Tradeify Review (2026)

What is Tradeify?

Tradeify is a US futures proprietary trading firm operated by Tradeify Holdings, Corp., based in Boca Raton, Florida. It was founded by CEO Brett Simberkoff, known online as “Brett Simba,” who previously ran Simba Stocks LLC (an A+ BBB business), alongside co-founder and COO Vinan “Vinny” Mistry. A precise founding date is genuinely hard to pin down. There is an inactive 2021 Florida foreign-corporation filing, a UK entity incorporated in January 2024 and dissolved a year later, and a Tradeify Funding LLC filing from October 2024. The honest framing is that Tradeify rose to prominence through 2024 and 2025 rather than tracing to one clean founding year.

The core product is an evaluation. You pay a one-time fee, trade a simulated account against live CME market data, hit a profit target without breaching the drawdown floor, and then trade a funded account. Crucially, “funded” here means a simulated account through the evaluation and Sim Funded stages. Only the separate Elite Live tier, unlocked after five cumulative approved payouts, places real CME capital through NinjaTrader and GFF Brokers. That is standard for the modern prop model, but traders should understand they are buying a paid skill test with a payout pipeline, not a brokerage account.

In March 2026 the firm rolled out “Tradeify 3.0,” which moved everything to one-time fees with no monthly subscription and no activation fee. The current lineup is Growth (one-phase evaluation), Select (one-phase evaluation), and Lightning Funded (instant, no evaluation). The older Advanced account, which used a harsher real-time intraday trailing drawdown, was discontinued for new purchases in December 2025.

Our verdict

Tradeify earns a cautiously positive score. The combination of cheap one-time entry fees, an end-of-day trailing drawdown that is more forgiving than an intraday high-water-mark trail, fast payouts via Rise, and a large, broadly positive review base puts it ahead of much of the futures-prop pack. The reasons it does not score higher are concrete: the payout total is self-reported with no independent audit, the fees are strictly non-refundable, enforcement of hedging and chargeback rules is aggressive, and there are real complaint clusters around KYC lockouts and retroactive country bans. Add heavy dependence on third-party platforms that have suffered repeated outages, and the simulated-capital reality, and you have a strong firm that still demands a careful read of the rules before you pay.

We assess Tradeify from its own Funded Trader Agreement and site, a GlobeNewswire press release, StatusGator outage tracking, Florida business filings, and aggregated trader reports. We have not purchased an evaluation or traded an account.

Key features & specs

The table below maps the three current account families across the four standard sizes. Read it as a cost-versus-difficulty grid rather than a list of headline account values. The key columns are the one-time fee, the profit target, and the drawdown floor, because those three decide how hard the test is and how much you risk to attempt it. Growth and Select share identical profit targets at each size; the difference is the consistency rule and the daily loss limit. Lightning Funded skips the evaluation entirely at a much higher upfront price.

Pricing & value

On raw entry cost, Tradeify is competitive. A Growth $50K evaluation runs $145 one-time, the $100K is $255, and the $150K is $369. Select sizes are a touch higher ($165, $265, and $369 respectively). These are one-time fees with no monthly subscription and no activation fee, which is a genuine advantage over subscription-model firms where the cost compounds every month you stay in the evaluation. Lightning Funded is the premium path, skipping the test at $345 for the $25K up to $796 for the $150K, and you pay for the convenience of instant funding.

The catch is that every dollar is non-refundable. Section 7.1 of the Funded Trader Agreement is unambiguous: all fees paid for evaluation programs, subscriptions, or any other services are strictly non-refundable. Many prop firms refund the evaluation fee with your first payout. Tradeify does not. That changes the real cost-to-funded math, because your true cost is the evaluation fee plus in-account commissions, which run roughly $5.76 round-turn on e-mini index futures and about $1.82 on micros, with no fee rebate at the finish line. Against that, the split is strong: Growth and Lightning Funded let you keep 100% of the first $15,000 in cumulative payouts before moving to a 90/10 split in your favour, while Select pays 90/10 from the first dollar. The value proposition is good on entry cost and split but weaker on refundability.

Legitimacy & payout safety

This is the section that should decide your purchase, so we will be precise. The prop evaluation program is not a regulated brokerage relationship, and Tradeify says so plainly. The Funded Trader Agreement states the company does not hold a broker-dealer license and does not provide brokerage services, and that Elite Live accounts are facilitated by NinjaTrader and GFF Brokers, which are third-party regulated brokerages. Separately, the firm launched a retail brokerage, Slay Markets (Tradeify Brokerage LLC), on 19 May 2026, which it describes as a CFTC-registered Introducing Broker and NFA member with NinjaTrader Clearing as FCM, per a GlobeNewswire press release. We could not independently load NFA BASIC to confirm a specific NFA ID, so we treat that registration as the firm's own disclosure, and we stress that the brokerage is a distinct product from the prop program. The evaluation you buy is not itself a regulated financial product.

It is just as important to be clear about what “funded” means here. Through the evaluation and Sim Funded stages you trade simulated capital on live market data, and only the separate Elite Live tier places real CME capital. The Funded Trader Agreement leaves no doubt about who owns the money:

On the payout record, the homepage advertises “Over $200 million verified payouts,” and the underlying counter reads roughly $197.9 million across about 80,867 transactions. We publish this as self-reported, because there is no independent audit and no public ledger behind the figure. Prop Firm Match handed Tradeify 2025 awards for Highest Rated and Best Payout Process, but that is a commercial affiliate aggregator, so we treat it as marketing corroboration, not verification. What does carry weight is the volume and consistency of user reports describing genuinely fast payouts, often within minutes to an hour via Rise. The balance of evidence is that Tradeify pays, and pays quickly, even though the precise total is unaudited.

The drawdown definition is the load-bearing rule, and here Tradeify earns real credit. All current accounts use an end-of-day trailing drawdown. The floor trails the highest end-of-day closing balance, updates once per day at the close, and does not move intraday. That is meaningfully friendlier than an intraday high-water-mark trail, because an open profit you give back during the same session does not ratchet the floor up against you. It is still enforced in real time, so if live equity touches the floor during the session the account fails immediately. The floor then locks once your end-of-day balance exceeds the starting balance plus the max drawdown plus $100. To be exact, on a $50K account with a $2,000 drawdown that trigger is $52,100, and after it locks the floor sits at $50,100, which is $100 above the starting balance, and never moves again. Treat the published per-size drawdown figures as confirm-at-purchase, since the Help Center tables were unreachable and some third-party numbers conflict.

Finally, platform and sector risk. Tradeify leans heavily on third-party platforms. StatusGator has tracked more than 1,238 NinjaTrader-connection outages since November 2024, including a multi-week outage in 2026. Those are NinjaTrader infrastructure problems rather than Tradeify-specific failures, but they still hit Tradeify traders. On the other side of the ledger, Tradeify was not among the roughly 80 to 100 MetaTrader-dependent prop firms that collapsed in 2024 and 2025, because it is futures-only and was never on MT4 or MT5, and we found no CFTC action, regulator warning, or NFA disciplinary proceeding naming the firm.

What traders say

The community picture is broadly favourable but not uncomplicated. A third party reporting Trustpilot data puts Tradeify at roughly 4.6 out of 5 from more than 2,700 reviews, with about 88 percent five-star and roughly 7.4 percent one-star. We could not read Trustpilot directly, so we attribute that as reported. Read it with the usual caution: prop-firm review bases skew heavily toward satisfied payout recipients, and some payout reviews across the sector are incentivised, so a high average deserves a grain of salt. The recurring positives are consistent, though: very fast payouts via Rise, dashboard transparency, and responsive named support agents.

The negatives matter more for a buying decision. Reported complaints cluster around KYC and Rise verification failures with no resubmission path and no refund, payout approvals that then stall or reverse, and hedging-violation hard terminations with no warning, including a widely-cited but disputed account involving an 11-second violation, five terminated accounts, and roughly $88,000 claimed lost, which we present as a reported, disputed complaint rather than verified fact. The pattern we would weigh most heavily is retroactive country-restriction bans: traders accepted and charged, then locked out with no refund when their country is later added to a restricted list, as the Malaysia and Morocco cases describe.

Pros & cons

The strengths and weaknesses below trace to the evidence above: cheap one-time entry and a forgiving end-of-day trailing drawdown on one side, strictly non-refundable fees and aggressive enforcement on the other.

Tradeify vs alternatives

Against the broader futures-prop field, Tradeify's clearest edge is its end-of-day trailing drawdown paired with one-time fees. Firms that use intraday high-water-mark trailing make it easier to fail an account on an open-profit giveback, and subscription firms keep charging you monthly while you grind toward funding. Tradeify avoids both traps, and its 90/10 split with a 100 percent runway on the first $15,000 of Growth payouts is at or above what most rivals offer.

Where Tradeify trails some competitors is refundability and enforcement posture. Several peers refund the evaluation fee on first payout, which Tradeify never does, and Tradeify's hedging and chargeback rules carry hard, immediate consequences that some traders find unforgiving. On payout proof, Tradeify is in the same boat as most of the sector: a big self-reported number without a public, audited ledger. So the choice often comes down to whether the friendlier drawdown and fast Rise payouts outweigh the non-refundable fee and the documented country-ban and KYC-lockout risk.

How Tradeify compares to the next tools in our prop firms ranking:

In short: FundingPips edges ahead of Tradeify in the overall ranking, but disciplined intraday futures traders who want one-time fees and a forgiving EOD-trailing drawdown is where Tradeify makes its strongest case.

Who is Tradeify for?

Use Tradeify if…

Use Tradeify if you trade futures, want a one-time fee rather than a monthly subscription, and value a drawdown rule that does not punish intraday give-back. It suits disciplined intraday traders who close positions before 4:59 PM ET, do not rely on hedging or copy trading, and want fast payouts through Rise. The 100 percent runway on Growth payouts rewards traders who reach the funded stage and keep performing.

Skip it if…

Skip it if you need a regulated brokerage relationship, want your evaluation fee refunded on first payout, or trade in or near a jurisdiction that could be added to a restricted list, since retroactive country bans with no refund are a documented complaint. Hedgers, copy traders, HFT-bot users, and anyone who might dispute a charge should look elsewhere, because those behaviours trigger immediate, permanent enforcement.

Final verdict

Tradeify is a comparatively strong, genuinely-paying futures prop firm with a trader-friendlier end-of-day trailing drawdown, cheap one-time entry, a healthy split, and thousands of positive reviews. That earns it a cautiously positive score. The tempering factors are real and should shape your expectations: the payout total is self-reported rather than audited, every fee is strictly non-refundable, hedging and chargeback enforcement is aggressive, there are genuine complaint clusters around KYC lockouts and retroactive country bans, the firm leans on third-party platforms that have suffered repeated outages, and most of the capital is simulated. Buy the challenge for the fast payouts and the forgiving drawdown, but read the Funded Trader Agreement first, and do not commit money you cannot afford to lose to a non-refundable fee. We score Tradeify 7.3 out of 10.

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