Last reviewed 2026-08-16
Starting a prop firm: what it actually costs
The advertised way to start a prop firm is to license a white-label platform, pay a monthly fee plus a cut of revenue, and put your logo on it. The advertised number is the monthly fee. It is the smallest number in the stack.
What the monthly fee does not cover is the part that decides whether the firm survives: the risk logic that sets what you can safely sell, the treasury discipline that means a funded trader gets paid in a bad month, the payment rails, the dispute handling, and the person who watches all of it. Firms that fail rarely fail on platform cost. They fail because they sold terms they could not fund.
This protocol charges one on-chain launch fee, from $1,000 at the entry tier to $50,000 at the top, and no recurring platform rent. What the fee deploys is not a skin. It is a treasury PDA, a token and bonding curve, a white-label terminal, and an autonomous risk engine that sets the firm's sellable terms from its own solvency.
Solana devnet, in test SOL — read from the settlement record at the last deploy, and every figure resolves to a transaction on the paying firm's page. Mainnet opens September 2026.
The cost stack, side by side
| White-label build | Deploy on the protocol | |
|---|---|---|
| Up-front | Setup fee, plus company formation, plus legal. | One on-chain launch fee, $1,000 to $50,000 by tier. |
| Recurring | Monthly platform licence, often plus a revenue share. | None. There is no platform rent. |
| Engine | Licensed. Its behaviour is the vendor's business, not yours. | Shared, source-verified on-chain, identical for every firm. |
| Risk management | Yours to build and staff. | The autonomous risk engine sets sellable terms from live solvency, per firm. |
| Payments | A processor per region, each with its own onboarding and chargeback exposure. | SOL in and SOL out. No processor, no chargebacks. |
| What a trader can verify about you | Whatever you publish about yourself. | Treasury balance, settled payouts, pass rate. All on-chain, none of it yours to edit. |
| What you actually control | Everything, including the rules and the results. | Brand, storefront, and the profit-split preset. Rules and results are protocol-enforced. |
The part that is not a cost saving
Deploying here means giving up control of the two levers most operators assume they are buying: the evaluation rules and the outcome. You cannot loosen the target to win customers, and you cannot decline a payout. If your plan depends on either, this is the wrong platform and it is better to know that on the pricing page than after the launch fee.
What you get for that is the one thing a new firm cannot buy: a trader's willingness to believe you. A firm nobody has heard of, with terms nobody can quietly change and a treasury anybody can read, starts from a different place than a firm nobody has heard of with a landing page.
What the tiers change
Not the rules and not the account-size ladder. Every tier ships the same engine, the same evaluation terms and the same $1k to $1M account sizes, which unlock on the firm's own treasury rather than on what it paid.
What a higher tier buys is a larger share of protocol fee flow, deeper prerendered SEO surface for the firm's public pages, and franchise-pool participation among firms at the same tier. The full matrix is in the operator economics doc rather than summarised here, because a summary of a fee ladder is exactly the thing that goes stale.
Before you deploy
Three documents that describe the deal in the terms you will actually be operating under.
Questions
- Is the launch fee recurring?
- No. It is charged once, on-chain, at deployment. There is no monthly platform fee and no revenue share on top of the documented protocol fee legs.
- Can I set my own evaluation rules?
- No. The core rules are platform-fixed and server-enforced: 7% profit target, 10% max drawdown, 5% daily loss, four minimum trading days. You set the profit-split preset. Leverage is platform-set and reduced by the risk engine under stress.
- What happens to my firm if it cannot fund a payout?
- The waterfall runs past your treasury into the token reserve, then a staked backstop, then a protocol-wide pool funded by every firm's fees. Meanwhile the risk engine tightens what you are allowed to sell, so the shortfall stops growing while it is being covered.