The number a founder writes into the first business plan is the platform's monthly fee. The number that arrives twelve months later is that fee plus a data contract, a hosting bill, a bridge, a risk plugin and half a salary. The gap between the two is where most first-year prop firms lose the marketing budget they needed to acquire their first thousand challenge buyers.
Year one is the year the arithmetic matters most, because revenue is smallest and every line is fixed. So here is the cost model laid out by mechanism rather than by brochure, and an honest note on where the rented platforms come out ahead.
The lines nobody forgets
Two costs get budgeted correctly by almost everyone: the platform's recurring fee and its setup fee. Whether you rent a legacy platform through a white label or take a SaaS subscription on a major third-party platform, there is a monthly figure and a one-off to stand the environment up. eTrader is quoted for each firm, with the feed and hosting included; book a call or text us to get yours. What the platform includes sits in eTrader pricing.
Everything after those two lines is where vendors diverge, and where a plan written in a spreadsheet stops matching the bank statement.
The reason vendors differ so much on the rest is not greed. It is where the product boundary was drawn. A platform sold as a server product ends at the server. A platform sold as a managed service has to carry everything the server needed.
The lines that arrive later
| Cost line | Server-product model | eTrader |
|---|---|---|
| Market data | Separate feed contract, billed monthly | 70ms-updated feed included |
| Hosting | Your servers or rented infrastructure | Hosting by SGHK included |
| Platform administration | A hire or a retainer | No hire; hosted by SGHK, managed by your firm |
| Mobile apps | Often a separate tier | Native iOS and Android included |
| Rules enforcement | Plugins or a bolt-on risk tool | CRM rules engine, 500ms sync |
| Upgrades | Migration work, upgrade fees | Rolled out automatically |
None of those lines is exotic. Each one is simply work that has to happen somewhere, and the only question is whether your firm buys it, hires it or receives it inside a price. A new prop firm with four people and no revenue is the worst possible buyer of six small contracts.
Read that table as six vendor relationships rather than six prices. Each one has a renewal date, a support queue and a way of failing at an inconvenient hour, and a two-person startup pays for all three in attention. The pattern is unpacked further in what a legacy platform licence really costs.
The half-salary line
The single largest year-one surprise is not a contract. It is the person who keeps the deployment healthy. Patching, gateway monitoring, backup verification, capacity planning for a payrolls release: on a self-run or white-label legacy platform environment somebody does that work, and on a firm of four people it is either a hire competing directly with ad spend or it is a founder awake at night instead of selling.
Cost a platform by the jobs it creates, not by its invoice. A cheaper monthly fee that requires one operations hire is more expensive than a higher fee that requires none, in the year when the founder's attention is the scarcest asset in the company.
Why the platform bill should track the business at launch
Licence tiers force a bet. Pick a tier sized for the firm you hope to become and you pay for that capacity from month one; pick a smaller one and you renegotiate mid-growth from a weak position. Neither is what a firm with no account base yet should be doing. A platform bill that grows when the business grows and not before is the only shape a first-year cash flow can absorb comfortably, so ask every vendor how its quote changes as your account base grows.
The wider founding budget, licensing, payments, marketing and staff, sits in what it costs to start a prop firm. Platform is one slice of it, but it is the slice most likely to be modelled at a third of its real size.
Where the rented platforms genuinely win
Concede the honest points. major third-party platforms are delivered as services too, so several of the lines above are inside their subscriptions as well, and a firm comparing them with eTrader is comparing like with like rather than a model against a model. Brand recognition has commercial value: a terminal traders already know reduces support load and objection handling in the first months. And a firm whose target trader runs trading robots is buying an ecosystem, not just an execution surface.
Where eTrader separates is the combination: the feed included rather than contracted, hosting and administration absorbed, every client surface included, and the rules engine that a prop firm needs shipped as part of the same system rather than sourced from a third party. That is the piece a rented terminal usually leaves for you to buy.
The number to write into the plan
Model twelve months, not one. Take every recurring line, add the setup fees, add the fraction of a salary the deployment consumes, and add the cost of one migration if the vendor's policy toward prop firms changes, which for at least one vendor it already did once. Then compare that total against a quote with the feed and hosting inside it. If the totals are close, choose on recognition and ecosystem. In most first-year models we have seen founders build, they are not close, and the difference is usually the marketing budget that decides whether year two happens. What the same choice does to your launch date is in time to launch.
"Price a platform by the jobs it creates. An operations hire in year one costs more than any line on the invoice that caused it."
— The SGHK Team
Key Takeaways
- Founders budget the monthly fee and the setup fee correctly, then meet the feed, hosting, admin, plugin and upgrade lines afterwards.
- Six separate cost lines are six vendor relationships, each with a renewal date and a failure mode a small team pays for in attention.
- eTrader includes the 70ms feed, hosting and native apps in the platform, and pricing is quoted for each firm on a call.
- major third-party platforms are also delivered as services, so compare twelve-month totals rather than headline fees.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is usually missing from a new prop firm's platform budget?
Market data on its own contract, hosting, the administrator who patches and monitors the deployment, risk plugins for rule enforcement, and upgrade or migration work. On a managed platform those sit inside the monthly price instead of beside it.
Should a new prop firm buy a fixed licence tier at launch?
For a firm with no account base yet, usually not. A fixed tier forces you to pay from month one for capacity sized to a firm you do not have. Ask how a quote tracks the business instead; eTrader is quoted for your firm on a call, with the feed and hosting included.
Do the rented SaaS platforms have the same hidden lines?
Less so than a self-run server deployment, since hosting and updates sit with the vendor. The line most of them still leave to the firm is prop rule enforcement, which is usually bought as a separate risk tool, and market data terms vary by vendor and instrument.
About SGHK
SGHK is a FinTech company that designs and builds its own software for the trading industry: the eTrader trading platform, Launch your Broker and Launch your Prop Firm. Every product is written, hosted and supported in-house and licensed to trading firms, with the CRMs branded to them, all hosted by us in the cloud, managed by each firm and built to scale across clustered servers as our clients grow. Everything is encrypted, and each firm is the only one with access to its data and its clients' data.