Fees & payment
You pay once, up front, to start an evaluation. The fee is the firm's primary revenue and the reason the economics work; it's what funds the capital allocated to traders who pass.
What you pay
The evaluation fee is set by tier:
| Tier | Evaluation fee | Account size |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | $100 | $10,000 |
| Basic | $250 | $25,000 |
| Pro | $500 | $50,000 |
| Elite (v2) | $1,000 | $100,000 |
| Whale (v2) | $2,500 | $250,000 |
The fee is charged once per evaluation attempt. A retry after a fail is a new attempt and a new fee.
How checkout works
Checkout is fiat-first and built so you never have to think about crypto:
- You select a tier and see the full rules contract for it, profit target, max drawdown, daily loss limit, and (in v2) the profit split and refund terms, before you pay.
- You pay by card. Behind the scenes, the payment is converted to USDC stablecoin and the evaluation fee is recorded on-chain to the firm's treasury.
- Your evaluation account is created and you land in the cockpit.
Paying directly in USDC from your account is the underlying path, but card checkout is the default and you never need to touch a wallet, a network, or a gas fee. See Verifiability for what's happening underneath.
If a payment is rejected, you're returned to checkout cleanly: no account is created and you are never double-charged. If a payment succeeds but provisioning hiccups, the system retries safely without charging you twice.
The refund-on-first-payout promise (v2)
In the funded phase, there's a flywheel that traditional prop firms made famous: your first successful payout refunds your original evaluation fee.
The logic is simple: fees from traders who don't pass fund the capital pool, and traders who go on to earn a payout risk nothing net. This applies to funded payouts in v2; it does not apply to the paper-trading closed beta, where there are no payouts.
Currency
Fees settle in USDC (native Circle USDC). Card payments on-ramp to USDC automatically. Whether SUI is accepted at a small discount is an open question for the funded phase and not part of checkout today.