Prop Firm Reset Fees Explained: When Resetting Is Worth It vs Starting Fresh

I've reset an Apex evaluation exactly twice in three years and regretted one of those resets immediately — I paid $80 to save an account that had no business being saved, because the setup that blew it wasn't a bad day, it was a bad strategy. That's the part nobody explains when they tell you "just reset it." A reset gives you your starting balance and drawdown limits back. It does not give you a better edge, a calmer head, or a different market regime. Whether resetting is worth the money or whether you should close it out and buy a fresh evaluation comes down to math that's specific to each firm's current pricing — and that pricing has changed enough in the last year that a lot of what's floating around Reddit and YouTube is already wrong. Here's what resets actually cost right now, firm by firm, and the actual decision framework for when to pay it versus start over.

What a "Reset" Actually Does

A reset restores a failed or struggling evaluation account back to its starting balance, with the drawdown threshold recalculated from that fresh balance. It does not extend your access window in most cases, and it does not touch your billing or renewal date — those two details trip people up more than the price itself. You're not buying a new 30-day clock. You're buying your equity curve back to zero on an account whose subscription or access period is already running on its original schedule, unless the firm explicitly states otherwise.

This matters because the arithmetic of "reset vs new eval" isn't just sticker price vs sticker price. If your reset doesn't reset your access window and you've already burned 20 of your 30 days failing the first attempt, you're paying to fight the clock along with the rules a second time. A fresh evaluation purchase, by contrast, generally gives you the full access period again. That's a real factor in the decision, not just a footnote.

Apex Trader Funding: No More Evaluation Resets, Period

This is the single biggest change traders need to understand if they're coming back to Apex after being away for six months or more: as of the current 4.0 rule set, there is no reset option for a failed Evaluation account at all. Apex's own help center states it plainly — there are no reset fees on Evaluations, and if an Evaluation fails, the only way to continue is by purchasing a new one. The old system, where you could pay roughly half the original evaluation price to restore a blown account, or get a free automatic reset when your subscription renewed, is gone along with the recurring monthly billing model it depended on. Apex now sells Evaluations as a one-time fee for 30 days of access, full stop.

Where resets still exist at Apex is on the funded side — the Performance Account (PA), after you've passed the evaluation and started trading real payouts on simulated capital. If you breach a funded PA's trailing drawdown, Apex's support documentation lists the reset cost at $80 for a Rithmic-routed account and $100 for a Tradovate-routed account. That reset restores your PA to its original balance and drawdown threshold and, per Apex's help center, does not change your renewal or expiration date — make sure you're resetting the correct account, because the action is irreversible.

Since there's no evaluation reset anymore, the real decision at Apex isn't "reset or new eval" — it's just "buy a new eval, and time the purchase around a discount window." Apex runs 80–90% off evaluation sales constantly enough that a fresh $50K Evaluation attempt frequently runs somewhere in the high-teens to mid-$20s at full sale pricing rather than full list price. If you fail, you're not out a reset fee on top of a sunk evaluation cost — you're just buying the next discounted attempt. That's arguably cleaner than the old system, but it means the entire "should I reset" question at Apex only applies once you're already funded and protecting a live PA, not while you're still in the evaluation phase.

Topstep: Reset Pricing Is Real and Tiered by Path

Topstep runs two pricing paths on its Trading Combine — Standard and No Activation Fee — and the reset cost depends on which path your account is on. On the Standard path, a reset currently costs the same as one month of that account size's subscription: $49 for the 50K, $99 for the 100K, and $199 for the 150K. On the No Activation Fee path, resets run higher — publicly reported figures put them around $95–$109 for the 50K, $149–$159 for the 100K, and roughly $209–$229 for the 150K, reflecting that you're not going to owe a separate activation fee later, so the reset itself carries more of the cost.

Topstep also gives you a free reset credit each time your subscription rebills, meaning if you're paying monthly and haven't canceled, a failed Combine effectively resets itself on your renewal date without a separate charge — the same mechanic the old Apex system used to run. The catch is the same one from above: that free reset doesn't reset your billing cycle, it just happens to land on it. If you're the type of trader who needs the full 30 days to prove a strategy holds up, relying on the automatic rebill reset can quietly cost you trading days you were counting on.

One more Topstep-specific wrinkle worth knowing: if you pass the Combine and get an Express Funded Account (XFA), then lose it before your first payout, that's not a reset — it's a separate "Reactivation" product called Back2Funded, and it is meaningfully more expensive: reported figures put it at roughly $599 for the 50K XFA, $699 for the 100K, and $829 for the 150K, within a 30-calendar-day window of the account closing. Don't confuse a pre-funding Combine reset with a post-funding reactivation — they're priced in completely different tiers.

FTMO Futures: Reset Tied to the Monthly Subscription Track

FTMO's futures product runs on Growth and Pro tracks, both billed as a recurring monthly subscription during the evaluation phase — unlike FTMO's original CFD challenge, which is a one-time purchase. Reported reset fees for FTMO Futures run close to, but slightly under, the monthly subscription fee for each size and track: roughly $109 (Growth) / $129 (Pro) for the $50K, $169 (Growth) / $199 (Pro) for the $100K, and $219 (Growth) / $259 (Pro) for the $150K. Activation fees for moving into the funded simulated account are waived on both tracks once you pass, which is the one piece of good news in FTMO's structure — you're not stacking a reset fee and an activation fee on the same attempt.

MyFundedFutures, Bulenox, and the Smaller Firms

The newer wave of futures prop firms mostly skips the discounted-reset model entirely and just charges the same price to reset as to renew, because their evaluations are billed as 30-day recurring subscriptions rather than one-time fees. MyFundedFutures, for example, prices its Rapid and Pro evaluations with reset cost equal to purchase cost on most sizes — a Rapid 50K runs roughly $157 to buy, reset, or renew, and a Pro 100K runs roughly $344 across the board. Bulenox runs a similar subscription model on its Qualification product, with reset pricing that tracks the evaluation's monthly fee rather than a discounted half-price restore. The practical read: if a firm bills monthly rather than one-time, assume the reset costs close to a full month's fee unless you check the current pricing page, because the "cheap reset" era that Apex popularized in 2022–2024 has mostly ended industry-wide.

The Actual Math: When a Reset Is Worth It

Strip away the marketing and this comes down to three questions, in order:

• Is the reset actually cheaper than a new evaluation, after accounting for any active discount code on a fresh purchase? On firms still offering real discounted resets (Topstep Standard path, FTMO), the reset is close to a wash or modestly cheaper than a new eval bought at list price — but if the firm is running an 80%+ sale on new evaluations (common at Apex, Bulenox, and others during promo periods), a brand-new discounted evaluation can be cheaper than what a reset used to cost, making the comparison moot.
• Does the reset preserve meaningful access time, or are you buying back a clock that's about to run out anyway? A $99 reset on a Combine with four days of access left is a much worse trade than a $99 reset on one with three weeks left. Check your actual remaining window before paying, not just the account balance.
• Was the failure a variance event or a process failure? This is the question traders skip most often. If you got stopped out by a legitimate setup that simply didn't work — normal distribution of outcomes for a strategy with positive expectancy — a reset is rational. If you blew the account because you doubled size after two losses, or took a setup outside your rules because you were behind on the profit target, the reset fee is just a toll on repeating the same mistake. No firm's reset button fixes a revenge-trading pattern or an unvalidated strategy; only a documented process change does that.

A Rough Framework I Actually Use

Before paying any reset fee, I want to be able to answer, specifically, what changes about my execution on the next attempt. Not "I'll be more careful" — a concrete rule change: a smaller max position size, a hard stop on daily loss at half the firm's limit instead of trading right up to it, or cutting a setup out of rotation because three of my last four losses came from it. If I can't name that change, I close the account and either walk away from that size for a while or buy a new evaluation from scratch with a clean trading journal reset alongside the account reset. Paying to restore the account without restoring the process is how traders end up three or four resets deep on the same broken approach, having spent more on resets than a completely fresh attempt would have cost.

Reset Fees vs New Evaluation: Side-by-Side Snapshot

Two things stand out looking at this across firms. First, nobody offers a meaningfully discounted reset anymore — the 2022-era "half price to try again" model is functionally dead outside of Apex's automatic renewal reset, which only applies if you forget to cancel a failing account before it rebills. Second, a reset almost never buys you more time; it buys you your balance back on the clock that's already running. That single fact should drive most of the decision, more than the dollar figure on its own.

What I'd Actually Tell Someone Asking This Question

If you're on Apex and the account is an Evaluation, there's no decision to make — there's no reset, so the only live question is whether to buy the next discounted attempt now or wait for a bigger sale, and whether your plan genuinely earns another shot. If you're on Topstep, FTMO, or a subscription-model firm and you're deciding whether to pay a reset fee, run the three questions above before you click buy: check the real price difference against a fresh purchase with any active discount, check how much access time the reset actually buys back, and be honest about whether the failure was variance or a rules problem. The money at stake on any single reset — $80 to maybe $250 depending on firm and size — is small compared to what traders lose repeating the same unexamined mistake across three or four resets in a row. The reset button was never the expensive part. The unchanged process on the other side of it is.