Funded Trading Plus Opens Any Challenge for $4, and the Activation Fee on a $100K Pass Is $489
Funded Trading Plus has added a program called Activation Accounts to its homepage, marked NEW, that lets a trader start an evaluation for $4 and pay the rest of the fee only after passing. The firm’s own pricing table shows what “the rest” means: $179 on a $25,000 account, $299 on a $50,000 account and $489 on a $100,000 account. For funded traders the number that matters is not the $4. It is the fact that the evaluation and the funded account run on two different rule sets, and the funded one is tighter.
What the $4 Actually Buys
The program is presented on the Funded Trading Plus site under the line “Pass Now. Pay Later.” The flow the firm publishes has four steps: choose an account size of $25,000, $50,000 or $100,000, pay $4 and start, pass a single-phase challenge with a 2% profit target, then buy the funded account. The firm’s own wording on the fourth step is blunt about the sequence: “only now do you pay the rest.”
That $4 is listed in the pricing widget as the total fee, which is accurate for the evaluation stage and misleading if a trader stops reading there. The same table carries a separate line, Activation Fee, that states the full picture for each size: “$4 to start, $179 on pass”, “$4 to start, $299 on pass” and “$4 to start, $489 on pass”. A trader who passes a $100,000 Activation Account and wants the funded account has therefore paid $493 in total.
The accounts are offered on MT5 and Match Trade. Only those three sizes are available. The firm’s widget also states, for this program only, “No add-ons available for this program”, which removes the scaling plan, the 90% reward split upgrade and the faster reward frequency that Funded Trading Plus sells on its other challenges.
The Challenge Rules Are Loose, the Funded Rules Are Not
This is the part of the announcement that deserves more attention than the price. Funded Trading Plus publishes two rule blocks for the Activation Account, one for the evaluation and one headed “Once Funded”, and they do not match.
During the evaluation the trader gets a 2% profit target, a 4% maximum daily loss measured on balance, a 6% maximum loss described as static, leverage of 1:30, news trading allowed subject to policy, weekend holding allowed, an unlimited time limit, no maximum trading days and, stated explicitly, no consistency rule.
Once funded, three of those loosen into something stricter. The maximum daily loss drops from 4% to 3%. The 6% maximum loss stops being static and becomes trailing, with the firm’s note that it “locks at starting balance”. And a consistency rule appears where there was none: 25%, checked at payout. The reward split is 80% and the payout frequency is every 10 trading days.
A trader who reads only the evaluation column will pass under one set of constraints and then trade for real money under another. The consistency rule is the sharpest edge here, because it is not a pass or fail gate during the challenge at all. It arrives at the moment a payout is requested, which is the worst moment to discover it. Our guide to what can actually be verified about prop firm payouts covers why payout-stage conditions deserve more scrutiny than headline splits.
At $100,000 the Cheap Route Is Currently the Expensive One
Funded Trading Plus is running a site-wide promotion, code FUNDED30, advertised as 30% off every program and every account size. On the same homepage widget, the $100,000 1-Step Express shows a total fee of $549.00 reduced to $384.30 with that code.
Set that against the Activation Account route. A $100,000 Activation Account costs $4 now and $489 on a pass, so $493 all in. That is $56 below the 1-Step Express list price, and $108.70 above the same challenge bought today with the discount code. In other words, at the $100,000 size, the pay-later program is currently the more expensive way to reach a funded account for any trader who expects to pass.
The 1-Step Express also carries a 10% profit target against the Activation Account’s 2%, so the two are not doing the same job. The Activation route asks for far less performance and far less money upfront, and charges for that flexibility at the back end. Funded Trading Plus does not publish the 1-Step Express prices for $25,000 and $50,000 alongside the Activation table, so the same comparison cannot be made cleanly at those sizes from the homepage alone.
The model itself is not new to the industry. Deferred and staged payment structures have been appearing across the sector for most of this year, and firms such as E8 Markets and FundedNext have each reworked their entry pricing in different directions. What separates the Funded Trading Plus version is the size of the gap between the advertised number and the real one.
What Funded Trading Plus Has Not Published
Several things a trader would want to know are absent from the firm’s public pages, and it is worth being explicit about them rather than filling the gaps.
Funded Trading Plus has not stated whether the $4 is refundable, credited against the activation fee, or simply kept if the trader fails. It has not published a deadline for paying the activation fee after a pass, nor what happens to a passed account if the trader does not pay. It has not said whether the Activation Account is a permanent addition to the lineup or a limited offer. It has not confirmed whether the FUNDED30 code applies to the activation fee, and the widget’s “no add-ons” line suggests the program sits outside the firm’s usual pricing mechanics. It has also not said whether an Activation Account can later be scaled, given that the scaling add-on is unavailable.
The firm does allow news trading and weekend holding on this program, which is consistent with its wider positioning and with the small group of firms we track in our roundup of prop firms that now allow news trading. Funded Trading Plus also notes on its performance panel that the figures it displays, including $19.5 million in total trader rewards across 60,000 traders, were last refreshed in February 2026.
What This Means for the Broader Prop Industry
Low entry pricing has been the sector’s main competitive lever for two years, and it has mostly taken the form of discount codes. Activation Accounts are a different move. They shift the fee from before the evaluation to after it, which changes who carries the risk of a failed attempt and, just as importantly, changes what a firm can advertise. A $4 headline is a marketing asset that a 30% discount code cannot match, even when the discounted product is cheaper.
That is the pattern worth watching. If deferred activation spreads, the visible price of a challenge stops being a useful comparison number, because the visible price will no longer be the price. Traders will need to add two figures together, and the second figure is the one firms have the least incentive to put in large type. JoinProp’s 2026 Prop Firm Trust Index already weights disclosure quality for exactly this reason.
There is a second, quieter implication. A firm that collects most of its fee only from traders who pass has a stronger commercial interest in how many people pass, and in what the funded account costs it afterwards. It is reasonable to read the Activation Account’s funded-stage rules, the trailing drawdown, the tighter daily loss and the 25% consistency check, as the other half of that equation. Funded Trading Plus has not framed it that way and has not been asked to, so this is an observation about the structure rather than a claim about intent.
For now, the practical advice is narrow. Traders drawn in by the $4 should read the Once Funded column before the evaluation column, and should price the route at $183, $303 or $493 rather than at $4. Anyone who is confident of passing a 10% target should check the discounted 1-Step Express price before assuming the pay-later option saves money.
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