Subscription or one-off payment: only three firms compare

38 monthly lines, 106 paid once

The reading behind this site is 13 firms, 144 accounts and 433 fee lines, dated 16 August 2026. Sorted on nothing but how the evaluation is billed, it splits into 38 lines charged by the month and 106 charged once.

Those two counts add up to 144, the exact number of accounts recorded. Whatever else moves from one plan to the next, a billing model is something the catalogue carries throughout. That makes it a usable sorting key, and an easy one to misuse.

The evaluation pricing hub puts the priced lines side by side; the one-off payment list isolates the second group.

Seven firms, ten firms, four counted twice

Counted by firm rather than by line, 6 firms bill an evaluation by the month and 10 bill it once. Six and ten make sixteen, three more than the 13 firms in the reading, because 3 firms do both: Funded Futures Network, Phidias Propfirm, Alpha Futures.

The arithmetic closes exactly: 6 + 10 − 3 = 13. No firm sits outside the two models, and the overlap accounts for the whole of the difference. Those three are the only addresses where a monthly price and a one-off price can be set against each other without also changing firm. Everywhere else, picking a model means picking a house at the same time.

Across two firms, the comparison carries two variables

A price is a number attached to a rulebook, and between two firms the rulebook moves. The reading measures how much.

Drawdown. Across the 144 accounts: 118 end-of-day, 23 trailing, 3 static. By firm, 8 carry end-of-day only, 4 mix end-of-day and trailing, 1 mixes end-of-day and static. A subscription priced under a trailing drawdown and a one-off priced under an end-of-day one are not two prices for the same object; the glossary sets out what separates them.
Consistency. 67 of the 144 accounts carry no consistency rule at all. Where one exists, it is 20, 30, 40, 45, 50 %.
Daily loss. 79 of the 144 carry no daily loss limit.
Split. 13 firms publish one, and the values recorded are 50, 80, 90, 95, 100 %.

A cross-firm comparison therefore sets two numbers side by side whose objects differ on drawdown, consistency, daily loss and split, each genuinely variable inside this corpus. The price difference is real. The claim that it is a difference between billing models is the part the comparison cannot support.

The evaluation line is not the bill

Two further items sit downstream of the evaluation, and neither behaves like it.

Activation. 121 priced lines, from 0 to 149 US dollars, of which 109 are declared free. 14 more exist as lines with no published amount. No firm in the reading is without an activation line: the item is universal, the figure is not always stated. The activation fees hub holds the detail.

Reset. 76 priced lines, from 40 to 599 US dollars, while 68 of the 144 accounts carry no reset line at all. The reset fees hub sorts them.

Opacity is concentrated rather than spread. 24 amounts are not published by the firm, and they fall on two items only, activation 14 and data feed 10, across three firms: Apex Trader Funding, My Funded Futures and Bulenox. A separate 1 amount is missing because we have not recorded them; that reserve is ours, not theirs, and the methodology keeps the two apart. The evaluation billing model is therefore the best documented part of the bill, and the unpublished amounts sit on the parts that come after it.

The same house is not the same rule end to end

3 firms change drawdown type once the account is funded, compared with what the evaluation used: My Funded Futures, Funded Futures Network and Take Profit Trader. One of those three is among the three firms that sell both billing models. So even inside one house, a comparison has to name the stage it is about, because the drawdown that priced the evaluation is not necessarily the one that governs the funded account.

My Funded Futures appears on a third list as well, among the three firms where the 24 unpublished amounts are concentrated. The cleanest comparison ground in the corpus overlaps with the firm that publishes least completely. That is not a contradiction to resolve, it is the state of the data, and it is why the comparison belongs in the four guides, where each line says whether the figure came from the firm: My Funded Futures, Funded Futures Network, Phidias Propfirm, Alpha Futures.

What the structure supports

Rank inside a model. 106 one-off lines and 38 monthly lines are each large enough to be sorted on their own terms, and such a ranking holds the billing model fixed instead of comparing across it.
Compare models inside four houses, with the stage named: My Funded Futures, Funded Futures Network, Phidias Propfirm, Alpha Futures.
Know which lines are priced before paying. 109 of the 121 activation lines are declared free and 14 carry no published amount at all; which of the two you face is knowable in advance, and it is a figure that lands after the evaluation is passed.

Every quantity above comes from the same 16 August 2026 reading that the real-cost calculator and the firm guides are built from.

What this data does not say

Nothing about duration. The reading records prices and rules, not how long anything takes. No break-even month can be derived from it, and none is offered here: any statement of the form « the subscription overtakes the one-off at month N » would have to come from somewhere other than this corpus.
Nothing about renewal. Whether a monthly price is the same at the second billing, and whether a promotional price recurs, is not part of the reading.
Silence is not zero. 68 of the 144 accounts carry no reset line, and the data does not say whether the firm charges nothing, folds the cost elsewhere, or simply does not state it. The same caution applies to the 1 amounts we have not recorded, which are our gap and not the firms'.
24 amounts are the firm's own silence, on activation and data feed only, at three firms. For those accounts part of the bill cannot be priced under either billing model.
Counts are counts of lines, not of purchases. 38 against 106 describes what is on sale in this reading. It says nothing about what is bought, by whom, or with what result.

Figures as of August 16, 2026, recomputed on every data update. Methodology