Every prop firm pricing page shows you one number. FTMO’s $100K evaluation is $540. FundedNext’s is $299. Some futures firms will get you in the door for under $100 once you apply the coupon that’s always running. And almost everyone, us included at some point, has looked at that number and thought “fine, that’s the cost.”
It’s not. It’s the cost if you pass first time, never reset, and the firm has no activation fee. Very few people tick all three boxes. So here’s the arithmetic we actually run before we recommend a firm, using real numbers from our reviews. None of it’s complicated. It’s just the part of the decision that the pricing page is designed to make you skip.
Start with the honest pass rate
Firms don’t publish pass rates in a way you can rely on. A few have put out numbers in interviews or regulatory filings over the years, and independent estimates cluster somewhere between 5% and 15% for a two-step evaluation. The “passed and then got paid” number is lower again, because a funded account isn’t a payout.
That range matters because it changes what you’re actually buying. At a 10% pass rate, the median trader isn’t buying one evaluation. They’re buying somewhere between two and four. Even if you’re a better-than-average trader — and everyone reading this believes they’re, which is fine, so do we — planning on passing your first attempt is planning on being in the top slice of everyone who tries. Budget for two or three attempts and you’ll be closer to reality than most.
There’s a second reason to take the pass rate seriously. The evaluation is, in a real sense, the firm’s product. A firm that makes most of its money from challenge fees rather than from a cut of trader profits has no financial reason to make the evaluation passable. That doesn’t make it a scam. It does mean the rules are written by someone whose revenue goes up when you fail, and you should read them that way.
Resets and retries are where the fee doubles
This is the part the pricing page never mentions. When you breach a rule during the evaluation, you either buy a full new challenge or, at some firms, pay a discounted reset that keeps your place in the process. On a $540 FTMO challenge, one failed attempt plus a second purchase is $1,080 before you’ve seen a funded account. Two failures is $1,620. Suddenly the “cheap” $299 firm that refunds your fee on first payout isn’t just cheaper; it’s a completely different financial decision.
Reset pricing varies enormously and is rarely on the main pricing page. Some firms offer a reset at roughly a third of the original fee if you failed while still in profit. Some only offer it during Phase 2. Some don’t offer it at all and call every failure a fresh purchase. Before you buy, find the reset policy — it’s usually in the FAQ under “what happens if I breach” — and treat the reset price as part of the cost, because statistically it probably will be.
We list whether the fee is refundable on every firm review, and the Challenge Cost Comparator lets you model two or three attempts side by side rather than guessing.
Activation fees and monthly data fees
Futures firms in particular are fond of the low headline fee followed by a one-off activation charge when you pass — anywhere from $85 to $150 in the firms we’ve looked at — and sometimes a monthly platform or data fee on top. None of this is hidden exactly; it’s in the terms. But it’s not on the button you click to buy, and it lands at the exact moment you’re least likely to object, because you’ve just passed and you want your account.
If you’re comparing a futures firm to a forex firm on price alone, add the activation fee to the futures side before you decide. A “$79” evaluation with a $125 activation is a $204 evaluation. It’s still cheaper than a lot of forex options, but the gap is a third of what the two pricing pages suggest.
Monthly fees are the sneakier version. A $30-a-month data or platform charge is trivial in month one and $360 by the end of a year on a funded account. On a small account that has paid out once or twice, that’s a meaningful slice of what you actually took home. We note recurring fees in the Payouts tab on each review when we find them.
The fee refund is the biggest single variable
A refundable challenge fee changes the whole calculation. If FTMO refunds your $540 on your first payout, and you pass and withdraw, your net cost of entry was zero. If FundedNext refunds $299, same outcome. If a firm charges $199 and never refunds it, that $199 is gone no matter how well you trade.
So the honest comparison isn’t “$540 vs $299 vs $199.” It’s “how much do I lose if I fail, and how much do I lose if I succeed.” At a refund-on-first-payout firm, the second number is close to zero. That’s why our comparison table has a fee-refundable column and why we weight it heavily in the Value for Money sub-score. The refund is also, quietly, a signal about the firm’s business model: a firm that gives your fee back is a firm that expects to make its money from your future profits, which means it needs you to keep trading. That’s the incentive you want.
The time cost is real, even if you never pay it in cash
A 30-day time limit with a 4-day minimum trading requirement means you’re committing at least a month of focused screen time per attempt. Three attempts is a quarter of a year. That’s not a reason to avoid challenges. It’s a reason to pick a firm whose rules suit how you already trade, rather than one you’ve to bend your style to fit.
The pattern we see over and over is a trader passing a challenge with a strategy they wouldn’t normally use — more aggressive, more trades, tighter stops to hit the target inside the window — and then blowing the funded account with the strategy they would normally use, because the funded rules are different and their real style was never tested against them. The time you spend is only an investment if the thing you’re practising is the thing you’ll actually do.
Opportunity cost, or what the fee could have been
One more number, and it’s the one nobody likes. A $540 fee plus two resets is roughly $1,000. That’s not a large trading account, but it’s a real one, and at some brokers it’s enough to trade micro lots with sensible risk. If the honest reason you want a prop firm is that you don’t have capital, it’s worth at least asking whether three evaluation fees would have been capital. For a lot of people the answer is still “no, the leverage a funded account gives me is worth it.” That’s a fine answer. It’s just one you should arrive at on purpose.
What “expensive” actually looks like
- A $540 fee, refunded on first payout, at a firm that reliably pays: close to free if you pass and withdraw.
- A $299 fee at a firm with a trailing drawdown that closes accounts quickly: potentially $900 across three attempts, none of it refunded.
- A $79 futures fee with a $125 activation, on a firm with a consistency rule you didn’t read: $204 plus the trades you can’t take.
- A $199 non-refundable fee at a firm with a $30 monthly data charge: $559 in year one before a single payout, even if you pass first time.
The five-minute version
Before you buy any evaluation, write down four numbers: the fee, the reset price, the activation fee if any, and whether the fee comes back. Multiply the first two by two. Add the third. Subtract the fee if it’s refundable and you’re confident you’ll withdraw. That’s your realistic cost. If it’s more than you’d be comfortable losing in a bad month of trading, it’s too much for an evaluation, regardless of what the pricing page says.
The sticker price is the least useful of those numbers. Refundability, reset policy and rule fit are what decide the real cost, and those are the three columns to look at first.