Four contract terms to read before you pay a prop firm passing service

Every passing service sells the pass. The pass is the easy half to describe and the hard half to promise, so the marketing stops there.

What actually decides whether you lost money is the four terms underneath it. None of them are exotic, and all of them are usually missing from the pricing page.

1. Who holds the funded account

This is the one that matters and the one least often stated. When an evaluation is passed, the account exists somewhere — an email address, a login, a name on the KYC record, a payout method.

If the operator registered the account, you do not own an account. You own a promise that the account will be transferred, on terms that were not written down when you paid. If you registered it, you own it from the first login and the service is doing work on your account rather than selling you one.

Ask directly: whose email address is on the firm dashboard, and whose name is on the KYC record? A service that cannot answer in one sentence has not thought about it, which is worse than a bad answer.

2. What a breach costs, and who pays the retry

"Retries covered" is on every site in this market. It is a real benefit and it is nearly always undefined in three ways:

  • How many retries — one, or until it passes?
  • Within what window — same month, same quarter, indefinitely?
  • On which firm — the original one, or any firm, which matters when the original changes its rules mid-evaluation?

A retry promise with no count and no window is not a term, it is a sentiment. The clause to look for is the one that says what happens on the second breach, because that is where the arithmetic of a fixed fee stops being generous.

3. The refund trigger, and what it actually returns

"Pass or refund" sounds like a guarantee. Read what it refunds.

Your true cost is not the service fee alone — it is the service fee plus the challenge fee you already paid the firm, doubled if you are on a retry. A refund of the service fee leaves the challenge fee with the firm, which is often the larger number on a $200k account.

So the useful question is not "is there a refund" but "does the refund cover the firm's challenge fee as well, and what is the deadline for claiming it?"

4. What you receive, and whether a stranger could check it

The deliverable is one of three things: login credentials, a certificate, or a screenshot.

  • Credentials transfer an asset. Good.
  • A certificate with the client name redacted is checkable — a firm can confirm an account number exists.
  • A screenshot is a picture. It costs nothing to produce and proves nothing.

If the only artefact is an image, the pass has the same evidential status as a testimonial.

The awkward part: I run one of these

ElitePropX is a flat-fee passing service — $220 per evaluation, any account size, retries covered, no profit split on the funded account. So this is not a neutral buyer's guide. Treat it as the list of questions I expect to be asked, and hold me to the same four answers:

  1. The account is registered in the client's name, with the client's email on the dashboard.
  2. Retries are covered without a count, because the fee is per evaluation rather than per attempt.
  3. A refund returns the service fee; the firm's challenge fee is not recoverable by us or by anyone.
  4. The deliverable is credentials plus a certificate with the client name redacted.

The parts that make those answers checkable rather than asserted are published: the methodology explains what a checked date promises and how corrections are handled, and the passed challenges page includes the evaluations that were reset — roughly one in twenty — because a service that only lists wins has not published a record, it has published an advertisement.

The printable version

Four questions, in the order that saves the most money:

Whose email and name are on the account? · How many retries, in what window, on which firm? · What does the refund return, and by when? · Is the deliverable credentials, a certificate, or a screenshot?

If a service answers all four in writing, the price becomes comparable. If it answers two, the price is not the thing you should be comparing.