By sticker price, the cheapest 50K futures prop firm evaluation at the time of writing is Topstep at $49/month, with TradeDay, FundedNext Futures, and Tradeify clustered between $125 and $145. But sticker price is not cost: most traders fail at least once, and what a failure costs you — a free rebill reset, a $77.99 reset fee, or a full repurchase — moves the real bill far more than the entry price does. This post compares verified 50K prices across ten firms, breaks down the three billing models hiding behind those prices, works out what three attempts actually cost under each, and ends with the one formula that decides which firm is genuinely cheapest for you.
50K evaluation prices compared (verified July 2026)
Every number below was checked in July 2026 against each firm's own pricing page, for a standard 50K evaluation. Promos change weekly — several firms discount so aggressively that the list price is closer to marketing fiction than fact — so treat this as a snapshot and check the live price before you buy. TestMax is not affiliated with any prop firm; full rule breakdowns for every major firm live on our prop firm rules hub.
| Firm | 50K eval price | Trailing drawdown | Reset policy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Topstep | $49/mo | $2,000 EOD | $49, plus a free reset credit with each monthly rebill |
| TradeDay | $125/mo (heavy promos) | $2,000 | $60–89, plus one free reset per month |
| FundedNext Futures | $134 one-time | $1,500 EOD | $77.99 |
| Tradeify | $145 one-time | $2,000 EOD, enforced in real time | $95 |
| MyFundedFutures (Rapid) | $157/mo (50% promos common) | $2,000 EOD | Monthly rebill auto-restores a breached eval |
| Take Profit Trader | $170 (40%-off promos common) | $2,000 EOD | $99 |
| Bulenox | $175/mo (promos common) | $2,500 | $78, or free at rebill |
| Lucid Trading | $185 one-time | $2,000 EOD | $120 |
| Elite Trader Funding | $197/mo (65% promos frequent) | $2,000 (live) | $47 unlimited, plus free at renewal |
| Apex | $249 one-time (90% promos near-constant) | $2,000 | None — a failed eval means buying a new one |
Two things jump out. First, half the industry runs permanent "limited time" sales — Apex at 90% off near-constantly, Elite Trader Funding at 65%, MyFundedFutures at 50%. A list price mostly tells you a firm's marketing strategy, not its cost; we unpacked that machinery in how prop firm promo codes actually work. Second, anyone hunting for cheap futures prop firms by sorting this table top to bottom is comparing apples to subscriptions: the prices split into three completely different cost models, and the model matters more than the number.
The three cost models behind the prices
Model 1: monthly rebill with free resets
Topstep, TradeDay, MyFundedFutures, Bulenox, Elite Trader Funding. You're not buying an evaluation; you're renting attempts by the month. Fail mid-cycle and you either pay a small reset ($49 at Topstep, $47 at Elite Trader Funding) or simply wait — the next rebill restarts the account, and most of these firms bundle a free reset credit into each billing cycle. MyFundedFutures goes furthest: the rebill itself auto-restores a breached eval.
The strength of this model is a capped monthly downside. A patient Topstep trader gets roughly two attempts per month for $49. The weakness is the clock: every month you don't pass is another rebill, so a slow, careful pass costs more than a fast one, and the subscription quietly keeps charging traders who've mentally quit but haven't cancelled.
Model 2: one-time fee with paid resets
FundedNext Futures ($134, resets $77.99), Tradeify ($145, resets $95), Take Profit Trader ($170, resets $99), Lucid Trading ($185, resets $120). No subscription, no time pressure — you can take six months to pass and pay nothing extra. But every failure is cash out the door, and reset fees run 50–70% of the entry price. This model rewards traders who genuinely expect to pass in one or two attempts and punishes everyone else.
Model 3: one-time fee, no resets at all
Apex stands alone: $249 list, and there is no reset button. A failed evaluation means purchasing an entirely new one. On paper this is the harshest deal on the page — softened almost entirely by the near-constant 90% promos. At roughly $25 an attempt, Apex can be the cheapest seat in the industry; at list price, it's the most expensive mistake. If you're considering Apex, the promo isn't a bonus — it is the price, and you should never buy without one.
What three attempts actually cost
Assume you fail twice and pass on the third try. As you'll see in the next section, that is a realistic scenario, not a pessimistic one.
| Firm (model) | Entry | Two failures | Three-attempt total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Topstep (rebill + free resets) | $49 | $49–98 | $98–147 |
| FundedNext Futures (paid resets) | $134 | $155.98 | $289.98 |
| Tradeify (paid resets) | $145 | $190 | $335 |
| Lucid Trading (paid resets) | $185 | $240 | $425 |
| Apex at list (no resets) | $249 | $498 | $747 |
| Apex at 90% promo (no resets) | ~$25 | ~$50 | ~$75 |
The Topstep range depends on pacing: burn through all three attempts in one month and you pay $147 ($49 entry plus two $49 resets); spread them across two billing cycles and the free reset credit brings it down to $98. Either way the rebill model's cap does its job — three attempts at Topstep cost less than one attempt at four of the firms above it.
Notice how the ordering flips. Apex is simultaneously the cheapest and the most expensive firm on the table depending entirely on whether you caught the promo. And Lucid's $425 for three tries is real money for a $50k sim account — more than a year of most trading tools. Sticker-price rankings survive exactly one failed attempt.
The only formula that matters: price ÷ probability
Here is the uncomfortable part. The best-sourced pass-rate data available says 94% fail their first challenge, ~7% of buyers ever receive a payout (analysis of 300k+ accounts, blog.pickmytrade.trade). Three attempts isn't the unlucky case — it's close to the ordinary one.
That makes the true cost of any evaluation:
Expected cost = price per attempt ÷ probability of passing per attempt
Run the numbers. If your per-attempt odds look like the population's ~6%, a $49 Topstep attempt carries an expected total cost of roughly $817 before you ever hold a funded account. Apex at list works out near $4,150; even Apex at the 90% promo is about $415. Now give the same trader a 50% per-attempt pass probability: Topstep's expected cost drops to ~$98 and promo-Apex to ~$50.
Read that again: the denominator moved expected cost by a factor of eight; a decade of promo-code hunting moves the numerator by a couple hundred dollars. Firm shopping optimizes the small number. Preparation optimizes the big one. The cheapest prop firm is the one you're prepared for.
And the 94% aren't failing because they can't read a chart. As we broke down in why traders fail prop firm challenges, the dominant killers are rule breaches — trailing drawdown, daily loss limits — and simple expectancy math, where a trader's win rate doesn't cover their risk-reward ratio at the size the rules force them to trade.
Honest caveat: cheapest is not best
The entry fee is the smallest number in prop firm economics. Two bigger ones deserve more of your attention than any $30 price gap:
Funded-phase rules. The eval price tells you nothing about what happens after you pass. MyFundedFutures' drawdown, for example, trails end-of-day during the eval but switches to intraday once you're funded — the same firm gets strictly harder exactly when real money is on the line. Tradeify enforces its EOD figure in real time during the eval itself. The EOD vs intraday trailing drawdown difference is worth more than $100 of fee savings, because it changes how you have to trade.
Payout rules. A cheap eval at a firm with slow, restrictive, or heavily conditioned withdrawals is expensive in the only way that ultimately matters. Before choosing on price, read how prop firm payouts work and weigh the payout policy at least as heavily as the entry fee.
Price also bundles difficulty. Topstep's $49 comes with a $3,000 profit target; FundedNext's $134 has a smaller $2,500 target but a much tighter $1,500 drawdown; FundedNext's 40% consistency rule doesn't fail you but raises your target if you breach it, quietly extending the eval. None of that shows up in a price column. If you want a ranking that weighs the whole package instead of the fee, start with our best futures prop firms verdicts.
The cheapest attempt is the one you don't waste
Everything above points the same direction: the lever you control is the probability side of the formula, and raising it costs nothing.
First, know the exact ruleset before the clock starts — drawdown type, consistency percentage, daily loss limit. The free prop firm drawdown calculator shows you how a trailing drawdown actually moves with your trades, which surprises almost everyone the first time.
Second, rehearse against those rules before paying anyone. TestMax's prop-firm evaluation simulator ships with firm presets that enforce trailing drawdown (EOD and intraday variants), consistency rules, and daily loss limits inside a bar-by-bar market replay, so a rule breach costs you a practice session instead of a reset fee — and the free plan includes three months of futures data with no credit card. The working principle is practice off-platform, perform on-platform: do your reps in a sim, then trade the eval on the firm's platform, and check your firm's own rules on anything account-related.
The full method is in our guide to practicing a prop firm challenge, with tooling options in the prop firm simulator guide. When your replay stats — win rate, expectancy, per-setup breakdowns — survive 30+ sessions with the preset enforcing the rules, buy the eval. At that point almost any firm on the table is cheap, because you've shrunk the only number that was ever really expensive.