Martin Najat
Most founders compare a salary against an invoice. That is the wrong comparison, and it is why the decision usually gets made on a feeling rather than a model.
The real comparison is total coverage cost against the invoice. Coverage means the hours that have to be staffed, the tools those people need, the management time they consume, and the risk your firm carries while they learn. Price all four and outsourced prop firm operations and an in-house desk become comparable numbers rather than two different kinds of claim.
This post gives you the model rather than a price list, because labour costs differ by an order of magnitude between markets. Below is every cost line on both sides, what moves each one, and the questions that tell you which option fits your firm. If you are earlier than this decision, the full launch sequence for prop firm founders covers where operations cover sits in the order of work.
Coverage, not headcount, is what you are buying
A prop firm’s operational load is defined in hours, not people. The forex week runs from Sunday evening to Friday evening, your traders sit across time zones, and payout requests, rule questions and disputes arrive when they arrive, not inside your office day.
Build the model in that order: functions, then hours, then shifts, then people. Five functions need cover from your first funded trader.
- Risk monitoring, across the trading week
- Trader support, on your traders’ hours rather than yours
- Payout processing, on the schedule you published
- KYC and onboarding review, at the speed marketing delivers buyers
- Dispute ownership, with one named person who can decide
Write down the hours each genuinely needs. Some need the whole trading week, some a daily window. Dispute ownership needs authority rather than hours, which is why founders keep it and why it quietly eats their week.
Now the shape, which is our recommendation from running this work rather than a figure from an industry survey. The floor is two people: one back office, one front line support. It becomes three when you want extended cover through the day, and the person you add is a second front line support, not a second back office hire.
That asymmetry is the useful part. Back office work is withdrawal validation, KYC review, reconciliation and dispute paperwork. It stays one person’s job for a long time, because splitting it is how firms end up giving traders two different answers. Front line support is what you duplicate to buy hours, since it is the function traders touch and the queue that grows with volume. Hours are bought at the front line. Judgement is concentrated in the back office.
Then do the arithmetic yourself, because no vendor can do it for you. Add up the hours you need covered, divide by the hours one person can actually work, then add cover for holiday, sickness and handover, since a rota with no slack breaks the first time somebody is ill.
Two things constrain that division. If you employ inside the EU, Directive 2003/88/EC entitles every worker to 11 consecutive hours of daily rest in each 24 hour period and 24 hours of uninterrupted weekly rest, and caps average weekly working time at 48 hours. National implementations vary, so check where you employ. The second is simpler: nobody works seven days, so one full time person never covers a function across a full trading week.
Which is why two or three is a functional floor rather than a staffing plan. It tells you which jobs exist, not that they are covered every week of the year. Closing that gap is where the options diverge: hiring means another person or gaps you have decided to accept, buying means the cover is contractually somebody else’s problem.
What an in-house desk costs, line by line
Salary is the line everyone counts, and it is rarely the largest part of the total.
Employer taxes and benefits sit on top of every salary and are not negotiable. Recruitment costs money and time: agency or advertising fees, your screening hours, and the weeks the seat sits empty. Every person needs licences in every tool they touch, and if you are office based, workspace, machines and connectivity.
Then the lines founders find late.
Training to competence is the big one. Competence here is not knowing the software, it is knowing what a hedged pair looks like across two accounts, when a payout should be held, and how to word a rule explanation a trader will accept. That takes months, and you pay salary throughout.
Management and supervision is the line almost every model prices at zero. It is usually the founder’s time, the most valuable time in the business, and it does not stop after onboarding: reviewing decisions, settling escalations and correcting drift is permanent work. Holiday and sickness cover is the other unpriced line, and why a single hire per function does not survive contact with a calendar.
One more, and it is the quiet one. A leaver takes undocumented process with them.
What an outsourced desk costs, including what vendors leave out
Pricing starts as a per agent or per seat fee, billed monthly, and if a vendor cannot say what a seat includes and excludes, that is the answer to a different question.
One figure of ours belongs in your model: Trade Guard sits under 1,000 US dollars per agent per month. That is a ceiling we hold ourselves to, not a price, and not a market rate for outsourced operations in general. Exact per agent pricing is still quoted against your own coverage requirement, because the requirement is what sets it, so ask for it against the rota you built above rather than a headcount you guessed, and make every vendor price that same rota.
That ceiling gives the comparison one fixed side. Price the floor from earlier in your own market, one back office and one front line support, with employer taxes, tooling and absence cover included, then set it against the same number of agents at that ceiling. We are not computing the example, because an honest one needs your local salary figures and ours would be wrong for most readers.
Everything else worth verifying before you sign is in our buyer’s checklist for white label software.
Ask about onboarding and training too. Somebody has to teach an external team your rulebook, your payout policy and your tone, and vendors handle it differently: bundled, charged once, or charged per change. Ask which, and what happens when you change a rule.
Then the lines vendors do not volunteer. Your own time briefing and reviewing the desk never reaches nothing, because escalations come back to you by design and somebody on your side has to own the decisions the desk is not authorised to make. Process documentation is required either way, and a good vendor makes you write it before they start, which feels like an imposition and is the most valuable thing they do in month one. Add the switching cost if it does not work: notice, handover, and re-documenting whatever lived in their heads.
The downsides deserve saying plainly, because a vendor pretending they do not exist tells you how the relationship will go. A third party sits one step further from your traders than your own staff. Your brand voice has to be taught and then audited, or support starts sounding like a call centre. And you depend on somebody else’s staffing decisions, which is a transfer of control rather than a technicality. In exchange you get coverage that already exists, process debugged on other firms, and a cost you can change next quarter. What a managed operational desk covers is what to compare, function by function.
How to cost outsourced prop firm operations against a hire
Every cell below describes the nature of a cost and what moves it, not an amount. Fill the amounts in for your own market and your own coverage hours, because those two variables swing the result more than anything either side of this table can offer you.
| Cost line | In-house | Outsourced | What drives it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base cost | Salary per person, per shift covered | Per agent per month, quoted on enquiry, under 1,000 US dollars with us | Local labour market, coverage hours required |
| Employer taxes and benefits | On top of every salary, statutory | Inside the vendor fee | Jurisdiction of employment |
| Recruitment | Advertising or agency, screening time, weeks unfilled | Usually none | How specialised the role, depth of your pool |
| Onboarding and training | Months to competence, salary paid throughout | Bundled, once, or per change. Ask which | How unusual your rulebook and payout policy are |
| Tooling, licences and equipment | Per seat, plus desk, machine and connectivity | Mostly theirs. Verify which seats you still pay | Seats and systems per function |
| Management, supervision and escalation | Founder or ops lead time, priced at zero, and escalations land there | Lower, never nothing. Briefing, review, a defined path back | Process maturity, how much is written down |
| Absence and out of hours cover | Shift premium, rota slack, or gaps you accept | Contractually theirs, priced into the cover you buy | Coverage hours, where your traders are |
| Process documentation | Needed, usually skipped until a leaver forces it | Needed, and demanded up front | Complexity of your rules and payout workflow |
| Brand voice and control | Native to your staff, every decision yours | Taught then audited, their staffing is theirs | How much of your brand lives in support |
| Getting it wrong | Quiet damage, a managed exit, then a rehire | Change agents, or give notice | Supervision quality, portability of your process |
Which side of the line your firm is on
Outsourcing tends to win while volume is low and unpredictable, and while you are still learning what your own processes should be. It converts a fixed cost into a variable one and buys process somebody else has debugged. Hiring tends to win once volume is high and steady, the process is written down, and the firm can absorb absence without a gap.
The threshold is different for every firm, so answer these instead of looking for a number.
- Is your ticket and payout volume steady enough to roster against, or does it move with every campaign
- Are your processes written down well enough for a new person to follow without asking you
- Could you absorb one person being ill during a payout window, today, without the founder covering it
- If this decision turned out wrong in three months, which version could you reverse
That last question is usually the most useful one to sit with.
Cost is not the deciding factor, risk is
The costing model tells you what each option consumes. It does not tell you which to choose, because the deciding factor sits elsewhere.
Withdrawal validation, dispute handling and fraud review are exercised on your traders in public. They are also where a weak hire fails quietly: the queue keeps moving, tickets keep closing, and the damage lands on your traders before your dispute log. The argument about the hire that quietly breaks a firm is why we recommend never staffing those three on a guess.
The same applies to detection work. Reading a flag, deciding whether it holds and defending that to a trader waiting on money takes trained judgement, and it is where continuous cross account fraud detection becomes a decision or becomes a queue nobody actions. Tooling does not fix an unqualified reviewer.
So the honest claim for buying a desk is not that it is cheaper. Sometimes it is, often not, and your arithmetic will tell you which. The claim is that it is lower risk early: the training is done, the coverage exists, and the decision is reversible with notice rather than redundancy.
When hiring in-house is the right answer
Hire if operations quality is your differentiator. If traders choose you for how your support answers, how fast a payout clears and how a dispute gets handled, that capability belongs inside the company, never in somebody else’s staffing decision.
Hire if you are large and steady. Predictable volume, a written process and enough people for a rota removes most of what makes outsourcing attractive, and at that size the per seat maths usually turns against a vendor.
Hire if the labour where you are is affordable and available, with people who already understand trading operations, or if your model is unusual enough that no external desk has seen it before. A vendor’s value is pattern recognition across many firms, so with no precedent you are paying for training rather than experience.
What to do with this
Build the coverage table for your own firm this week: functions down the side, hours across the top, then the shifts those hours imply. Take it to two vendors and price both against that rota rather than each other’s marketing.
If you want the outsourced column priced against your rota, book a scoping call and bring your coverage hours and your rulebook. The firms that get this decision right are the ones who priced coverage rather than headcount, whichever way they ended up going.
