Tradeify has become one of the most talked-about futures prop firms over the last 12 months, and honestly, the hype is mostly justified. Multiple Prop Firm Match awards in 2025 (Highest Rated, Best Payout Process, Most User Friendly), a 4.8 Trustpilot rating from over 2,000 verified reviews, and a product lineup that’s genuinely different from the Topstep/Apex crowd. But “most talked about” doesn’t automatically mean “right for you,” so let’s get into it.
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Quick Snapshot
| Feature | SELECT (50K) | GROWTH (50K) | LIGHTNING FUNDED (50K) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly Cost | $159 | $139 | One-time $349+ |
| Activation Fee | None | None | None |
| Profit Target | $3,000 | $3,000 | None (skip eval) |
| Drawdown Type | EOD Trailing | EOD Trailing | EOD Trailing |
| Daily Loss Limit | None | Yes (soft breach) | None |
| Consistency Rule | 40% (eval only) | 35% (funded) | 20-30% (tiered) |
| Min Trading Days | 3 | 1 | N/A |
| Profit Split | 90% | 90% | 90% |
| Platforms | Tradovate only | Tradovate, NT, TV | Tradovate, NT, TV |
What Tradeify Actually Offers
Three paths to funding: Growth (evaluation), SELECT (evaluation with flexible funded choice), and Lightning Funded (instant, skip the eval entirely). The SELECT plan launched in late 2025 and is genuinely the most interesting thing they’ve built.
Let’s go through each.
SELECT: The One Worth Your Attention
Here’s the pitch: pass one evaluation with a 40% consistency rule (meaning no single day can represent more than 40% of your total eval profits), then CHOOSE your funded structure afterward. You’re not locked in before you even start.
The evaluation itself is straightforward. EOD trailing drawdown only. No daily loss limit, which matters a lot if you’ve ever blown an eval at 11am on an otherwise good trading day because you happened to be down $1,200 before a reversal. With SELECT, that scenario doesn’t end your account. Your drawdown only updates at 5 PM ET end of day. Real-time enforcement still applies, but the floor only moves once a day, at close.
The 40% rule during eval will slow you down though. You mathematically need at least 3 trading days because of how the math works. Day 1 you bank $900 on a $50K account (profit target is $3,000). Day 2 you make another $700 (total $1,600, your biggest day is $900 which is 56% of total, so you can’t pass yet). You keep going until that biggest day gets diluted below 40%. For most traders this ends up being 4-6 days depending on how consistent their P&L looks. It’s not brutal, but don’t plan on smoking through it in a session.
Once you pass, you pick SELECT Flex or SELECT Daily. And this choice is permanent for that account, so think it through.
SELECT Flex (5-Day Policy): Request payouts after every 5 winning days (each day must clear a minimum profit threshold: $150 for 50K, $200 for 100K, $250 for 150K). Payout cap is 50% of total profits, capped at $3,000 per request on a 50K account. No consistency rule once funded. No daily loss limit. No minimum balance requirement for payouts. For each cycle after the first, you just need to be net positive since your last payout.
This is the one most community members recommend, and I’d agree. The funded rules are genuinely clean. No daily loss limit means you’re not watching a clock at 2 PM worried about where your intraday drawdown sits.
SELECT Daily: You can request payouts literally every trading day once you build a $2,100 buffer (on a 50K account). Sounds incredible, right? The catch is the 2x multiplier rule. You can only withdraw up to twice the profit you’ve earned since your last payout, capped at $1,000. So if you made $200 since your last payout, you can pull $400. If you made $600, you pull $1,000 (the cap kicks in). You also need to be net positive since your last payout to request.
Real talk: SELECT Daily sounds better than it performs in practice for most traders. The small payout caps mean you’re grinding $400-$800 withdrawals frequently, which is fine if that’s your style. But the buffer requirement plus the 2x multiplier adds friction. Traders on Prop Firm Match specifically mention this gets annoying when you have a big day followed by a few flat ones.
SELECT pricing at full rate: $159/month for 50K, $259/month for 100K, $359/month for 150K. No activation fee after you pass. No ongoing monthly fee for funded accounts.
Growth: The Fast Track Option
Growth evaluation is simpler and cheaper. Pass in as little as 1 trading day since there’s no consistency rule. You just need to hit the profit target ($3,000 for a 50K account) while staying within your daily loss limit (soft breach at $1,250 for 50K) and EOD trailing drawdown.
The “soft breach” part is important. If you hit your daily loss limit, trading stops for that day but your account doesn’t fail. That’s a meaningful safety valve.
Growth starts at $139/month for a 50K account. Cheaper entry point, faster potential funding. The trade-off is the funded account has a 35% consistency rule baked in, which SELECT Flex avoids entirely. Some traders find this manageable. Others hate it. Depends entirely on how lumpy your trading days are.
A few traders on Reddit note that the buffer requirements before Growth payouts are higher than SELECT, and the payout ramp-up tiers move slowly for the first few withdrawals. Not a dealbreaker, but worth knowing if cash flow matters to you in the early weeks.
Lightning Funded: Skip the Eval Entirely
Lightning Funded (formerly called “Straight to Sim”) is exactly what it sounds like. Pay once, skip the challenge, start trading simulated capital and collect payouts immediately. No profit target to hit first.
Pricing starts around $349 for a 25K account, up from there for larger sizes. One-time fee, no recurring subscription.
The consistency rule here is tiered and it changes by payout cycle. For accounts purchased after September 12, 2025: 20% for the first payout, 25% for the second, 30% for the third payout and beyond. That escalating structure is a bit annoying honestly. I understand why they do it (they’re trying to ensure you don’t just nail one massive day and cash out repeatedly), but having the rules tighten on you as you succeed is a weird design choice.
You’re also looking at a stricter path to the Elite Live account tier. After 5 total payouts across all your Tradeify accounts, you become eligible for consideration for live funding. Tradeify reaches out when they select you. Some traders find this ambiguity frustrating since there’s no hard threshold like “4 payouts on this specific account.”
Lightning Funded is genuinely useful for traders who’ve already proven themselves and just want capital without the eval grind. For everyone else, SELECT is probably a better deal mathematically.
The Drawdown Structure (This Part Matters More Than Anything)
EOD trailing drawdown across all plans is Tradeify’s biggest competitive advantage, full stop.
Here’s why it matters in practice. Say you’re trading NQ (the Nasdaq futures, MNQ for micros) and you have a rough morning. Down $600 by noon. In an intraday trailing system like Apex’s or the old Advanced plan at Tradeify, that loss has already tightened your trailing floor. You’d need to climb back AND move forward just to have the same cushion you started with.
With EOD trailing, your floor doesn’t move until 5 PM ET. If you dig that $600 hole and climb back out before the session closes, it’s like it never happened from a drawdown perspective. The floor updates only at close based on your end-of-day balance. That’s an enormous psychological and practical difference for active traders.
One thing to know: the drawdown limit locks permanently once your EOD balance exceeds your drawdown floor by $100. For a 50K account, once your balance clears $52,100 (starting balance $50K, drawdown $2K, plus $100), the floor stops trailing entirely and locks at $50,100 forever. That’s actually a great feature once you’re in positive territory. Your downside stops growing. Some firms trail the drawdown to infinity and it never stops biting.
Payout Speed: This Is Where They Actually Shine
Community feedback on payouts is consistently strong. Traders report same-day processing in many cases, often within a couple of hours of requesting. Weekend payouts happen. Multiple Trustpilot reviews specifically mention being surprised that a weekend request came through Sunday morning.
Payouts process through Rise and Plane. Rise handles most accounts. A handful of traders have reported delays when the Rise verification process hits issues, and Tradeify’s responses on Trustpilot suggest they’ve been on top of following up when this happens. One trader documented a 4-day wait that eventually resolved, which Tradeify responded to directly acknowledging they should have followed up sooner.
That’s about as honest as prop firm support gets.
What Doesn’t Work
The SELECT micro contract bug is a real issue right now. SELECT accounts on Tradovate have a known limitation where the micro position limits are much lower than advertised. A 50K SELECT account should allow 40 micros but is currently capped at 4 due to a platform-side bug. Tradeify acknowledges it and says it’s Tradovate’s problem to fix. That’s probably true, but it doesn’t help you if you built your strategy around scaling MES or MNQ positions.
The practical workaround they recommend is switching to mini contracts when you’d otherwise use 4+ micros. 10 MES contracts cost $18.20 in fees for the same exposure as 1 ES contract at $5.76. That fee drag is real, especially for scalpers who trade size.
SELECT is also Tradovate only. They retired ProjectX in late 2025. NinjaTrader and TradingView work with Growth and Lightning accounts (via Tradovate connection), but not SELECT. For traders with highly customized NinjaTrader setups, this is a legitimate limitation.
Support response times vary. The majority of Trustpilot reviews praise support, but there are recurring reports of 3-5 day ticket wait times during busy periods. One review mentions a Discord moderator being “snarky” when a customer pressed for help. Not a pattern, but worth noting that support quality appears to fluctuate.
The “net positive between payouts” rule on SELECT Flex is annoying. You need to show at least $1 of profit since your last withdrawal to request the next one. In theory, minor. In practice, if you have a draw-down period between payout cycles, you can’t pull anything until you’re back in the green. ImanTrading’s community review called this out pretty directly and they’re right, it’s an arbitrary friction point.
Who Should Use Tradeify
SELECT Flex is the clear recommendation for day traders who trade ES, NQ, CL, or GC and want the least restrictive funded rules without paying Topstep prices. The combination of no daily loss limit, no funded consistency rule, EOD drawdown, and fast payouts is genuinely hard to beat at this price point.
Growth makes sense if you trade very consistently (tight day-to-day variance) and want to get funded faster. The 1-day eval pass potential is real for traders who are on it. Just understand that the funded rules are stricter.
Lightning Funded is solid for traders who are already consistently profitable and just want capital access without an evaluation. The escalating consistency rule is annoying but manageable.
Skip Tradeify if you primarily trade overnight positions or need to hold trades across sessions. The EOD drawdown structure, while friendly intraday, still locks in your floor every evening, which creates a different kind of pressure for multi-day holds. Swing traders generally report more friction here than at firms with static drawdowns in the funded stage.
Bottom Line
Tradeify earned those 2025 awards. The SELECT plan is genuinely well-designed, payout speed is among the best in the industry, and the EOD drawdown structure makes the evaluation process far more survivable than most competitors. It’s not perfect. The micro contract bug is a real issue for some traders, SELECT being limited to Tradovate is a constraint, and the payout rules have some friction points that don’t need to exist.
But if you’re a disciplined day trader who primarily trades ES or NQ and wants funded capital without activation fees and a fair shot at keeping 90% of what you make, Tradeify belongs near the top of your list.
Pricing for SELECT starts at $159/month for a 50K account with no activation fee. Growth is $139/month for the same account size.