How Much Does a Funded Account Really Cost?

The Checkout Price Is One Line of the Bill

None of this is hidden. It is spread out. The evaluation fee sits on the pricing page, the activation fee sits on the funded-account page, the reset fee sits in the help center, and the data fee, where there is one, sits in a platform table three clicks away, so the number a firm puts on the button is honest and incomplete at the same time. I have never paid a fee I did not see coming, but that is because I go looking for every one of them before I put a card in, and I will tell you plainly that many firms make the costs hard to follow, with add-ons and resets and activation fees and data lines scattered across the site. You have to be very careful and read through everything.

Here is the whole bill in one sentence. What it costs to get funded is the evaluation fee times the number of months you take (at a firm that bills monthly), plus the activation fee when you pass, plus every reset you buy, plus any data or platform fee the firm charges on top. That is the formula. The rest of this page walks each line, then runs the arithmetic at three account sizes with round numbers you can redo on paper, then shows you why the line that decides the total is almost never the one you are looking at.

Every Fee a Prop Firm Can Charge You

I have paid monthly fees, one-time fees, reset fees and activation fees, and the only line on this list I have never paid is the data fee, on purpose. So here is each line, what it is for, and where it tends to surprise people.

The evaluation fee is the price on the button, and it comes in two shapes that matter more than the number. At a firm that bills one time, you pay once and the evaluation runs until you pass, fail, or hit whatever time limit the firm sets. At a firm that bills monthly, the same evaluation renews every thirty days until you pass or cancel, so a slow, careful pass costs more than a fast one, and the price you compared against the other firms was really a price per month. Keep in mind the monthly shape is not the trap it looks like. A cheap evaluation that renews monthly is a great way to go, because if the month goes badly and the account fails, the renewal hands you a fresh account at the same price you were going to pay anyway. That is a reset built into the fee, and it is the reason I like that shape.

The activation fee is the one people budget for least, because it does not exist until you pass. At some firms it is zero, at some it is a flat one-time charge, and at some it rises with the size of the account you passed, so a bigger evaluation can carry a bigger second bill. Read the funded-account page before you buy the evaluation, not after you pass it, because the activation fee is decided the day you pick the account size, and by the time it comes due you have already done the work. The prop firms with no activation fee list runs the firms that skip it entirely.

The reset fee is the one you pay when the evaluation fails and you want the same account back instead of buying a new one. Firms price it below a fresh evaluation, some hand out a free reset or two before charging, and at a monthly firm the renewal itself often does the job. I have bought plenty of resets over the years, and the honest read is that a reset is cheap on the day and expensive as a habit, which is why the how to pass guide treats the second reset as a signal to stop and look at the trading instead of the fee.

The data and platform fee is the one cost I will not pay. Real-time futures data comes from the exchange, and a firm either includes it in the evaluation price, passes the exchange's own charge through to you, or bills its own platform and data package on top. I only trade firms that include the feed, because a data line turns a one-time evaluation into a monthly one and it keeps billing after you pass. Make sure you find that line before you compare prices, because it is the easiest one to miss and the one most likely to be sitting in a table on a different page.

One cost that is not on this bill: the commission on every round trip you trade. That is a real number, it varies by platform and broker, and it shows up in your results, not on the firm's invoice. It is not a prop firm fee, so it stays off this page, and off our scoring.

What It Costs by Account Size

The honest answer on how much a 100K account costs is that it depends on the shape of the bill more than the size of the account, and since that is the question people type most, let me show it with round numbers rather than any firm's price list. Take a firm that bills monthly and charges an activation fee that rises with size: a 25K evaluation at 60 dollars a month, a 50K at 120, a 100K at 200, with activation at 100, 150 and 250, and a reset at 70 whatever the size. None of those are a real firm's numbers. They are the shape of a real firm's numbers, and the shape is what you are about to see.

Pass in the first month with no reset and the bill is the evaluation plus the activation. The 25K costs 160. The 50K costs 270. The 100K costs 450. So far the checkout price and the real bill are not far apart, and this is the case every pricing page is quietly assuming.

Now take three months and one reset, which is a normal path for a careful trader, not a bad one. The 25K is three months at 60, which is 180, plus the 70 reset, plus 100 to activate: 350. The 50K is 360 plus 70 plus 150: 580. The 100K is 600 plus 70 plus 250: 920. The 25K evaluation that said 60 on the button cost almost six times that, and nothing about it was a surprise, it was just a monthly price doing what monthly prices do.

Run the same three months at a firm that bills one time. Say its 50K is 300 up front, activation is zero, and a reset is 100. Pass fast with no reset and it costs 300, which is more than the 270 the monthly firm charged. Take three months and one reset and it costs 400, which is 180 less than the monthly firm's 580. Same account size, same trader, same three months, and the cheaper firm flipped depending on how long the pass took. That is the whole point of this page in one comparison. Cheap is a shape, not a price, and the shape only tells you what it costs once you are honest about how long you take and how often you fail.

For what it is worth, price was the last thing I looked at when I bought my first evaluation. It was a 300K, the biggest one on the menu, and I bought it for the biggest drawdown I could get, for uncapped payouts, and for enough contracts to scalp with size. Since then I have bought plenty of smaller accounts, and the reason is never the lower price, it is a better ratio of profit target to drawdown, as long as the payouts stay uncapped. So pick the size by the ratio and the terms first, then run the bill for that size the way we just did, and only then compare firms on price. A cheap 50K with a tight drawdown is not a cheap account, it is a cheap ticket to a reset.

If you want the real numbers for the size you have in mind, every firm we cover has them on its review page at list price, and the cheapest prop firms page runs this same total-cost arithmetic across the roster so you do not have to build the table yourself. The full directory is where the reviews live.

How Firms Differ on Cost

Every firm charges some version of the bill above. What changes from firm to firm is which lines are on it and how big each one is, and those differences sort into a handful of patterns you can spot in five minutes once you know them.

The first split is the billing model, one time or monthly, and it is the split that decides everything downstream. A one-time evaluation sometimes comes with a time limit, so the cost is fixed but the clock can be real. A monthly evaluation usually has no time limit, so the clock is soft but the cost keeps running. Neither is better. A trader who passes fast pays less on one-time. A trader who takes a few tries pays less on monthly with the renewal reset built in. Decide which trader you are before you decide which model is cheaper, because the model is cheaper for exactly one of them.

The second split is the activation fee, and firms handle it three ways: none at all, a flat charge, or a charge that scales with account size. A few firms also let you trade the activation fee away by paying a higher evaluation price up front, which is the same money moved to a different day. That version is worth knowing because it changes the bill for a fast passer (who now pays more) and a slow one (who was going to pay the activation anyway).

The third split is resets. Some firms sell them, some include one or two free before charging, and at some firms the funded account has its own reset with its own price, which is a different bill than the evaluation reset and belongs to the what happens if you blow a funded account page.

The fourth split is data, and it is the one I sort firms by first. A firm either includes the feed, passes the exchange fee through at cost, or charges its own platform and data package on top of everything else. Included is a fixed bill. Passthrough is an honest bill that moves when the exchange moves it. Paid is a second subscription living inside your evaluation, and it is the line that most often turns a cheap firm into an expensive one over a year.

I read all of this on every firm I have ever bought from, and it is why I have never paid a fee I did not see coming. I will also say plainly that it is not easy to do on your own, and it is a lot harder to do across five or six firms at once when each one puts the lines in a different place. That is the job this site was built for. Our Cost Score reads these exact fields for every firm we cover, and the scoring methodology shows you what goes into it, so you can check the work rather than take my word for it.

Why the Cheapest Evaluation Is Rarely the Cheapest Path

A cheap evaluation is a price for one attempt. A payout is what you get after some number of attempts, an activation, and however many months of whatever the firm bills on top, so the cheapest attempt and the cheapest path are two different questions, and almost every price comparison you will find online answers the first one and calls it the second.

Here is how a cheap ticket turns into an expensive path. Start with the rules, because the rules set how many attempts you are likely to need. A low price paired with a tight drawdown against the profit target is not a bargain, it is a firm pricing in that you will probably buy the account twice, and at a monthly firm the second purchase is called a renewal and does not feel like one. Then look at what lands after the pass. An activation that scales with size and a data package that bills every month are both zero on the day you compare evaluation prices and both very real on the day you pass, so the firm with the cheap evaluation and the expensive funded side wins the comparison and loses the year. Then look at the sale, if there is one. A discount on the evaluation fee is a discount on one line of the bill, and you have to check whether it touches the activation, the reset, or the data line, because it often does not. Firms know the evaluation price is the line you are looking at. That is why it is the line that goes on sale. I buy my evaluations when they go on sale, and I still read the terms of the sale before I read the price, because a discount is a discount on one line and I want to know which one.

So when I see a cheap evaluation, the price tells me nothing until I have found three other numbers: the drawdown next to the target, the activation line on the funded page, and the data line wherever the firm keeps it. If the drawdown is tight for the size, the price is a ticket to a reset. If the activation scales, the small print grew with the account. If data is billed on top, I close the tab, because a fee that keeps running after I pass is a fee I do not agree to.

This is the whole reason our Cost Score exists, and it is worth saying what it does and does not do. It is not a ranking of evaluation prices, which would just repeat the checkout button. It reads the list price, the billing model, the activation, the reset fees and the data line for every firm we cover and scores the bill, not the ticket, and it does that from each firm's standard list prices rather than whatever sale is running this week, because a sale is a date and a list price is a fact. The cheapest prop firms page is that score put in order, and the scoring methodology shows every input, so if you think we weighted a line wrong you can see exactly which one.

One thing the score cannot read is you. It does not know whether you pass fast or slow, and that is the number that decides which billing model is cheaper, which is why the section above ran the same trader through both. Take the score as the bill at list price, then adjust it for how long you honestly take.

Draw Your Fee Line Before You Shop

Fees are a filter, not a ranking, and the way to use this page is to decide which lines you will pay before you look at a single firm. Mine are simple. I will pay a monthly fee, a one-time fee, a reset, or an activation when the rules on the other side of that fee are right, and I have paid all four. I will not pay a data fee for connectivity to the exchange. That has to be included in the price, and a firm that bills it on top does not get my card no matter what the evaluation costs, because a fee that keeps running after the pass is a fee I never agreed to. You do not have to draw your line where I drew mine. You do have to draw it before you shop, because a pricing page is built to move it for you.

Once the lines are drawn, run the bill the way section three did, at the size you actually want, for the number of months you honestly take, with a reset in the math. Then compare firms on that number and not on the button. Two firms with the same evaluation price can be a couple hundred dollars apart by the time you are funded, and the one that looked cheaper on the pricing page is not the one that comes out ahead as often as you would think.

Then decide what the whole thing is allowed to cost you per month, and treat that as a hard number. Mine is one cheap evaluation a month, paid out of my own pocket, and no more. If I want to run more evaluations than that, they get bought out of trading proceeds, never out of the paycheck. That one rule is what keeps me from gambling on evaluations with my own hard-earned money, and it is worth more than any fee comparison on this page, because the only real way to lose money to a prop firm is to keep buying attempts you cannot afford to lose.

The firm finder has a budget filter that does the first cut for you across every firm we cover, at list price, and the how to choose a prop firm guide walks the rest of the decision once the fee filter has done its part. If you are still deciding whether to buy an evaluation at all, that is the are prop firms worth it question, and it has its own page.

So read every fee line before you buy, price the path and not the ticket, and never spend money on an evaluation that you would feel in your own account if it went to zero. The evaluation can be reset. Your own money cannot.

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Written and maintained by Lane Dotson, an active futures day trader with more than 13 years in the markets. More about Lane