Blog · August 16, 2026
What prop firms do not publish — and why that is the real criterion
Recording prop firm pricing by hand, one pattern keeps coming back: the missing information is not spread at random. It is almost always the same items that are missing, and always the ones that cost money.
Across the 13 firms in our record, 3 fee line items exist with no published amount. They are: activation (funded account) at Apex Trader Funding, data feed at My Funded Futures, activation (funded account) at Bulenox.
Three forms of opacity
1. The fee announced without an amount
The commonest case is the activation fee: the firm confirms that it exists, without ever showing how much. You find out the price after paying for the evaluation and passing the test — which is the exact moment when walking away costs the most.
2. The internal contradiction
More troubling: several firms contradict themselves. A pricing page announces “no activation fee” while the FAQ on the same site puts a figure on that fee; a promo page promises free market data while the help centre announces a monthly deduction from the funded account's balance.
These contradictions go unmentioned on the usual comparison sites, because catching them means reading the FAQ as well as the price grid. Here they are recorded in the guide for the firm concerned, and the highest amount is the one kept — so that the bill is never understated.
3. The conditional fee
Finally, some fees only exist in specific situations: “professional” status declared to the data provider, use of a bot or a trade copier, a subscription to market depth. Counting them by default would inflate the bill for the manual trader, who is the common case; ignoring them would trap the ones they apply to.
The calculator therefore shows them as optional: visible, priced, but outside the default total.
Why make it a criterion
A firm that publishes everything lets you calculate its cost before you buy. A firm that publishes only part of it transfers the risk to the customer. That is a verifiable fact, independent of any opinion on the quality of the service — and it is why the comparison shows a computed transparency score rather than a rating handed out by hand.
The practical consequence: at comparable headline price, prefer the firm whose total cost you can calculate. The other one is asking you to sign without knowing the amount.
Figures as of August 16, 2026, recomputed on every data update. Methodology