Take Profit Trader Activation Fee 2026: What You Actually Pay

Comparing what funding actually costs? Phidias Express to Live is the alternative we build. First, every fee at Take Profit Trader, from their own documentation.

Does Take Profit Trader have an activation fee?

Yes. It is $130, charged once per PRO account, when you pass the Test and move your account to PRO. You do not pay it to start the Test, and it is not a monthly charge. Take Profit Trader has been running a discount code continuously that waives it, so most traders never actually pay the $130. The waiver is not automatic: it arrives as a credit you have to apply yourself.

Why is Take Profit Trader asking me to pay the activation fee when I used a promo code?

This question appears in three of Take Profit Trader’s four promo FAQ articles, which tells you how often traders hit it. The answer is the same each time, and it is a mechanism worth understanding before you are staring at a payment screen you did not expect.

The code does not remove the fee. It gives you a credit of the same amount. When you pass the Test, a $130 PRO Activation credit lands in your credit bank, and you have to go into the dashboard, start the activation, and choose Your credits as the payment method. Until you do that, the dashboard behaves exactly as if you owed $130, because as far as the checkout is concerned, you do.

There is a timing detail in the same note that catches people out. Activation credits are not issued at weekends. If you pass your Test on a Friday, the credit is issued the next business day, which is Monday. Take Profit Trader states this explicitly.

So a Friday pass means your funded account waits until Monday, not because anything went wrong, but because the credit that pays your activation fee has not been created yet. If you are close to passing on a Thursday, that is a reason to finish on Thursday.

When would you actually pay the $130?

Three situations, all avoidable.

You bought without a code. Take Profit Trader states the waiver is attached to the account created with the code, so it is a property of the account from the moment you buy it. Nothing in the documentation offers a way to add it afterwards.

You bought your Test using credit. As above, those accounts are excluded from promotions, activation waiver included.

You paid it by mistake. The credit sits in your credit bank and the checkout still offers a card. If you click through without switching the payment method to Your credits, you have paid a fee you did not owe.

The waiver survives the things people assume would void it. Take Profit Trader is explicit that resets do not cost you the waiver: reset once, twice, or however many times, and you still pay no activation fee on that account.

It is also not time limited. However long the Test takes you, the account keeps its waiver. For the detail on which code is running and what it discounts, we cover that separately in our guide to the Take Profit Trader promo code.

The fee nobody searches for: the monthly subscription

Take Profit Trader does not sell an evaluation. It sells a monthly subscription that contains an evaluation. That distinction is the single most important thing on this page, and it changes how you should read every price the firm advertises.

The headline benefit is genuine: there is no time limit on reaching your profit target. Most firms give you a deadline. Take Profit Trader gives you a rate instead. Take as long as you like, and pay for every month you take.

Read the middle bullet again, because it is the one that costs real money:

To be fair to Take Profit Trader, the subscription does stop by itself in one situation. Pass the Test and it is cancelled automatically, and PRO accounts carry no recurring subscription fee at all. Once you are funded, the meter is off.

Which leaves the asymmetry worth remembering: the subscription cancels itself when you succeed, and keeps billing when you fail. Only one of those two outcomes is the common one. Take Profit Trader’s own published pass rate is 36.22%.

Your account can be finished while your subscription is still healthy. Those are two separate objects in Take Profit Trader’s system, and only one of them notices that you blew the account. The other keeps charging on the same calendar day each month until you go into the dashboard and stop it.

This is not hidden. It is written on the subscriptions page in plain language, and Take Profit Trader deserves credit for stating it rather than burying it. But it does put the burden on the trader at the exact moment a trader is least likely to be doing admin. You have just lost an account. Logging in to cancel a subscription is not what you feel like doing that evening.

It also shows up in the complaint record. Billing, subscription and refund issues appear in 21% of the 81 one-star reviews we sampled for our Take Profit Trader review, the fifth most common theme. That is a sample of roughly 1,200 one-star reviews, weighted toward recent months, so read it as indicative rather than as a census.

What cancelling actually does

Cancelling is simple and irreversible. You do it from the Journey to Profit section of the dashboard, either with the X next to the subscription or through Cancel Subscription in the account details. Take Profit Trader confirms the action cannot be undone.

What matters is what happens next. Your subscription stays active until the end of the current billing period, so you keep trading the days you already paid for. Then it terminates.

And here is the part that reframes the headline promise: if you have not reached your profit target by the end of that billing cycle, the Test is considered unsuccessful.

So the no time limit product does have a deadline. It appears the moment you cancel, and it is set by your own billing date. That is a fair way to run a subscription, but it means the marketing claim and the operational reality differ in a way worth knowing before you cancel on day three of a cycle.

An unpaid subscription blocks your funded account

This one is worth checking your card details over. If a renewal payment fails, Take Profit Trader flags the subscription as overdue with a red card symbol in the dashboard, and the consequence is not just a nagging notice.

You can pass your Test and still not get funded. Take Profit Trader states that an account cannot move to PRO unless the payment issue is resolved. The evaluation result is not the blocker. The billing is.

Worse, the failure mode is terminal. Renewals are automated and the card is retried, but if the final attempt fails, the account expires and Take Profit Trader states it cannot reactivate expired accounts. An expired card on a passing account is not a support ticket, it is a lost account.

The practical takeaway is dull and important: keep a valid card with funds available on the renewal date, especially in the week you expect to pass.

Why a reset does not buy you a fresh month

Resets are priced to feel small next to the monthly rate, and for a Test account they are: $79 on the 25K up to $199 on the 150K. The catch is structural rather than numeric.

Resetting does not change your subscription renewal date. Take Profit Trader says so directly. A reset gives you a clean balance inside a month you have already bought, and the renewal still arrives exactly when it always would have.

Reset twice in one billing cycle and you have paid one monthly rate and two reset fees for a single calendar window. On a 100K account at the discounted rate, that is $198 plus $338 in one month, most of it for restarts rather than for time.

There is one useful nuance in the other direction. Take Profit Trader only resets accounts at renewal if the account is disabled. If your account is active, the monthly renewal does not trigger a reset, so your progress carries across the billing boundary.

Monthly prices read from Take Profit Trader’s pricing page in August 2026; reset prices from its help centre. PRO resets are capped at three per account.

Commissions, and who sets them

For an active trader this is the largest number on the page, and it is the one least discussed.

Take Profit Trader charges $4.50 per round trip per contract on futures, and $1.50 per round trip per contract on micros. The same rates apply to Test and PRO accounts, so you are paying them from your first evaluation trade.

The firm is unusually direct about the arrangement. In its own words, these commissions are not imposed by a third party, they are established and regulated by Take Profit Trader, and they are applied inside the simulated environment for consistency with live trading.

That is a defensible design choice. A simulated account that charges no commission teaches you a cost structure that does not exist, and traders who never model commissions get a nasty surprise the first time they trade real size. It is still worth being clear-eyed about the fact that on a Test or PRO account, the party setting the commission rate and the party running the simulation are the same party.

PRO+ works differently. Once you reach the live tier, Take Profit Trader states that a separate commission structure applies, and points to NinjaTrader’s and Tradovate’s published schedules for the detail.

Why micros cost you more than three times the minis

Here is the asymmetry almost nobody prices in, and it disproportionately hits small accounts.

Ten micro contracts equal one mini in size. But the micro commission is one third of the mini rate, not one tenth. So trading the same exposure in micros costs you 3.33 times the commission for identical market risk.

This matters because the pressure toward micros is real and rational. Tight drawdown limits reward smaller increments, and micros let you size precisely instead of jumping in whole minis. You reach for them for a good reason, and then pay a premium for it.

The point is not that micros are a trap. It is that if you are stacking micros up to mini-sized exposure, you are paying the granularity premium without using the granularity. Work out your size in minis first, and reach for micros only where you genuinely need the finer increment. On six round trips a day, that single decision is the difference between roughly $81 and $270 in daily commission.

The withdrawal fee that punishes small payouts

Take Profit Trader waives all fees on withdrawals from the wallet above $250. Request $250 or less and you are charged a flat $50, deducted automatically.

As a percentage that is brutal at the bottom end. A $250 withdrawal costs you 20% in fees. A $100 withdrawal costs you 50%. PayPal may add its own charges on top, deducted from the same amount.

The fix is simply to let the balance build past $250 before requesting. We cover the full mechanics of getting money out, including the buffer zone that has to clear first, in our guide to Take Profit Trader payout rules.

What it costs to reach a funded account, three ways

A 100K account, using the discounted rate that has been available continuously, with the activation fee waived. The only variable is how long you take and how often you reset.

Now add commissions, because they dwarf all of it. Six round trips a day on three minis is $81 in commission per day, or roughly $1,620 over a twenty-day month. One month of moderately active trading costs more in commissions than six months of subscription.

That is the honest summary of Take Profit Trader’s cost structure. The subscription is what you notice. The commissions are what you pay. Any comparison between prop firms that stops at the monthly price is comparing the smaller number.

It is also why the pass rate matters to your budget. Take Profit Trader publishes its own figure: 36.22% of Trading Tests were passed across 2025. Most people paying these monthly rates do not reach the funded account, and the subscription model means the longer they try, the more they pay. The full account structure is broken down here, and the rules that end most attempts are in our guide to the trailing drawdown.

Which cost will actually dominate your bill?

Four questions on how long you expect the Test to take, what you do after a bad week, how often you trade, and whether you size in minis or micros. The check names the fee that will actually decide your total, which is rarely the one people budget for. No email.

How we price the same thing at Phidias

We charge once. There is no monthly subscription attached to your evaluation, so the clock is not also a meter, and nothing keeps billing after an account ends.

The bigger difference is what you are buying. Take Profit Trader’s PRO tier is a simulated funded account, and the live tier above it is invitation only, awarded at the firm’s discretion with no published threshold. Phidias Express to Live converts to a live account at your first payout, which is a published rule rather than a decision made about you.

Take Profit Trader fees: frequently asked questions

Useful resources