What a prop firm challenge costs

Why the order changes

The sticker prices one attempt. Nobody buys one attempt — or rather, everybody intends to and most end up buying two or three, because most attempts fail. Across 3 attempts a programme that refunds its fee costs 2 fees and one that does not costs 3, which is enough to move programmes several places in the list.

In the dollar table, Funding Pips' 2 Step Pro is the 15th-cheapest sticker at the $25K size and the 18th-cheapest across 3 attempts — its fee never comes back. HyroTrader's Two-Step Challenge runs the other way, 54th on sticker and 34th across attempts, because a returned fee cancels a whole attempt.

A refund is not one thing

“Fee refunded” covers four different promises in this data, at four different distances from the day you pass. FTMO’s 2-Step returns it with the first payout. FundedNext returns the Stellar 2-Step’s with the first reward, but the 1-Step’s and Lite’s only with the third — two payout cycles further from passing, on the programmes with the cheaper-looking stickers. Hola Prime pays it back in four 25% installments tied to the first four payouts. Funding Pips returns it at the fourth reward, and on the 2 Step Standard alone — the Pro and Flex models are recorded as not eligible. Alpha Capital records no refund on any of its 8 programmes.

The5ers’ Bootcamp inverts the idea entirely: its fee comes in two parts, and the second — larger than the first — is charged on passing. A programme that bills you for succeeding sits at the far end of the same axis the refunders occupy, and its sticker understates the all-in price accordingly. And every netted figure on this page treats a refund as certain money: in practice it is conditional on the funded account surviving to the payout that carries it, so the netting flatters the programmes that refund late.

The other half of the decision

Cost is the half of the decision firms advertise. The other half is whether you finish: every single-phase challenge ranked by the chance a losing streak ends it, FTMO’s own pair compared, and the arithmetic that turns published rules into a probability. Every programme we have read is here, with its sources and the dates they were read.

Questions

What does a prop firm challenge cost?

At the $25K account size, the fees we hold run from $9 to $1,250 among the firms pricing in dollars, and from €149 to €250 at Fidelcrest and FTMO, which price in euros. At $100K: $10 to $5,300, and €439 to €799 in euros. Those are promotional prices as displayed on the day each was read, and the sticker understates the real figure anyway: most people do not pass first time, so the realistic cost is two or three fees, less a refund where one exists — and only some programmes have one.

Which prop firm has the cheapest challenge?

Among programmes priced at a comparable $25K size, For Traders’s Pay After Pass (Forex) has the cheapest sticker at $9, and it stays cheapest across 3 attempts at $27 net of its refund. Below the top the order changes: Funding Pips’s 2 Step Pro is the 15th-cheapest sticker and only 18th-cheapest across attempts — its fee never comes back. Fidelcrest and FTMO price in euros and are compared separately: Fidelcrest’s Micro Trader — Normal has the cheapest euro sticker at $25K (€99), while across 3 attempts the cheapest is FTMO’s 2-Step (€500). And “cheapest” says nothing about the odds of passing, which is the other half of the price.

Do prop firms refund the challenge fee?

Some do, and when matters as much as whether. FTMO returns the 2-Step’s fee with the first payout and never returns the 1-Step’s — its own FAQ says so, and the 1-Step is the cheaper sticker. FundedNext returns the Stellar 2-Step’s fee with the first reward, but the 1-Step’s and Lite’s only with the third. Hola Prime pays the refund in four 25% installments across the first four payouts. Funding Pips returns it at the fourth reward, on the 2 Step Standard alone. Alpha Capital records no refund on any of its 8 programmes. Each of those is a different distance between passing and seeing the money, and a refund that arrives with the fourth payout is only worth its face value if the funded account lives that long.