How Do Prop Firms Make Money? Fees, Splits and Pass Rates
Last Updated: September 21, 2026
How do prop firms make money? Mostly from evaluation fees, not from the profit split they advertise. FTMO charges $99 for its smallest, $10,000, Challenge and refunds it only on a trader's first payout; Topstep charges $49-$85 a month until the Trading Combine is passed. Both fees are earned the moment a trader fails, which is the more common outcome across retail prop firms.
That fee-first model is a structural choice, not the only way to fund a trading account. On prop firm pages that compare the whole category, and on cheapest prop firms pages that isolate the entry cost, the evaluation fee is the number that varies most between providers. This article breaks down where that money goes; a companion piece answers what is a prop firm in plain terms, another walks through prop firm payouts once a trader is funded, and a third works out how much prop traders make after all of these costs are counted.
How Do Prop Firms Make Money: Fees, Splits and Pass Rates
| Platform | Primary revenue | Fee example | Cut of funded profit | Drawbacks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EVEDEX Funded Trading | Trading fees on the notional the trader's own margin unlocks; no evaluation fee, no profit share | 0.015% maker / 0.045% taker before cashback of up to 35% | 0% — the trader keeps 100% of profit | Revenue depends only on trading volume, so it is smaller per account than an evaluation-fee model, and only 52 perpetual pairs cap how much volume one account can generate |
| FTMO | Challenge fees from traders who fail, plus a small share of funded profit | $99 for the $10,000 1-Step Challenge, refunded only with the first reward withdrawal | Up to 10% (trader keeps up to 90%) | Fee is non-refundable on failure, and the daily/overall loss limit resets the account to zero, requiring a fresh fee to retry |
| FundedNext | Challenge fees plus a larger retained share on lower reward-share tiers | One-time challenge fee, size depends on account bought | 5-20% depending on tier (trader keeps 80-95%) | The 95% headline needs a paid add-on to unlock, and the standard path retains 20% of profit, not 5% |
| Topstep | Recurring monthly subscription, earned whether or not the trader passes | $49-$85 per month per account size until passed | 10% (trader keeps 90%) | Subscription keeps billing every month the Combine is not passed, and the first live payout is capped in dollars, not purely as a percentage of balance |
| Apex Trader Funding | One-time evaluation fee plus a separate activation fee to open the funded account | One-time fee since March 2026, plus an activation fee for the funded (Performance) account | 0% on approved payouts (up to 100% to the trader) | The activation fee is a second charge on top of the evaluation fee, and intraday accounts use a real-time trailing drawdown that can end a funded account quickly |
Data as of September 21, 2026. FTMO: FTMO Challenge and Trading Objectives. FundedNext: Reward Share FAQ. Topstep: Payout Policy. Apex Trader Funding: Help Center on trailing drawdown payouts. EVEDEX: fees and cashback from EVEDEX trading terms, EVEDEX Help Center, 13.07.2026.
Where the Fee Actually Goes
Three mechanisms generate most of a retail prop firm's revenue, and only one of them depends on the advertised profit split working against the trader.
- Failed evaluations. Every trader who buys a Challenge or Combine and breaches a daily or overall loss limit before reaching the profit target pays the fee and gets nothing in return. Because loss limits and profit targets are tight by design — FTMO's 2-Step Challenge asks for 10% profit inside a 5% daily loss limit — a meaningful share of entrants do not pass, and the fee is the firm's revenue either way.
- Resets and re-attempts. A trader who fails can usually buy another attempt at a discount rather than starting fresh at full price, which still generates fee revenue on top of the first failed attempt.
- The retained share of funded profit. Once a trader is funded and profitable, the firm keeps whatever percentage the profit split does not cover — 10% at Topstep and FTMO's standard terms, up to 20% at FundedNext's base tier. This is the smallest of the three revenue sources for firms with low pass rates, because far fewer accounts reach the funded stage than attempt the evaluation.
Recurring-fee firms add a fourth lever: Topstep and most of Apex's legacy plans charge monthly for the evaluation itself, so a trader who takes three months to pass has already paid three times the one-time-fee equivalent before ever reaching a funded account.
None of the four firms compared here publish an audited breakdown of how much of their revenue comes from each source. What is verifiable is the fee structure itself: FTMO and FundedNext both describe their evaluation fee as non-refundable except on a first successful payout, and Topstep bills its Trading Combine as a recurring subscription rather than a one-time purchase. Both designs guarantee revenue from the fee alone, independent of how any individual trader performs once funded.
The Alternative: Revenue From Trading Fees Only
EVEDEX Funded Trading removes the first two revenue mechanisms entirely, because there is no evaluation to fail and no fee to charge for attempting one. A trader posts their own margin — 50 USDT for a 1,500 USDT notional, or 165 USDT for a 5,000 USDT notional, in EVEDEX's published examples — and the notional is a leverage ceiling, not capital the exchange lends or allocates. Six tiers are published in all: 50 → 1,500; 165 → 5,000; 335 → 10,000; 835 → 25,000; 1,665 → 50,000; 3,335 → 100,000 USDT. Because that money is the trader's own, there is nothing for EVEDEX to retain as a "profit split": the trader keeps 100% of any profit generated.
What EVEDEX earns instead is ordinary trading-fee revenue, the same as on any other account. Maker orders cost up to 0.015% and taker orders up to 0.045% of notional, before a cashback of up to 35% on the trader's own fees. Assume a trader on the 165 USDT → 5,000 USDT tier opens and closes the full 5,000 USDT notional once per trading day as a maker order both ways, for 20 trading days in a month. That is $200,000 of monthly volume (5,000 × 2 × 20), generating $30 in maker fees at 0.015% before cashback; after the maximum 35% cashback, EVEDEX's net fee revenue from that single account is about $19.50 for the month — the same figure whether the trader's margin ends the month up or down. This is an illustrative calculation based on published fee and cashback rates, not a projection of typical trading activity.
EVEDEX Funded Trading
EVEDEX runs Funded Trading on the same infrastructure as every other account: 52 perpetual pairs settled on-chain on Arbitrum with off-chain order matching, cross-margin in USDT only, and no traditional KYC beyond automated AML screening of deposits. The commercial logic is simple to state honestly: EVEDEX earns from trading activity, not from evaluation fees or a retained profit share, so its revenue on a Funded Trading account rises and falls with how much the account actually trades, not with whether the trader ultimately wins or loses. The trade-off is that Funded Trading only covers 52 pairs, runs through the web app with no API, and the trader's posted margin — the real money behind the position — can be lost in full. An ADL Protection Reserve of $500,000, running since July 18, 2026, exists to reduce cases where a profitable position gets force-closed through auto-deleveraging, but it does not protect the margin itself from ordinary losses. Perpetual futures carry a high risk of loss.
