Monthly-subscription evals: the billing cycle is the multiplier
Two evaluations (one at $160 a billing cycle, one at $320 paid once) cost identical money at exactly two cycles. On cycle three the cheaper-looking sticker is $160 ahead of the dearer one, and $320 ahead by cycle four. None of that gap depends on how you trade: a subscription sticker buys a cycle of access, a one-time sticker buys the account until it passes or breaches, and which shape you hold decides whether your bill grows with the calendar or with the number of tries.
In this guide
The short answer
Start here
Read the billing shape off the plan you are actually buying, then price one attempt as the cycle price multiplied by the cycles you will realistically hold it. Divide any one-time alternative's entry price by that cycle price to get the crossover (the cycle count where the two shapes cost the same) and compare it against your own estimate before you buy. Where the plan does not publish its restart price, its proration terms, or whether billing continues after you pass, those cells are unknown: get them in writing from support before the first renewal date lands.
What matters
- Divide the one-time entry by the cycle price before you buy: $320 ÷ $160 = two cycles is where the shapes tie, and every cycle past it adds a full sticker to the subscription path.
- Write the renewal date into your calendar on the day you purchase and make the cancel decision two days before it. A breached account renews on schedule until someone cancels it.
- Confirm what a restart costs before you plan a second attempt: where a restart is billed at the cycle price, a mid-cycle retry adds another full charge inside the same month.
- Compute the crossover on the renewal price rather than a promotional first cycle, and treat any unpublished refund, proration or post-pass billing term as unknown until support answers in writing.
1
Two fee shapes, and what each sticker buys
Reading one fee model off a firm's front page and applying it to everything that firm sells is how a purchase gets mispriced before the first session. Billing shape is a per-plan fact: one lineup can carry an auto-renewing subscription plan and a genuine one-time purchase side by side, which is why NANO stores billing on the plan row and never on the firm row. The shape you are buying is the one printed on the plan you are about to check out with.
The two shapes price different things. A subscription charges a fixed amount per cycle (whatever the plan's terms define, stated as a day count on plans that publish one) and renews on that schedule until someone cancels, whether you traded twenty sessions that cycle or none. A one-time plan takes a single payment and the account lives until it passes or breaches, however long that takes. So a subscription plan has no published cost-per-attempt at all: that number is the cycle price times a variable the trader supplies.
Two more shape facts move real money and both are read at purchase. Some subscription plans offer a pair of purchase paths (a lower cycle price with a one-time activation charged after the pass, or a higher cycle price with no activation) chosen at checkout and fixed for that account afterwards. And on some plans the subscription keeps billing at the funded stage, which converts a funded seat from a one-off cost into a running one. Where a plan's terms state neither, the cell is unknown and belongs in a support ticket before purchase.
- Subscription plan. A fixed charge per cycle, auto-renewing until cancelled; cost per attempt = cycle price × cycles held.
- One-time plan, one payment for one account; cost per attempt = the entry price, whatever the calendar does.
- Mixed lineup, both shapes sold under one brand, so the shape is read off the plan row, and the retry rule is read separately from it.
2
Cycles are the multiplier: the crossover arithmetic
The crossover is one division and it settles the shape question: one-time entry ÷ cycle price = the number of cycles where the two paths cost the same. On the worked pair below that is $320 ÷ $160 = 2. Cycle one costs $160 against $320 and the subscription is genuinely half the price; cycle two ties at $320; cycle three costs $480 against $320, and the gap then widens by one full sticker every cycle. Under the crossover the subscription wins, past it the one-time entry does, and the only unknown in the whole comparison is how many cycles you will hold the account.
That unknown is where an eval with no time limit to pass gets misread as free time. An unlimited evaluation on a subscription still runs a clock, and the clock is your card: no deadline means no forced exit, so a slow attempt bills again rather than ending. Two published cells set the floor under how fast the calendar can possibly move. A minimum-trading-days rule means an evaluation requiring three trading days cannot finish in two sessions, and a trader who buys mid-week and trades three sessions a week meets the renewal date before the third qualifying session lands.
Nobody publishes months-to-pass, and NANO does not estimate yours. The public cost model prices a subscription sticker as a cycle price times an assumed one cycle per attempt, labels that assumption, and spreads the total across a labeled industry baseline pass band shown as a range rather than a point. One cycle per attempt is the optimistic end of the time question: a trader whose last two attempts each ran a second cycle doubles that line by hand before comparing anything.
3
The renewal date is a rule with its own calendar
Stopping trading after a breach and treating the account as finished is the move that quietly buys a month of nothing. On an auto-renewing plan the charge follows the date, not the state of the account: breached, passed or untouched, the plan renews on schedule until it is cancelled. Cancel-anytime is an accurate description of the mechanism and a poor description of the deadline, the gap between the breach and the next renewal date is the entire decision window, and it can be three days.
Two adjacent charges keep their own calendars. A separately billed platform or market-data subscription renews on its own fixed day and may not be prorated, so an evaluation bought late in the month can meet that charge twice inside one attempt. And where the plan's terms carry no refund or proration line for a cycle you cut short by passing, that term is unknown: ask support in writing, and budget as though the answer is no until the written answer arrives.
The date is also the only lever that changes the arithmetic in the worked path. A restart taken one day before a renewal buys a few sessions for the same $160 that a restart taken the day after a renewal buys a full cycle for. That is not a trading edge, it is a purchase-timing one, and it only exists for a trader who knows the date, which is why it goes in the calendar at purchase rather than being looked up after a charge appears.
4
Which variable you are exposed to, and pricing it in before you buy
Each shape exposes you to a different variable, and the retry rule decides how sharp that exposure is. A retry after a breach comes in three published forms: a flat reset fee that restarts the same account at a discount, a full repurchase where the plan sells no resets at all, or, on subscription plans, a restart billed at the cycle price, which means the sticker is simply charged again. A trader who breaches twice inside one cycle on that third form pays the sticker three times in one calendar month, and no page ever showed that number.
The worked path prices exactly that exposure. Three cycles plus one mid-cycle restart runs (3 × $160) + $160 = $640, while the one-time plan covers the same two attempts for $320 + $80 = $400 no matter how long they took. The plan whose sticker read half the price finished $240 higher, 60% over, because its bill was indexed to the calendar while the other was indexed to attempts.
A promotional cycle changes the first line of that sum and nothing after it. A discounted first cycle on the worked plan saves money once and then renews at the price the plan's terms state, so the crossover is computed on the renewal price and the promotion is counted as a one-off credit against the total. Four numbers, marked verified-at-checkout or unknown, are enough to decide: the cycle or entry price, the restart price, activation, and whether billing continues after the pass. Compare your estimated cycles against the crossover, and record each renewal as it lands, because a subscription's real price only becomes knowable once the renewals are in the record.
- Cycle or entry price, the sticker, read at checkout for your exact plan and size.
- Restart price, a flat reset, a full repurchase, or another cycle at the sticker.
- Activation, charged once after the pass on plans that carry it, and $0 on plans that publish none.
- Post-pass billing, whether the subscription continues at the funded stage, or ends at the pass.
Worked example
Assumptions, not a forecastA $160 cycle against a $320 one-time entry
- Hypothetical subscription plan: $160 per billing cycle, auto-renewing, no activation fee; a restart after a breach is billed at the same $160.
- Hypothetical one-time plan: $320 entry, $80 flat reset after a breach, no activation fee.
- Hypothetical path taken on both: one breach inside the first cycle, one restart, then a pass during the third cycle.
- Both stickers are list prices with no promotion applied, and cycles are billed whole with no proration assumed.
Cycle by cycle the subscription costs $160, $320 and $480 against the flat $320, so the shapes tie at the crossover of $320 ÷ $160 = 2 cycles. On the path above the subscription bills three cycles plus the mid-cycle restart: (3 × $160) + $160 = $640. The one-time plan bills $320 + $80 = $400 for the same two attempts, whatever the calendar did. The sticker that read half the price finished $240 higher, and every further cycle adds another $160 to that gap.
Every figure here is hypothetical and chosen to show the shape arithmetic; real cycle prices, restart rules and activation charges are published per plan, and some plans publish none of them. The comparison prices two billing shapes and says nothing about which product is easier to pass, how long any trader takes, or which firm to buy from.
Tool tutorial
Price the billing shape at the checkout
- 1
Identify the shape on the plan row you are buying, an auto-renewing cycle price, or a single payment. A lineup that sells both means the firm-level answer is the wrong one to carry into the arithmetic.
- 2
Copy four numbers: the cycle or entry price, the restart price, activation, and any separately billed platform or data charge. Mark each verified at checkout or unknown; a blank budgeted as zero understates the path by exactly the amount you skipped.
- 3
Compute the crossover: one-time entry ÷ cycle price. With $320 and $160 it is two cycles. That quotient is the threshold the whole decision turns on.
- 4
Estimate your own cycles per attempt from the plan's minimum trading days and the number of sessions you actually trade in a week. When that estimate reaches or passes the crossover, the subscription's sticker advantage is gone before the second renewal, and the decision changes to the one-time shape or to a smaller size.
- 5
Write the renewal date in your calendar and set the cancel decision two days ahead of it. After a breach, that date is what stops the next charge, closing the platform does not.
- 6
Record each charge as it lands, renewals separately from the entry, so the path total you compare against next time is your own history rather than a sticker.
See a subscription sticker priced in cycles
Cost to Funded reads published, verified fees for every covered firm and plan at your account size and renders a monthly plan's sticker as a cycle price times the cycles assumed per attempt, never as a flat per-try figure, alongside the restart price and any one-time activation inside a modeled total across a labeled baseline pass band.
Account required, no paid plan; the published-fee model itself is public. Its most important boundary is the time assumption: it prices one billing cycle per attempt and labels that, so a plan you hold for three cycles costs roughly three times what its per-attempt line shows, and a plan whose price is unsourced is named as missing rather than estimated.
Evidence boundary
What NANO can and cannot know
NANO records the billing shape, cycle price, restart rule and activation each firm publishes, per plan, and leaves a cell empty where the terms do not state it, an empty cell marks a gap in the published record and is never a zero. It cannot see your card, cannot cancel a subscription for you, and does not track promotional prices between verification dates. Its modeled path assumes one billing cycle per attempt at a labeled baseline pass band, which describes cost shape and cannot forecast how many cycles you will take.
Common questions
- How does a prop firm monthly subscription eval work?
- You pay a fixed price for a billing cycle and it renews automatically on that calendar date until you cancel, so the account keeps costing money whether you traded that cycle or not. Cost per attempt is therefore the cycle price times the cycles you hold it: a $160 cycle is $320 by the second and $480 by the third, against a one-time plan that charges once.
- Do I get charged again if I fail the evaluation?
- Yes, unless you cancel before the renewal date, the charge follows the date, and a breached account renews on schedule like any other. On plans where a restart is billed at the cycle price, a mid-cycle retry adds a further full charge, which is how one calendar month can carry two or three.
- Is a one-time fee cheaper than a monthly subscription?
- There is no general answer and NANO does not rank two named products against each other on price, because the answer depends on a number only you can estimate. Do the crossover instead: divide the one-time entry by the cycle price, $320 ÷ $160 = two cycles, then compare that against how many cycles you realistically need. Under the crossover the subscription is cheaper, past it the one-time entry is.
- Does the subscription stop when I pass the evaluation?
- On some plans it ends at the pass and on others it keeps billing at the funded stage, so this is a per-plan cell to read before buying rather than discover after passing. Where the plan's terms state nothing, the answer is unknown, ask support in writing, because it decides whether a funded seat is a one-off cost or a monthly one.
- The first month is discounted, does that change the crossover?
- Only the first cycle: compute the crossover on the renewal price, since a promotional cycle renews at whatever the plan's terms state. A half-price first cycle on a $160 plan is an $80 credit against the total, and every cycle after it bills at the price that decides the comparison.