Methodology
How the data is collected and computed
38 firms, 350 instant accounts, 747 challenges, 1456 official sources, data checked Oct 5, 2026 — every price and rule on this site traces back to one of them.
How the data is collected
Every price and rule on this site comes from a firm's own official pages — never a third-party review, a forum post or an estimate.
Each value is stored with the exact page it came from, the exact sentence or line it was read from (the excerpt), and the date it was checked. 5119 rule values are stored this way right now, from 1456 official pages (1425 of them linkable from the site).
When a firm's own pages disagree with each other, both versions are shown side by side as a conflict, each with its own excerpt and source, on that firm's review — never silently picked one over the other. 331 such conflicts are on record.
A rule a firm has never published anywhere is shown as "Not published", with the official pages that were checked and the date — never guessed, and never left blank. 652 items are marked this way today.
Promo codes
Discount percentages are those offered with the code at the time of writing; firms can change them, so confirm the discount at checkout.
This site never lists a firm's own advertised promotion or any other public coupon: only its own partner codes appear here.
A code is never applied to an activation fee or a reset fee — only to the list price of the account itself.
When a firm's checkout shows its own rounded price instead of the plain percentage, that exact price is recorded per account size — but only when it is within $1 of the plain calculation below; a bigger gap is refused rather than stored.
How every derived number is computed
Every figure below comes from a small set of pure functions (lib/calc/) that take only stored facts as input — never a hand-typed total. The worked examples use a real account and recompute themselves whenever the underlying price, code or rule changes.
Price with a code
- The plain formula is the list price × (100 − the percent off) ÷ 100, rounded half up to the whole dollar.
- For example, Blue Guardian Instant Starter at $5K: the list price is $14.67. With the code PFK (25% off), that formula gives $11.00.
Recorded firm prices, within $1
- Some firms show their own rounded price at checkout instead of the plain formula above. When that happens, the site stores and shows the firm's own price instead — but only when it is within $1 of the plain formula; a bigger gap is refused.
- One current example: Blue Guardian Fast Track at $100K, code PFK (25% off). The plain formula gives $634.00; the firm's own checkout shows $633.75 — a $0.25 difference, inside the $1 the data rules allow.
Cost per $1,000 of drawdown
- The price you pay, divided by the account's maximum drawdown, × 1,000 — a way to compare accounts of very different sizes and prices on the one thing they all limit: how much you can lose before the account closes.
- Continuing the example: Blue Guardian Instant Starter at $5K costs $11.00 and allows $250 of maximum drawdown, so its cost per $1,000 is $11.00 ÷ $250 × 1,000 = $44.00.
On /challenges the measure adds the activation fee charged after passing, when the firm publishes it: a plan that asks a small amount upfront and the rest after you pass is ranked on the total, not on the upfront amount. A fee the firm does not publish counts as none in the ranking and reads “Not published” on the account; a plan whose fee after passing is known to exist but not published is left out, because its cost to get funded cannot be compared.
Ranks
- An account's rank is 1 plus the number of accounts with a strictly lower cost per $1,000 of drawdown in the same pool — the cheapest by that measure is always #1, and a tie shares the same rank.
- That makes Blue Guardian Instant Starter at $5K rank #1 of 36 among instant accounts with a code, by cost per $1,000 of drawdown.
Total to the payout stage
- What it costs to reach the payout stage: the price you pay for the account, plus the activation fee charged after passing. An instant account has no evaluation to pass, so this is simply the account's own price plus its own activation fee.
- Blue Guardian Instant Starter at $5K costs $11.00, but Blue Guardian has not published this account's activation fee, so the total to the payout stage is not published either — never assumed to be zero.
How listings are ordered
The home page and /instant-funding read the same pool of instant accounts and let you sort it by price, cost per $1,000 of drawdown, drawdown size or account size, in either direction — clicking a column header reverses it.
Before any sorting you choose, accounts start in one fixed order: price (with our code applied) low to high, then account size low to high. The home page starts sorted by price under a default budget you can change; /instant-funding starts sorted by cost per $1,000 of drawdown.
The /prop-firms directory lists firms alphabetically by name; each firm's "cheapest instant account" is its own lowest-price account, ties broken by the smaller size.
No listing is ever ordered by a rating, a score, or how much a firm pays this site — there is none to sort by (see below).
What this site does not do
- No ratings or scores of any firm, anywhere on the site.
- No user reviews, testimonials or star ratings.
- No scores copied or summarized from another review site.
- No comparative claim ("best", "cheapest", "most trusted") that is not a number computed from the stored data above and re-checked by an automated test.