How Much Does a Funded Account Really Cost?
- The real price of a funded account is the eval fee times the months you take, plus the activation fee when you pass, plus every reset you buy, plus any data fee billed on top. The checkout price is one line of that bill.
- With round example numbers, a 50K eval at $120 a month costs $270 if you pass in the first month. Take three months and one reset and the same account costs $580 once the activation is in.
- Which billing model is cheaper depends on how long you take. In this guide's example, the monthly firm was cheaper for a first-month pass, and the one-time firm was cheaper for three months with a reset.
- The activation fee and the data fee are the two lines people miss. Read the funded-account page before you buy, because some activation fees grow with account size, and a data fee keeps billing after you pass.
- Pick the account size by its drawdown next to the profit target first, then run the bill, then compare prices. A low price with a tight drawdown usually just buys you a reset.
The number on the checkout button is one line of the bill. Add the monthly rebill if the evaluation takes you past the first month, the activation fee that lands after you pass, any reset you buy on the way, and the data feed at firms that bill it separately. That total is what a funded account really costs.
I am an active futures day trader with more than 13 years in the markets, and I have paid every one of those fees except the data fee. I read the whole fee page with a fine-toothed comb before I buy, and I do not trade firms that add data fees on top. This page is that comb: every fee a firm can charge you, the arithmetic by account size, and why the lowest price on the page is so often not the cheapest way to a payout.
The Checkout Price Is One Line of the Bill
None of this is hidden. It is spread out. The eval fee sits on the pricing page, the activation fee sits on the funded-account page, and the reset fee sits in the help center. 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. 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. What it costs to get funded is the eval fee times the number of months you take, at a firm that bills monthly. Add the activation fee when you pass, every reset you buy, and any data or platform fee the firm charges on top. That is the formula. The rest of this page goes through each fee, then runs the arithmetic at three account sizes with round numbers you can redo on paper. Then it 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 Eval Fee
The eval fee is the price on the checkout page, but renewals and other fees are important other costs to factor in. At a firm that bills one time, you pay once and the eval runs until you pass, fail, or hit whatever time limit the firm sets. At a firm that bills monthly, the same eval renews every thirty days until you pass or cancel, so a slow, careful pass costs more than a fast one. The price you compared against the other firms was really a price per month. Keep in mind monthly billing is not the trap it looks like. A cheap eval 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 monthly billing.
The Activation Fee
The activation fee is the one people budget for least, because it doesn't 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 eval can carry a bigger second bill. Read the funded-account page before you buy the eval, 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
The reset fee is the one you pay when the eval fails and you want the same account back instead of buying a new one. Firms price it below a fresh eval, 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. That 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
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 eval 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 eval 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.
Not on the Bill: Commissions
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 how the firm bills more than the size of the account. 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 eval is $60 a month, a 50K is $120 and a 100K is $200. Activation is $100, $150 and $250, and a reset is $70 whatever the size. None of those are a real firm's numbers. They work the way a real firm's numbers work, and that is what you are about to see.
Pass in the First Month
Pass in the first month with no reset and the bill is the eval 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.
Three Months and One Reset
Now take three months and one reset, which is a normal run 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 eval 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.
The Same Three Months at a One-Time Firm
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 about how a firm bills, not the price on the checkout page, and you only know what it costs once you are honest about how long you take and how often you fail.
How I Pick a Size
For what it is worth, price was the last thing I looked at when I bought my first eval. 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 full price. The cheapest prop firms page runs this same total-cost arithmetic across all of them, 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.
Billing: One Time or Monthly
The first split is the billing model, one time or monthly, and it is the split that decides everything downstream. A one-time eval sometimes comes with a time limit, so the cost is fixed but you can run out of time. A monthly eval usually has no time limit, so you will not run out of time but the cost keeps running. Neither is better. A trader who passes fast usually pays less on monthly. A trader who takes a few tries usually pays less on one-time. Decide which trader you are before you decide which model is cheaper, because the model is cheaper for exactly one of them.
Activation: Free, Flat, or by Size
The second split is the activation fee. A few firms also let you trade it away by paying a higher eval 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).
Resets: Sold or Included
The third split is resets. Some firms sell them, and some include one or two free before charging. At some firms the funded account has its own reset with its own price, which is a different bill than the eval reset and belongs to the what happens if you blow a funded account page.
Data: Included, at Cost, or Extra
The fourth split is data, and it is the one I sort firms by first. Included is a fixed bill. At cost is a bill that moves when the exchange changes its fee. Extra is a second subscription on top of your eval, and it is the fee that most often turns a cheap firm into an expensive one over a year.
Reading All Four Across Firms
I will say plainly that reading all of this 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 fees for every firm we cover, and the how we score page 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 Way to a Payout
A cheap eval 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 way to a payout are two different questions, and many price comparisons you will find online answer the first one and call it the second.
Here is how a cheap ticket turns into an expensive bill.
Start With the Rules
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 buy is called a renewal and doesn't feel like one.
What Lands After the Pass
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 eval prices and both very real on the day you pass. So the firm with the cheap eval and the expensive funded side wins the comparison and loses the year.
The Sale
Then look at the sale, if there is one. A discount on the eval 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 doesn't. Firms know the eval price is the line you are looking at. That is why it is the line that goes on sale. I buy my evals 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.
Three Numbers I Find First
So when I see a cheap eval, the price tells me nothing until I have found three other numbers. They are the drawdown next to the target, the activation fee on the funded page, and the data fee 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.
What Our Cost Score Reads
This is the whole reason our Cost Score exists, and it is worth saying what it does and doesn't do. It is not a ranking of eval prices, which would just repeat the checkout button. It reads the price, the billing model, the activation, the reset fees and the data fee for every firm we cover and scores the bill, not the ticket. The price it reads is the firm's regular price, or the sale price while a published, dated sale is running. The cheapest prop firms page is that score put in order, and the how we score page 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 doesn't know whether you pass fast or slow, and that is the number that decides which billing model is cheaper, which is why the account size section above ran the same trader through both. Take the score as the bill on the day it was worked out, 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 doesn't get my card no matter what the eval costs. 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 the account size section 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 eval price can be a couple hundred dollars apart by the time you are funded. The one that looked cheaper on the pricing page is not the one that comes out ahead as often as you would think.
Set a Hard Number per Month
Then decide what the whole thing is allowed to cost you per month, and treat that as a hard number. Mine is one cheap eval a month, paid out of my own pocket, and no more. If I want to run more evals than that, they get bought out of trading proceeds, never out of the paycheck. That one rule is what keeps me from gambling on evals with my own hard-earned money, and it is worth more than any fee comparison on this page. 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. The how to choose a prop firm guide covers the rest of the decision once the fee filter has done its part. If you are still deciding whether to buy an eval 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 whole bill and not the ticket, and never spend money on an eval that you would feel in your own account if it went to zero. The eval can be reset. Your own money cannot.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Much Is a $100,000 Prop Firm Account?
There is no single price, because a 100K evaluation is billed one time at some firms and monthly at others, and the activation fee after you pass can be zero or can scale with the size. The number on the checkout button is one line of the bill. The real cost is that line times the months you take, plus activation, plus any resets, plus a data fee if the firm bills one. Every 100K we cover has its full price on the firm's review page, and the cheapest prop firms page lines them up on total cost rather than on the button.
How Much Does a $50,000 Funded Account Cost?
The same arithmetic as any other size: evaluation price times months, plus activation, plus resets, plus data if it is billed on top. The 50K is the most common size on the futures side and usually the one with the widest spread between firms on the funded-side fees, so the checkout price is the least useful number to compare at this size. Run the three-month, one-reset version of the bill before you decide.
How Much Is a $5,000 Prop Firm Account?
On the futures side, a 5K evaluation is not really a thing. The smallest futures evaluations we cover start at 25K, because futures contracts need an account that size to survive a normal drawdown. A 5K or 10K account is a forex-side product, priced and ruled differently, and it belongs on the forex firm pages rather than here.
Do All Prop Firms Charge a Monthly Fee?
No. Some firms bill the evaluation once, and some bill it every month until you pass or cancel. Monthly is cheaper if you pass fast and more expensive if you take a while, and the reverse is true of one-time, so the right model depends on how long you honestly take. Each firm's review states its billing model.
What Is a Prop Firm Activation Fee?
It is a one-time charge some firms bill after you pass the evaluation and before you can trade the funded account. It is separate from the evaluation fee, it is often not on the pricing page, and at some firms it rises with the size of the account you passed. Read the funded-account page before you buy the evaluation, because that is where the activation fee lives.
Can You Get Out of Paying an Activation Fee?
Three ways. Some firms do not charge one at all, and the prop firms with no activation fee page lists them. Some firms let you pay a higher evaluation price instead, which moves the same money to an earlier day. And some firm sales waive it as part of the promotion, which is worth checking the terms of a sale for before you assume the discount is only on the evaluation line.
How Much Does an Activation Fee Cost?
Anywhere from nothing to a fee that grows with the account. At firms that charge one, it is a flat amount on some accounts and a size-based amount on others, so a 150K can carry a much larger activation than a 50K at the same firm. The exact figure for every account we cover is on that firm's review, at full price and dated.