Key terms, as the firm publishes them

• Entry fee: $1,500 (Sailor) to $34,500 (Whale), one-time — published only in section 8.1 of the User Agreement, not on the pricing page.
• Account sizes: $45,000, $90,000, $180,000, $360,000, $720,000 and $1,035,000 in notional risk capital (User Agreement 8.1).
• Profit split: 70% at Sailor, rising to 90% at Kraken. The conditions page shows only the three middle tiers, at 75%, 80% and 85%.
• Profit target: none published, at any tier, on any page.
• Maximum drawdown: static, and fixed in dollars — $2,000 on a $45,000 account, $46,000 on a $1,035,000 account. That is 4.44% of account size at every tier (User Agreement 8.1).
• Daily loss limit: none published. Section 5.10 sets a limit “as a percentage of the Account Size, defined in the available Packages” — but the packages state dollars, not percentages.
• Payout frequency: requests accepted in the first 10 days of each month against the previous month’s realised profit, processed within one business day, minimum $500, capped at 10% of account size per month (User Agreement 7.1–7.4).
• Minimum trading days: the conditions page says “No minimum activity requirements”; section 7.4.1 requires “a minimum number of trades to be executed per account before a payout can be requested”. The number is not stated.

The 31.01% that does not add up

Three tiles sit across the Ufunded homepage: Users 10,000, Payouts 1,000, Payout Ratio 31.01%. Almost no firm volunteers a figure like the third, and its precision — two decimals against two conspicuously round neighbours — invites the reader to treat it as audited.

It does not survive the arithmetic. One thousand payouts from ten thousand users is 10%. To reach 31.01%, one of those two numbers has to be something other than what its label says.

The firm’s own regulatory page widens the gap rather than closing it. Its transparency report gives four quarters of 2025: 4,509, 5,690, 7,483 and 5,632 candidates introduced; 1,801, 1,702, 1,999 and 1,512 accepted; and 214, 290, 459 and 653 payouts made. Those figures check out internally — 653 of 665 requested in Q4 is the 98.2% approval rate claimed, and 1,801 of 4,509 is the stated 39.9% admission rate. That makes the headline tile harder to explain, not easier. Sum the quarters and 1,616 payouts were made in 2025 alone, against a homepage headline of 1,000.

Run the ratio every way the published data allows: accepted over introduced is 30.09%, payouts made over accepted 23.04%, payouts made over introduced 6.93%. None is 31.01%.

One reading fits better than the rest. The closest match is the admission rate, at 30.09% for 2025, which would plausibly reach 31.01% once the 2024 and 2023 quarters the page withholds are folded in. If so, the tile labelled “Payout Ratio” measures who gets let in, not who gets paid. That is a hypothesis, not a finding — the firm defines the term nowhere. What can be stated plainly is that 31.01% is not the share of Ufunded users who have received money.

Payouts: what is published, and what is not

The payout terms are specific, and mostly in the trader’s favour. There is no payout fee. Requests open on the first of the month and close on the tenth, against the previous month’s realised profit, and processing takes one business day. The minimum is $500 and the ceiling 10% of account size a month, so a $360,000 account draws up to $36,000 and rolls the surplus forward.

The homepage goes further, in terms most firms avoid committing to in writing.

“We run payouts through our algorithmic engine the moment you submit the request – no discretion, no manual queues. A deterministic ruleset validates your activity against the exact parameters in your agreement, so every decision is objective, reproducible, and immune to ‘case-by-case’ handling.”

— Ufunded, homepage, retrieved 20 September 2026

What we could not verify: the 31.01% ratio or its basis; the 10,000 users and 1,000 payouts, neither appearing in any supporting document; the 2024 and 2023 transparency figures, marked “available upon request”; the auditor behind the “Audited Financial Statements” the regulatory page claims; and the minimum trade count the agreement mandates without quantifying. Individual trader reports were not retrievable — Trustpilot blocked automated access — so the aggregate below is cited without the underlying review text.

The Trustpilot profile carried 1,528 reviews at a TrustScore of 4.4 when checked on 20 September 2026: 1,210 five-star, 189 four-star, 29 three-star, 13 two-star and 87 one-star. The profile is registered in the United Arab Emirates, not in the jurisdiction of the contracting entity.

The rules that actually cost traders money

The fee is the rule. On every tier, the entry fee is 3.33% of account size and the maximum drawdown is 4.44% — which means the fee is exactly 75% of the loss buffer it buys. A Sailor trader pays $1,500 for $2,000 of room. The agreement says so outright in section 3.11: “The Maximum Drawdown is higher than the Purchase Price of the Account. Thus, you are able to lose more than the cost of your Purchase.” True, but barely. Breach it and section 8.3 closes the account; a repurchase or revival is discretionary.

Three of the conditions page’s selling points are narrower in the contract. “No minimum activity” meets the mandated trade count at 7.4.1, with profits from a single large trade excluded. “No news restrictions” meets 5.6, which allows news trading “except for certain restricted events, which may be limited at the discretion of Ufunded.com”. “No spread mark-up” is true of equities only — 5.3 sets a 1 pip spread on forex and metals. And the $0.007 per share commission carries a $1.25 per execution floor under 5.4 that the conditions page omits; on small orders, that floor is the real cost.

Section 11 voids payouts for exploiting pricing errors, opposing positions, multiple accounts and any use of “software, artificial intelligence, ultra-high-speed trading, or mass data entry techniques”. Section 4.10 says the restricted-jurisdiction list is “listed on our Website”; we could not find such a page, and the obvious paths return 404.

How the loss buffer compares

Measure	Ufunded (Sailor)	Topstep ($50K Combine)	FTMO ($100,000 Challenge)
Account size	$45,000	$50,000	$100,000
Loss buffer	$2,000	$2,000	$10,000
Buffer as % of account	4.44%	4.0%	10%
Drawdown type	Static	Trailing, locks at start balance	Trailing, end of day
Daily loss limit	Not published	None — loss limit only	$3,000 (3%)
Profit target	None published	Target plus best day under 55% of it	$10,000 (10%)
Route to live-funded capital	None — simulated throughout	Live Funded Account, TopstepFunded LLC	None — simulated

Sources: Ufunded User Agreement 8.1; Topstep maximum loss limit; FTMO trading objectives. Criteria: published loss buffer, published daily limit, published target, and whether a trader can reach live capital. Ufunded’s static buffer is genuinely simpler than a trailing limit and the absence of a profit target is a real advantage — but it publishes the least about what stops an account.

Regulatory posture, and who you are contracting with

The contracting entity is Ufunded LLC, registered at Arthur L. Evelyn Building, Suite 5, Main Street, Charlestown, Nevis, West Indies, registration number L23321, organised under the Nevis Limited Liability Company Ordinance CAP. 7.04. It is not regulated, and it says so:

“Consequently, the User is not participating in any real financial transactions, nor is Ufunded.com involved in the offering or trading of securities, including security-based swaps, commodities, foreign exchange currencies, metals, or any other financial instruments. According to the above, the Company does not fall under the purview of the SEC, CFTC, or any similar financial regulator.”

— Ufunded User Agreement, section 4.7

Accounts are simulated throughout: no order reaches an exchange, fills are internal against CBOE quotes, and there is no live-funded stage at any tier.

Ownership is disclosed, unusually, by the parent. The “Backed by” logo resolves to Cypher, which states: “Companies we own … are Ufunded.com and Campus.Fund.” Cypher identifies itself as Cypher LLC, Nevis, and describes an ecosystem “where human traders (users) function as indicators, ultimately defining our edge” — matching Ufunded’s sections 4.2 and 12.1–12.3, under which trading data is monetised by the company and third parties with the user “not entitled to any remuneration”. Cypher’s homepage still carries “LOREM IPSUM DOLOR” placeholder text.

The invitation framing deserves the same scrutiny. Section 4.3 is blunt: “The platform is invite-only through selected affiliates, referred to as partners.” Both sites load a Post Affiliate Pro tracker. The gate is a referral funnel described as selectivity — the pattern we found at 18th Street Trading.

The ufunded.io question

A near-identical site runs at ufunded.io, and the two are one business. Both footers name Ufunded LLC of St Kitts and Nevis in byte-identical risk warnings; both resolve through the same pair of Cloudflare nameservers; both are built from the same Framer project, down to matching internal element identifiers; both link the same parent. The .io page references app.ufunded.com and status.ufunded.com alongside its own subdomain. They are not twins by age: ufunded.com was registered in 2011 and updated in July 2026, while ufunded.io was created on 24 July 2025.

The difference is the shop window and the paperwork. The .com fronts US equities, quoting NVDA, META, AAPL and AMZN; the .io fronts gold, EUR/USD and index products. More seriously, the .io has no user agreement at all: its footer link labelled “User Agreement” points to the privacy policy, and /faq and /user-stories return 404. A trader invited through ufunded.io is asked for $1,500 to $34,500 by a site that does not carry the contract binding them, and neither site canonicalises to the other. It is a different fault from Fidelcrest, where payee and funder diverge, but it lands in the same place: read the agreement on ufunded.com before paying anyone.

FAQ

What does Ufunded’s 31.01% payout ratio mean?
Nothing the firm defines. It appears only on the homepage of both sites, and not on the conditions page, the regulatory page, the FAQ or the User Agreement. It is not 1,000 divided by 10,000, and matches no combination of the quarterly figures published on the regulatory page.

How much does a Ufunded account cost?
Between $1,500 and $34,500, one-time, depending on tier — figures that sit in section 8.1 of the User Agreement rather than on the pricing page. The fee is 3.33% of account size at every tier, and equals 75% of that tier’s maximum drawdown. Section 7.6 makes it non-refundable once credentials are released.

Is Ufunded regulated, and is the money real?
It is not regulated: section 4.7 states the company does not fall under the purview of the SEC, CFTC or any similar regulator. Accounts are simulated at every tier, no order reaches an exchange, and there is no live-funded stage. Payouts are real money; the balances generating them are not.

Are ufunded.com and ufunded.io the same company?
Yes. Both name Ufunded LLC of Nevis, share Cloudflare nameservers and Framer build artefacts, and link the same parent. The .io site carries no user agreement, so the binding terms must be read on ufunded.com.

For the wider pattern of payout claims that cannot be checked against what a firm publishes, see our reviews of Propr and Pipcy.

This review is independent editorial analysis and is not financial, investment, or trading advice, and is not an endorsement or solicitation. The Industry Spread has no affiliate or referral relationship with the firms covered. Proprietary trading challenges carry a fee that is generally non-refundable, most participants do not reach a funded account, and funded capital is the firm’s capital, not the trader’s. Terms change frequently — always verify current rules directly with the firm before paying any fee.