Is the sticker fee the real cost of a prop firm challenge?
The real cost of a prop firm challenge is fee ÷ pass probability — not the sticker. A $150 evaluation at a 25% pass rate is a $600 expected ticket. We publish no pass rate for any named firm; compute yours free at app?src=challenges-worth-it.
The sticker is not the cost. The rule set is.
Getting funded is a repeated purchase: you buy an attempt, and if it fails you buy another at a fresh fee. So the number that matters is not the sticker price but fee ÷ your own pass probability — and that probability is set by the rule set you trade against, not by the number on the checkout page.
Binding constraint — the rule set, not the fee
At your pass probability, what does one $150 sticker actually cost?
Five stops, because this page publishes five rows. The ladder snaps to a published row and will not interpolate between them — a value between two measured rows is a value nobody measured.
Working backwards: free path — real cost is fee ÷ pass probability ($150 at 25% = $600 expected). Feed your win rate, R and risk size; read pass probability, expected attempts and fee spend under each firm's verified rules. No signup; computed in-browser.
Numbers first: expected cost = fee ÷ pass probability; $150 at 25% = $600 (4 attempts); $150 at 75% ≈ $200. Answer first: the sticker is not the cost — expected cost is fee ÷ pass probability. The checkout page shows one number — the evaluation fee — and traders decide "worth it" by comparing that sticker to the account size they'll control. But the fee is the cost of one attempt, and attempts fail often enough that firms sell the next one as a product. The honest question isn't "can I afford the fee?" It's "how many fees will I pay before I'm funded — and is that total worth what a funded account is actually worth to me?" This page answers both with arithmetic, and with the one input nobody can publish on your behalf: your own pass probability.
The price on the checkout page is not the cost
Getting funded is a repeated purchase. You buy an attempt; if it fails, you buy another, at a fresh fee. So the number that matters is not the sticker price but the expected cost of one funded account — the total you can expect to spend across however many attempts it takes. When each attempt is an independent draw at your pass probability, that number has a clean closed form:
expected attempts = 1 ÷ pass probabilityexpected cost to get funded = fee ÷ pass probabilityRead it slowly, because it inverts the way most traders shop. A 50% pass rate doesn't mean "half the time it costs the fee." It means you can expect to pay the fee twice. A 25% pass rate means four times. The sticker price is a floor you only hit in the lucky case; the expected price is what the challenge costs the average trader with your statistics.
One caveat keeps the formula honest: it treats every attempt as a fresh, independent draw at the same pass probability. Reality bends that both ways. A bruising failure can tilt the next attempt below your baseline; a trader who diagnoses what went wrong can lift it. So read fee ÷ pass probability as the number to beat, not a sentence you're serving — and the rest of this page is about the one input that beats it.
You aren't buying a challenge. You're buying a ticket in a lottery you run yourself — priced at the sticker fee, with your own pass probability as the odds. Cheap tickets with bad odds are the expensive ones.
This immediately explains a result that confuses fee-shoppers: a cheaper challenge often costs more. Put two evaluations side by side. A $150 evaluation at a 25% pass rate is a $600 expected ticket. A $500 evaluation at a 90% pass rate is about $556. The one with the smaller number on the checkout page is the more expensive path to a funded account, because the extra attempts you have to buy more than erase the discount. Ranking firms by fee alone doesn't just miss the point — it inverts the honest ranking.
The real cost, as a function of your pass probability
The multiplier does not depend on which firm you pick. It depends on one number — your probability of reaching funded — and it is fixed by arithmetic the moment that number is known. Every row below is 1 ÷ p on a sticker fee held flat at an illustrative $150, so the only thing varying is the probability itself.
| Funded probability | Expected attempts (1 ÷ p) | Expected cost at a $150 fee | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| 90% | 1.11× | $167 | Close to sticker. The fee is roughly the price. |
| 75% | 1.33× | $200 | A third more than sticker, invisibly. |
| 50% | 2.00× | $300 | Double. The coin-flip costs twice the advertised price. |
| 25% | 4.00× | $600 | Four attempts. The $150 evaluation was a $600 ticket. |
| 10% | 10.0× | $1,500 | Ten. Sticker price has stopped carrying information. |
This table is arithmetic, not a simulation: expected attempts = 1 ÷ funded probability, and a failed attempt is re-bought at a fresh fee (the conservative reading). It cannot be wrong unless the formula is. What it does not tell you is which row you are on — that depends on your statistics against a specific rule set, and it is the one number nobody can publish on your behalf. The engine computes it in your browser, from your own numbers, and tells no one. We publish no pass rate for any named firm. The first-party census of transcribed published stickers — 63 of 243 configs, $189–$750 at $100k (3.97×), 180 unrecorded not free — is research-prop-firm-fee-comparison.
The multiplier is the whole story — and the fee never moves it. What moves it is the rule you have to trade against: an intraday trailing floor that follows your equity upward (Apex), a consistency cap that limits how much of your profit may come from your best day (Topstep), or a static floor that never moves at all. Those are published rules, and each one bends your probability a different way. But which rule binds against your statistics, and how far it moves your number, is the one thing we will not print in a table on your behalf. The rule set is a price, and it's a bigger price than anything printed on the checkout page.
One fee, four probabilities. At a 90% pass probability the $150 sticker is close to what you actually pay; at 25% the same sticker is a $600 ticket — four attempts, not one. Nothing about the fee changed.
Bars are the expected spend to reach one funded account on an identical $150 sticker fee — the fee divided by the pass probability — ticked $150 in the gutter at left, the number you actually see at checkout. The horizontal variable is your pass probability, not a firm: we publish no pass rate for any named firm, and the wine bar marks the case where the multiplier, rather than the fee, decides whether the challenge is worth paying for. The published 10% row ($1,500) runs off the top of this plot; the table above carries it.
Two-step challenges charge a toll you can't see
One-step futures evaluations (Apex, Topstep, MyFundedFutures) fund you the moment you pass — pass equals funded. Two-step programs (FTMO, FundedNext) stack a second phase, and you're funded only if you clear both. Probabilities multiply, so:
funded probability = P(phase 1) × P(phase 2)Because probabilities multiply, a second phase always costs something, and the cost grows as your per-phase probability falls. Clear each phase 90% of the time and you are funded 81% of the time, not 90%. Clear each 70% and you are funded 49% — the second phase has taken more than twenty points. The toll is invisible on the sales page because each phase is quoted on its own.
The conservative reading, used here: a phase-2 failure restarts at a fresh fee, not a free retry. That said, phase count is a weak predictor of cost on its own. A two-step program with a floor that never moves can be a cheaper ticket than a one-step program whose daily limit ends sessions before the edge can express itself — and the reverse is equally possible. What decides it is which rule actually binds against your statistics, and your risk size — not the number of phases. A "one-step, get funded fast" headline is not automatically the cheaper ticket, and the only way to know is to run your own numbers.
Discounts, resets, and the reset trap
Two things obscure the real cost at the point of sale, and both cut against you.
Discount codes lower the sticker, not the multiplier. A 30%-off coupon changes the fee term in fee ÷ pass probability; it does nothing to the number of attempts. If your pass probability is 25%, a discount still leaves you buying four attempts on average — the coupon shaves the size of each, not the count. Firms that run near-permanent discounts are pricing that in. The honest saving is real but small next to the pass-rate lever below.
Reset fees reframe failure as a bargain. When you breach, a firm often offers a discounted "reset" to keep the same account rather than buying a fresh evaluation. It feels like a saving, and per-attempt it is — but it also lowers the friction of continuing to feed a challenge whose pass probability was the problem in the first place. Cheap resets don't fix bad odds; they make it easier to keep paying them. If the underlying pass probability is 25%, the correct response is usually not a reset — it's a smaller risk size, which changes the odds themselves.
So — are they worth it?
Now the two halves meet. A challenge is worth paying for when:
funded probability × (value of a funded account to you) > expected cost to get fundedThe left side is what you can realistically extract once funded — not the account's face size, but your modeled edge running under funded-stage rules, payout gates, and real-world friction. It is easy to overstate. A defensible estimate discounts the headline: our engine models a first funded year from your own expectancy and then applies an explicit 40% haircut for funded-stage rules and payout friction, and reports the result net of expected fee spend. The right side is the fee ÷ pass probability total from above. Both sides move with the same input — your pass probability — which is why a single honest number decides the question.
For a genuine edge, well-sized, at a static-drawdown firm, the comparison is usually comfortable: you expect to pay for a little over one attempt and keep a funded account with positive modeled value. For a marginal edge, over-sized, against an intraday trailing floor, the expected cost to get funded can approach or exceed the modeled first funded year — at which point the honest answer is not yet: fix the size or the edge before paying, not after.
There is also a cost the arithmetic doesn't capture: variance. "1.33 expected attempts" is an average; some traders with a 75% pass rate still fail three in a row and pay four fees before funding. If four consecutive fees would end your ability to keep trading, the expected value being positive is not enough — you also need to survive the draw. This is the same risk-of-ruin logic that governs the trades inside the challenge, applied one level up, to the challenges themselves.
The one lever that changes the math: risk size
If the real cost is fee ÷ pass probability, then anything that raises your pass probability cuts your cost by the same proportion — and the largest, cheapest lever is risk per trade. It costs nothing and it moves the number more than any coupon. From the same 8-firm study, halving risk from 1.0% to 0.5% per trade:
| If pass probability moves… | Expected attempts | Expected cost falls by |
|---|---|---|
| 90% → 99% | 1.11× → 1.01× | −9% |
| 75% → 95% | 1.33× → 1.05× | −21% |
| 25% → 70% | 4.00× → 1.43× | −64% |
Arithmetic on 1 ÷ p, nothing else. The lower your starting probability, the more a given improvement is worth — the curve is steepest exactly where traders are most likely to be standing. That is a property of the reciprocal, not of any firm.
Risk per trade is the input that moves this most, and it is the one fully in your control. How far it moves your probability depends on your statistics and on which rule binds against them — under a tight daily limit it can be decisive, under a loose static floor much less so. This is why "are challenges worth it?" is rarely a yes/no about the product and almost always a question about configuration: the same trader, at the same firm, can land on either side of "worth it" depending on a single input. The engine sweeps that input and shows you the whole curve for your own numbers.
Questions traders actually ask
How much does a prop firm challenge really cost?
Not the sticker fee. Because failed attempts are re-bought at a fresh fee, the expected cost of one funded account is the fee divided by your pass probability. On a common $150 evaluation, a trader with a 75% pass rate spends about $200 to get funded on average; a trader facing a 25% pass rate spends about $600. The pass probability — set by the firm's drawdown rule and your risk size — moves the real cost far more than the sticker price does. Compute yours free at app?src=challenges-worth-it.
Are prop firm challenges worth it?
A challenge is worth paying for when your expected cost to get funded is comfortably below the value you can realistically extract once funded, and you can absorb the variance of the attempts in between. Both sides of that comparison depend on your own pass probability, which is computable before you pay. For a strong, well-sized profile at a static-drawdown firm the math is usually favorable; for a marginal edge over-sized against an intraday trailing floor, the expected cost can exceed the modeled first funded year. The point is to compute it rather than guess.
Why does a cheaper challenge sometimes cost more?
Because the sticker price and the pass probability are separate numbers, and only their ratio is the real cost. A $150 evaluation at a 25% pass rate is a $600 expected ticket; a $500 evaluation at a 90% pass rate is about $556. The lower sticker on the harder challenge is more than erased by the extra attempts you have to buy. Ranking firms by fee alone inverts the honest ranking.
Do two-step challenges cost more than one-step?
Only if the composed pass rate is lower. A two-step program funds you only if you clear both phases, so funded probability is P(phase 1) x P(phase 2). Because probabilities multiply, the toll grows as the per-phase rate falls: clear each phase 90% of the time and you are funded 81% of the time, not 90%; clear each 70% and you are funded 49%. Phase count matters far less than which rule actually binds against your statistics, and your risk size. We publish no pass rate for any named firm — compute yours in the free browser engine.
What's the cheapest way to lower the cost?
Reducing risk per trade. Because expected cost is fee divided by pass probability, anything that lifts your pass probability cuts your cost proportionally, and risk per trade is the largest lever that is fully in your control. How much it moves your probability depends on your statistics and on which rule binds against them: under a tight daily loss limit it can be decisive, under a loose static floor much less so. The free browser engine sweeps the range and shows you the whole curve for your own numbers.
Do you get the fee back when you pass?
Policies vary by firm and change without notice, so the firm's own terms are the final authority. Some firms refund or credit the evaluation fee with your first payout; many do not, or attach conditions. A prudent cost estimate treats the fee as spent and any refund as upside, and it counts every failed attempt as a fee that does not come back. Model the conservative case, then let a refund be a pleasant surprise.
Working backwards: free path before fee ÷ pass probability exceeds funded value.
Real cost = fee ÷ pass probability — a $150 evaluation at 25% is a $600 expected ticket. Enter your win rate, average R, and risk size — or import your trade CSV — and get pass probability, expected attempts, and expected fee spend for each firm under its verified rules. Free, no signup, computed entirely in your browser.
Run your survival analysis — freeThe full Firm Fit ranking prices expected attempts, expected fee spend, and modeled first-year net across every firm. Nothing you enter leaves your device — methodology.
Companion reads: how an intraday trailing floor works — Apex's intraday trailing drawdown, explained · and why a real edge still needs the right size — risk of ruin for prop traders.
PropSurvival is independent analytical software and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any prop firm named here. Firms are named for the rules they publish, never ranked: we publish no pass rate, no cost per funded account and no ordering of firms by either. Every figure on this page is arithmetic on a stated pass probability, and the only pass probability that matters is the one the engine computes from your own numbers, in your browser. Those estimates are Monte Carlo results for the profile you enter, not predictions of any individual's results; fees are illustrative and firms change prices and rules without notice — each firm's own documentation is always the final authority. Nothing here is investment advice.