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 MT5 through a white label, take a SaaS subscription on DXtrade, Match-Trader, TradeLocker or cTrader, or license eTrader, there is a monthly figure and a one-off to stand the environment up. eTrader publishes its version: from $3,300 per month for prop firms, a one-time $1,650 setup fee and $1.50 per trading account issued. The full structure 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 free |
| Hosting | Your servers or rented infrastructure | Managed clusters included |
| Platform administration | A hire or a retainer | Operated by Singuard |
| 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 MetaQuotes 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 MetaTrader 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 per-account beats a licence tier 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. Tying the variable component to accounts actually issued, as eTrader does at $1.50 each, means the platform bill grows when the business grows and not before, which is the only shape a first-year cash flow can absorb comfortably.
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. cTrader, DXtrade, Match-Trader and TradeLocker 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 expert advisors 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, all five client surfaces in one price, 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 published monthly figure 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."
— Roman Onta, Executive Director, SINGUARD
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 publishes a prop structure of $3,300 per month, a one-time $1,650 setup fee and $1.50 per account, with the 70ms feed and hosting included.
- cTrader, DXtrade, Match-Trader and TradeLocker 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.
Is per-account pricing better than a licence tier for a launch?
For a firm with no account base yet, generally yes. A tier forces you to pay from month one for capacity sized to a firm you do not have. A per-account fee, $1.50 on eTrader, rises only as accounts are issued, so the bill tracks the business.
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 the Author
Roman Onta is an Executive Director at SINGUARD. He builds the Prop Firm CRM, the Broker CRM, Scalegram and CopySignals side by side with his brother Alex Onta, and he helped on the design of eTrader, the division Alex built and leads. His ground is worldwide payment processing, AML compliance and the corporate structures brokers are built on, work the two of them carry together, shaped by executive roles in the UAE and international corporates. He lives and works in Dubai for most of the year. Meet the executive duo leading Singuard's five divisions.