Tradeify Level Up Review: The $35K Ladder Explained

Tradeify has released its second Forge drop, Level Up, an $80 challenge with 10 levels and up to $35,000 in gross payouts.

Every level starts on a fresh $50,000 balance with a static drawdown and no daily loss limit, consistency rule or minimum trading days. Pass a level and you move to the next, collecting a fixed payout on 6 of the 10.

The static drawdown makes the early levels genuinely interesting. Levels 1 and 2 ask for $1,500 each with $1,000 of room, a far kinder ratio than Topstep’s Labs Challenges. But the targets grow while the drawdown shrinks, and 71% of the $35,000 headline sits on Levels 9 and 10, where you need to make 5 to 6 times your drawdown after clearing 8 levels first.

In this article I’ll explain how Level Up works, model how likely each level is to be reached, and compare it with Topstep’s $1.5K, $3K and $6K Challenges.

How Tradeify Level Up Works

Level Up costs $80 per attempt, with no activation fee or subscription. Each attempt is one run at the ladder, starting from Level 1.

The payouts in the table are gross. Tradeify pays them at a 90/10 profit split, so Level 2’s $1,000 pays you $900, and the full $35,000 ladder pays you $31,500.

Every level starts on a clean $50,000 balance. Profit does not carry forward, so passing Level 1 at $51,500 still sends you into Level 2 at $50,000.

The rest of the rules are simple:

• Maximum contracts: 2 Minis / 20 Micros on every level.
• Daily loss limit: None.
• Consistency: None.
• Minimum days and time limit: None.
• Passing: You must finish the day above the target, not just touch it intraday.
• Payouts: Gross amounts, paid at 90/10, so Level 2’s $1,000 pays you $900. Every payout goes through admin review.
• Restrictions: Microscalping and hedging rules still apply.
• Platform: Tradovate only, with KYC required before purchase.

If you fail Level 3 or Level 5, you can pay $150 or $299 respectively to restart that level instead of losing the run. Each checkpoint can be used once per run, and only within 30 days of purchase.

Fail anywhere else and the run ends. You get 5 lifetime attempts, can only run 1 at a time, and coupons can’t be used. Level Up doesn’t use one of your funded account slots. Full details are on the Tradeify Forge page.

The Static Drawdown Is The Interesting Part

Level 1 fails at $49,000, and that floor never moves. Every dollar of profit adds to your room.

Say you reach $51,000 and then give back $1,500. On a static floor you are still alive at $49,500, with $1,000 left to recover the $1,500 you need. On an end-of-day trailing drawdown, a close at $51,000 would have lifted the floor to $50,000, and that same pullback would have ended the level.

That is unusually forgiving for a $1,500 target. With no daily loss limit and no consistency rule, there is also nothing stopping you from taking a single large position, or recovering a bad morning with a strong afternoon.

The 2-Mini limit matters too. On Levels 1 and 2, $1,000 of drawdown with 2 E-mini S&P 500 contracts gives you a 10-point stop, which is tight but workable. On Levels 9 and 10, the same $1,000 has to produce $5,000 and $6,000, which is 50 and 60 points at full size without ever giving back more than 10 from the start.

One detail works against you. A level only passes if you finish the day above the target, while the floor is enforced in real time. A strong intraday run that fades before the close doesn’t count. Our prop firm drawdown guide explains how static and trailing limits compare in more detail.

The Later Levels Are Mostly Marketing

The $35,000 headline depends almost entirely on 2 levels: $25,000 of it comes from Levels 9 and 10. To get there, you have to clear 8 levels in a row, and then make 5 and 6 times your drawdown on the last 2.

To show how steep that is, I modelled a trader with no edge: someone whose results are a coin flip, so their chance of passing a level depends only on the size of the target relative to the drawdown. On a static floor, that chance is the drawdown divided by the drawdown plus the target. Level 1 is $1,000 ÷ $2,500, or 40%.

This is a baseline, not a prediction. Skilled traders will do better, and real traders paying commissions and slippage will usually do worse. But it shows how quickly the ladder narrows.

For this trader, roughly 1 attempt in 6 reaches the first payout. Fewer than 1 in 45,000 reaches Level 9, and around 1 in 320,000 completes the ladder.

Weight each payout by its chance of being reached and the picture becomes clearer still. Level 2’s $1,000 accounts for 77% of the expected payout of a run. Levels 9 and 10, which make up 71% of the headline figure, account for 0.13%.

A better trader shifts these numbers, but not the shape. Even someone who passes half of every level they attempt, which would be exceptional at the later targets, has only a 1 in 1,024 chance of completing all 10. With 5 lifetime attempts, a full ladder isn’t a realistic goal for almost anyone.

I think the “up to $35,000 in just one day” headline is also misleading in practice. A level passes when you end the day above its target, and the next level then has to be activated before you can trade it. Reading Tradeify’s own FAQ, I can’t see a way to clear 10 levels in 1 day, so the claim appears to describe the timing of the final payout rather than how quickly you can earn the full amount.

The checkpoints help a little. A $150 restart at Level 3 and a $299 restart at Level 5 give you a second chance on 2 of the levels. But they add cost exactly where the odds are already falling, and they must be used within 30 days of purchase.

Level Up vs The Topstep Labs Challenges

Level Up looks to me like Tradeify’s answer to Topstep’s Labs Challenges: pass a static-drawdown target twice, collect a fixed payout. The difference is that Level Up’s first payout comes from much easier targets, while Topstep pays far more for clearing far harder ones.

The last row uses the same coin-flip model as above, after Level Up’s 90/10 split. Topstep’s Challenges pay the full amount.

Level Up gives you around 2.5 times the chance of reaching a first payout, and twice the contract size of Topstep’s $3K and $6K Challenges. But the payout is so much smaller that, for the same money, I’d expect the original $3K Challenge to return more than twice as much on average. Even carrying on up the ladder only lifts Level Up’s expected return to about $2.34 per dollar, still behind all 3 Topstep versions.

Where Level Up does win is accessibility. A 1.5:1 ratio is something an ordinary trader can realistically hit twice, while 3:1 twice in a row is the kind of target I described in my Topstep $6K Challenge review as a low-probability shot. If you want a decent chance of being paid something, Level Up is the better product. If you want the best return on the fee, it isn’t.

Attempts, Limits and Restrictions

Level Up is a limited release. Once it sells out, any attempts you haven’t bought are gone, and unused attempts can’t be purchased later.

Each trader gets 5 lifetime attempts, whether they pass, fail or are abandoned. Only 1 run can be active at a time, and a checkpoint restart doesn’t use up an attempt.

There is no time limit on a level, but checkpoint restarts must be used within 30 days of purchase. KYC is required before you can buy, coupons are not accepted on the attempt or the checkpoint fees, and the plan runs on Tradovate only.

Is Tradeify Level Up Worth It?

I think Level Up is worth buying only if you judge it on its first 2 levels. Treat it as an $80 attempt at a $900 payout, with a static drawdown and a 1.5:1 target twice, and it is one of the more achievable fixed-payout products on the market.

The static floor, no daily loss limit and no consistency rule make Levels 1 and 2 genuinely friendly. Two Minis also give you enough size to reach $1,500 without needing a perfect day.

But the $35,000 figure is not a realistic part of the value. The targets roughly quadruple from Level 1 to Level 10 while the drawdown ends where it started, so the ladder gets harder exactly as the rewards get bigger. In my model, Levels 9 and 10 contribute less than 1% of what an attempt is actually worth.

On pure return per dollar, the Topstep Challenges were better. Level Up’s advantage is a much higher chance of being paid something, at the cost of being paid less.

Conclusion

Tradeify Level Up is a good first-payout product wrapped in a jackpot it is very unlikely to pay. Buy it for Levels 1 and 2, where the static drawdown does real work. Treat everything after Level 4 as a bonus rather than a reason to buy.

Also, don’t waste attempts. You only get 5 for life, so a run thrown away chasing $1,500 in a single oversized trade costs you more than the $80 fee. With no time limit and a floor that never moves, patience is the edge this product rewards.

For Tradeify’s other Forge drops and the latest prop firm launches, keep an eye on our prop firm news section.

Thanks for reading, for more prop firm content check out The Prop Journalist on YouTube and read more prop firm reviews here.