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The Prop Firm That Pays... Coupon …WHATPROP

Live account vs prop account

Neither one wins. A live account pays you 100% of a small number and cannot be taken away from you. A funded account pays you most of a large number, charges a fee up front, and can end on a rule you broke by two tenths of a percent. Which is better depends on one thing: whether the capital you are short of costs more than the rules you would have to trade under.

The trade-off in full

Your own live account

A broker account funded with your money.

What you keep
100% of the profit, minus spread, commission, swap and tax. No split, no payout schedule, no approval step.
What it costs
The capital itself. A 3% month on $2,000 is $60, and no amount of skill changes that arithmetic.
How it ends badly
You lose your own money. There is no rule to breach because there is no rule book, which is also how accounts get blown by traders nobody was watching.
Who owns it
You do. The balance is yours, withdrawable on the broker's terms.

A funded prop account

A firm's capital, traded under the firm's rules.

What you keep
Typically 90% of the profit. 96% of the tiers we list pay 80% or more.
What it costs
$179 to $800 up front for a 100k evaluation, $499 at the midpoint across 151 tiers.
How it ends badly
You breach at 3% in a day or 10% overall: on a 100k account that is a $3,000 day.
Who owns it
The firm does. You hold a contractual claim on a share of the profit, not on the balance.

The same month, both ways

Assume a 2% return on the account over one month. This is an arithmetic illustration, not a forecast: most traders do not return 2% a month, and most challenge attempts fail. The point is only what the same trading produces on each side.

A 2% month on a self-funded account versus a funded account
 $2,000 of your own$100,000 funded
Profit at 2%$40$2,000
Your share100%90%
Paid to you$40$1,800, on the firm's payout schedule
Paid by you first$2,000 deposited, and still yours at the end of the month$499 per attempt, gone whether you pass or not
What a bad day costsPart of your own balance3% in one day and the account is gone

The funded column is the larger number by an order of magnitude, and it is also the one that can go to zero on a Tuesday. That is the entire decision.

Which one fits you

Trade live if

  • You have capital sitting idle and the return on it, however small, is genuinely yours.
  • Your strategy needs room the rule book will not give it: overnight holds, news events, wide stops, long drawdown periods.
  • You are still finding out whether you are profitable. Paying a fee to find out is the expensive version of the same experiment.
  • You want to withdraw on your own schedule rather than a firm’s.

Go prop if

  • You are demonstrably consistent at a size far below what you would need for the income you want.
  • Your risk per trade already sits inside a 3% loss limit without you changing anything.
  • The fee is money you can lose twice over without it mattering. Attempts often take more than one try.
  • You have checked the firm actually pays. Payout evidence, not account size, is the variable that decides whether any of this was real.

If neither list describes you, the answer is usually neither yet. Both routes reward the same thing: a strategy that already works at whatever size you are trading now.

If you go prop

25 firms in our catalog currently run an offer. Compare on the terms that decide the outcome: the loss limits, the payout schedule, and whether payouts are evidenced rather than claimed.

Browse prop firmsCompare challengesCheck verified payoutsSee current offers

If you trade live

You need a broker rather than a firm. The things that matter here are different: how your funds are held, what execution actually costs you, and whether you can get your money back out.

Want to trade your own capital?

Common questions

Where these numbers come from

Fees, splits and drawdown limits come from the challenge tiers we list, refreshed hourly. Fees and splits are shown as a range and a midpoint rather than an average, because challenge pricing runs from trial tiers to institutional ones. The drawdown figures are the most common values across those tiers, not a limit: your firm's own rules are the ones that apply to you. How we rank.