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I failed my first prop challenge, reset twice, and passed on the fourth attempt. I added up the costs.

• Initial challenge: 250 dollars.
• Two resets at a discount: 200 each.
• Fourth attempt, which I passed: 250.

Total 900 dollars. The firm refunded the fee of the passing attempt with the first payout, so 650 net.

First payout was 1,100 dollars. So I'm ahead, but much less than it seems.

The more useful lesson: all three failures were the same mistake, hitting the daily limit after a bad morning. A rule that I stop after two losses would have saved most of the fees. I added that rule only after the third failure.

Does anyone track their challenge costs against payouts over time?

I started tracking this after my second failed challenge and I am glad I did, because the running total kept me honest. My tally was five attempts over about fourteen months, including one I failed on the last day by breaking the consistency rule rather than any loss limit. Fees came to a little over a thousand dollars before I saw a single payout.

Like you, the failures had one cause in common, but mine was the opposite of yours. I kept passing the daily limit fine and then trading too small in the second half of the challenge, running out of time and paying for an extension. Once I worked out the average daily gain I actually needed and sized for that from day one, I passed on the next attempt.

The thing I would add to your list is the cost of time. I spent roughly six weeks per attempt, and during those weeks I was not building my own account. Putting even a rough hourly value on that made me much more careful before clicking reset.