You’ve got the pricing pages open side by side, sorted by cost. One firm wants $32.99. Another quotes €155 but has a promo running at €89. A third doesn’t sell challenges at all — it charges $49 a month plus a $149 activation fee, and the meter runs until you pass. And at the bottom of your list sits a $29 challenge from a firm you’ve never heard of.
Here’s the claim we’ll defend: the sticker price on a prop firm challenge is the least honest number on the page. The cheapest prop firm on entry fee and the cheapest firm to actually get funded through are often two different companies. We sell the $29 challenge, so you’d expect us to tell you cheap is great. We’re going to do something more useful: show you the full price math at five firms — resets, subscriptions, activation fees, payout delays — and let you decide where cheap stops being a bargain.
The entry-fee table: what “cheapest” looks like firm by firm
Start with the raw numbers, as of our last pricing sweep. These are the lowest-cost ways into each of five major firms:
| Firm | Cheapest entry | Account size | Model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monetro | $29 | $5,000 | Endurance (3-step) |
| FundedNext | $32.99 | $5,000 | Stellar Lite |
| FTMO | €89 promo / €155 standard (~$96/$168) | €10,000 | 2-step |
| Topstep | $49/month + $149 activation | $50,000 | Trading Combine (subscription) |
| The Funded Trader | Varies by challenge type | Multiple | Standard / Dragon / Knight Pro |
Three things jump out of that table.
First, the entry points aren’t comparable products. Monetro’s $29 and FundedNext’s $32.99 both buy a $5K evaluation. FTMO’s cheapest ticket buys a €10K account — a bigger evaluation at a bigger price. Topstep’s smallest account is $50K, but you’re renting access monthly rather than buying an attempt.
Second, the gap between cheapest and second-cheapest is small — $29 versus $32.99 is a rounding error. The gap between challenge-based and subscription-based pricing is not. A Topstep trader who needs four months to pass their $50K Combine has paid $196 in subscription fees plus $149 activation: $345 for what the pricing page frames as “$49/month.”
Third, promos move constantly. FTMO’s €89 was a promotional price on the €10K challenge; the standard rate is €155. If your comparison spreadsheet is a month old, it’s wrong. Verify at checkout, every time — ours included.
Why the sticker price is the wrong math
The number that actually matters is cost-to-funded: what you’ll spend, in total, before you’re trading a live funded account. Three variables move it far more than the entry fee does.
Reset pricing. Most traders don’t pass on the first attempt. At FTMO, a failed challenge means paying the original fee again — discounts exist, attempts are unlimited, but the meter restarts. FundedNext offers discounted resets on most models. If your realistic path is two or three attempts, multiply accordingly: a “$168 challenge” is closer to a $350–$500 project. At Monetro the fee is one-time per attempt with no reset fee stacked on top — a failed attempt costs exactly what the checkout said, nothing extra.
Subscription time. Topstep’s model has no per-attempt fee at all, which sounds friendly until you price the clock. Slow, careful trading — the kind that passes evaluations — is exactly the kind that takes months. On a subscription, patience is billed monthly.
Refund policies. Here’s a point against us: FTMO refunds your challenge fee with your first payout. Pass, get paid, and the evaluation effectively cost nothing. Monetro doesn’t refund fees on passing — $29 stays $29 whether you pass or fail. On a $999 Evolution $200K purchase, that refund difference is real money, and if you’re confident in your pass rate, it legitimately strengthens FTMO’s case at the top end.
Run one worked example. Say you’re an average shopper eyeing a $10K account and honest enough to budget for two attempts. At FTMO’s standard €155 (~$168), two attempts is roughly $336, refunded later only if you eventually pass and collect a payout. At FundedNext, $59.99 for the nearest tier, twice, is about $120 — before any discounted reset math. At Monetro, the $10K Endurance is $59 per attempt: $118 total, no reset surcharge, no subscription clock. Same trader, same skill, same two failures and one pass — and the total cost ranges from $118 to $336 depending on a decision made before the first trade was placed.
The honest summary: cheap entry protects you on the downside (failure costs less), while refund-on-pass rewards the upside (success costs nothing). Which one you should optimize for depends on an uncomfortable question — how likely are you, really, to pass on attempt one?
What $29 actually buys at Monetro
So what’s inside the industry’s cheapest challenge? The $29 Endurance $5K is a three-phase evaluation. Full rule sheet, no paraphrasing:
- Profit targets: 5% in each of three phases — deliberately lower per phase than the typical 10%-then-5% two-step structure
- Drawdown: 5% daily, 10% maximum — both static, measured from initial balance. The floor never trails your equity up
- Minimum trading days: 5 per phase, so 15 minimum across the evaluation
- Time limit: none. No 30-day countdown pressuring you into oversized positions
- Profit split once funded: 80%, flat, on all three models — we don’t advertise a bigger number that only arrives after months of scaling
- Platform: cTrader with raw ECN pricing — 0.0 pip spreads, $3 per lot commission
- Leverage: 1:100 on Endurance, and news trading is allowed
And the trade-offs, because a rule sheet without them is marketing: three phases take longer than one — if you want speed, our own 1-step Velocity costs $45 at the same size with a tighter 6% max drawdown, and other firms’ 1-steps exist too. We don’t allow weekend holding or EAs on any model. There’s no fee refund on pass. And we launched in 2025 — we don’t have FTMO’s ten-year track record or 40,000 Trustpilot reviews yet, and pretending otherwise would be exactly the kind of claim this blog exists to avoid.
If a $29, no-time-limit evaluation with static drawdown sounds like your kind of math, the full rule sheets for all three models are at monetro.com/#challenges. Read them before you pay — that’s the whole point of this article.
The hidden costs that make cheap firms expensive
Entry fees are printed in 48-point font. The costs below live in help-center articles, and they decide more than the fee does.
Trailing drawdown. Topstep’s maximum loss trails your highest end-of-day balance until it locks at your starting balance. A winning first week raises the level at which you can be breached — early profit makes the account more fragile, not less. That’s a defensible design for futures, but it’s a cost no pricing page itemizes. We covered why this one mechanic decides survival in the 80/20 rule of prop firm risk management.
News-trading fine print. FundedNext applies a News Profit Split Rule: only 40% of profit from trades placed within 5 minutes of high-impact news counts toward your balance. The Funded Trader bans news trading outright on most challenges — a violation can void the challenge you paid for. If news events are part of your strategy, a cheap fee at the wrong firm costs you the whole account. (At Monetro, news trading is allowed on Evolution and Endurance, not on Velocity.)
Payout delay. Getting funded isn’t the finish line; getting paid is. FundedNext’s Stellar 2-Step and Lite hold your first payout for 21 days. FTMO defaults to monthly cycles. Monetro processes payouts on demand with an average of 8 hours’ processing once conditions are met — first payout after 5 trading days and 14 calendar days from your first funded trade. We wrote up what payout mechanics reveal about a firm’s real economics in our pay-day teardown.
Failure economics. Some firms earn a meaningful share of revenue from reset fees — the business quietly improves when you fail. We broke that model down in how prop firms make money when you fail. When you evaluate a cheap challenge, ask who profits from your second attempt.
When the cheapest prop firm is the wrong buy
We’d rather lose a $29 sale than have you buy the wrong product. Four cases where cheapest isn’t right:
You trade EAs or hold over weekends. Monetro doesn’t allow either, on any model. FTMO permits EAs with rule compliance and weekend holding on its Swing account. The Funded Trader’s Royal challenge allows both. A rule mismatch costs you the account regardless of what the fee was.
You want one phase, maximum speed. Three phases at 5% each is the patient trader’s route. If you’d rather clear one 10% target and be done, compare 1-step products directly — our Velocity ($45 at $5K, 6% max drawdown, 4% daily), Topstep’s Combine, FundedNext’s Stellar 1-Step. Cheapest-per-attempt matters less than matching the structure to how you actually trade.
You’re buying big. The cheapest-firm question sounds different at $10K than at $200K. At $10K, Monetro’s Evolution is $79 against FTMO’s €155 standard — roughly half price for a comparable 2-step. At $200K, Monetro Evolution is $999, FTMO is €1,080 (~$1,170), FundedNext’s Stellar 1-Step is $1,099.99 — and FTMO’s refund-on-pass can flip that ranking for confident traders. Run the math at your size, not the headline size.
You’re paying for track record. Ten years of operating history has genuine value. FTMO has it; Topstep has twelve. We started in 2025 and our Trustpilot page is still new. If sleeping well requires a decade of payout receipts, pay the premium — that’s a rational trade, not a mistake.
The bottom line: price the whole journey, not the ticket
The cheapest prop firm in 2026, measured purely on entry fee, is Monetro — $29 for the Endurance $5K, with FundedNext’s $32.99 Stellar Lite close behind. But that was never the real question.
The real question is what a firm charges you across the whole journey: the fee, the realistic number of attempts, the resets or the subscription months, the drawdown style that decides whether winners survive, the fine print that voids accounts, and the days between earning a payout and holding it. Price that journey at every firm on your shortlist and the rankings shuffle — sometimes in our favor, sometimes not, depending on your strategy, account size, and confidence.
What we’ll promise is the part we control: the number at checkout is the whole price. No reset fees, no activation fees, no subscription meter, an 80% split that starts at 80%, and payouts that process in hours, not weeks. Compare the rule sheets line by line at monetro.com/#challenges — including ours against anyone else’s. An hour spent reading rules before you pay is the one purchase in this industry that never needs a reset. That comparison is the cheapest thing on this page.
