solid fundamentals. Those leanings barely move year to year, which makes them far more reliable than any individual question.

This is why a free, reasoned approach can match a paid list for placement purposes: if you know your target company over-indexes on graphs, you drill graph problems from your free sheet until you recognise the shape in under two minutes — and it doesn't matter which specific graph question they ask. For the company-by-company pattern map, the Google, Amazon & Microsoft breakdown lays it out without any paywall involved.

The free playbook, step by step

Step	What you do	Free source
1. Pick a spine	Commit to one trusted sheet for coverage	Striver / NeetCode / Babbar 450
2. Build a frequency picture	Cross-reference 2–3 lists; note the repeating ~30–50 questions	GitHub company-wise repos
3. Read recent experiences	Find loops posted in the last few months for your company	LeetCode Discuss, GFG, r/leetcode
4. Reorder by pattern	Drill the patterns your company over-weights first	Pattern-distribution reasoning
5. Verify the bar	Confirm OA format and round structure	Glassdoor / AmbitionBox

That sequence gets you to roughly 80% of Premium's value at zero cost. The 20% gap is real — let's be honest about it.

When Premium is actually worth it (and when it isn't)

The honest case for Premium: its recency filter is genuinely better than anything free. "Questions from this company in the last 6 months," sorted by frequency, in one clean place, is real signal that free sources only approximate. If you have a confirmed onsite at one specific company in two weeks and ₹2–3k is trivial against the salary on the line, one month of Premium is a defensible spend. The convenience of not stitching five free sources together has value when time is the scarce resource.

The honest case against: if you're months out, prepping broadly, or targeting several companies, Premium buys you very little a free workflow doesn't. The tags are noisy, the recency advantage matters most in the final fortnight, and paying a monthly subscription during a six-month grind is pure leakage. And it does nothing for the question that decides far more outcomes — not "which company," but "how many problems and which ones?" — which the how many LeetCode problems are enough post answers directly: it's closer to 150 right problems than 1000 random ones.

• Pay if: one target, confirmed onsite, <2 weeks out, recency is decisive.
• Don't pay if: broad prep, multiple targets, months of runway, or you're early enough that fundamentals aren't solid yet.

Fundamentals first, company tags last

One trap worth naming: don't reach for company-specific anything until your most important DSA topics are solid. Company filtering is a final-mile optimisation — it sharpens prep that already exists. If your arrays, strings, hash maps, recursion, and graph basics aren't reflexive yet, a tagged Amazon list won't save you; you'll just fail Amazon's questions specifically instead of generically. Build the foundation, then overlay the company lean. Tags reorder priorities; they don't replace competence.

Let the free workflow run itself

Everything above is doable by hand — a sheet, a few open tabs, and the discipline to reorder by pattern. The friction is the stitching: keeping a trusted sheet's progress in one place while manually re-sequencing it around the company or role you're chasing. That re-sequencing is exactly what SUITS automates — it unifies the curated Apna College, Love Babbar 450, and Striver A2Z problems into one progress model, then reorders them around the role you're actually targeting so your highest-frequency patterns float to the top instead of sitting at step 14. You bring the free company-frequency reasoning from this post; SUITS handles the "what do I solve next, in what order" so you never pay $35/month to answer a question a free workflow already covers.