The new PipFarm Sustainable Scaling Program is live.
Smart Scaling and Simple Scaling have been phased out and replaced by a single program that applies to every challenge mode. Everything we announced last month is now active on your accounts: five payouts of any size, one account that grows instead of a new account being issued each time, and one scaling rule across every model.
There is no scaling review, no waiting period and no need to close a trade simply to receive your increment.
More importantly, we are not starting the count from zero.
Every payout already received from your current account counts toward the five, going all the way back to when the account was issued. If you have already received three payouts, you are three payouts into the cycle. If you have received five or more, you will scale with your next approved payout.
With the program now live, there is one final part of the mechanism to explain: what happens to your max loss allowance between scaling increments.
This matters because it is what allows us to keep challenge prices low and profit shares high while offering meaningful scaling. It is not a catch buried in the terms. It is the trade that makes the wider model work, and I would rather explain it clearly so you can plan around it.
The Short Version
Your first payout from the account does not affect your max loss allowance. This applies once, to the first payout the account ever receives.
Your second, third and fourth payouts reduce your remaining max loss allowance by the amount withdrawn from the account.
The allowance cannot fall below 1% of the starting balance. This means a payout will never leave the account with no room to continue trading.
Your fifth payout completes the cycle. It does not reduce your max loss allowance. Instead, your scaling increment is added and your full allowance is restored, calculated against the new, larger account balance.
Then the next five-payout cycle begins, and every payout in it reduces the allowance.
How It Works in Practice
Take a $10,000 account with a 10% max loss. You begin with a $1,000 allowance.
You trade successfully and receive your first payout. Nothing changes: you retain the full 10% allowance.
You continue trading and request a second payout of $300. That withdrawal represents 3% of the account. Once the payout is approved, your remaining max loss allowance becomes 7%.
You later withdraw another $300 as your third payout. A further 3% is removed, leaving you with a 4% allowance.
The same calculation applies to your fourth payout, subject to a hard floor of 1%. No matter how much you withdraw, your allowance will not fall below that level. There will always be room to begin the next cycle.
Your fifth approved payout works differently. It completes the scaling cycle, so no further reduction is applied. Your scaling increment, between 10% and 50% depending on your rank, is added automatically. The increment is a percentage of your initial balance, meaning the original balance set by the challenge you purchased. Your original max loss percentage is then restored against the increased balance.
Same account. More capital. Full allowance.
Then the cycle begins again. From here every payout reduces the allowance, since the exemption applied only to your first.
Why We Built It This Way
Most funded accounts eventually reach their max loss, often after the trader has already received one or more payouts. That is part of the prop-firm model: a successful payout can be many times larger than the original challenge fee.
But consider the economics behind the account.
A trader might pay around $300 for a $100,000 challenge and, after passing, receive access to as much as $10,000 in funded drawdown. PipFarm underwrites that allowance for as long as the account remains active.
At a 90% profit share, PipFarm retains 10% of the profit generated. Recovering $10,000 through that share would therefore require the trader to generate $100,000 in profit, a 100% return on a $100,000 account.
No PipFarm funded account has yet reached that point. The closest was a trader who generated 59.7% across 17 payouts from one account. That is the strongest funded-account performance we have ever recorded, but PipFarm’s share was still $5,969 against $10,000 of risk.
The gap becomes more significant after each payout. Only 34.7% of accounts that receive one payout go on to receive a second. Without any adjustment, we would continue providing the full original allowance after every withdrawal, even as profits leave the account and the likelihood of the account eventually breaching increases.
That cost has to be absorbed somewhere. In practice, it means one of three things:
- Higher challenge prices
- A lower profit share
- More restrictive trading rules
We would rather avoid all three.
Instead, we made a more direct trade: as profit is withdrawn, the risk standing behind the account reduces by the same amount. You take money off the table, and we reduce our exposure accordingly. Once you complete five payouts, the account scales and the full allowance is restored.
This connects the risk we provide to the profit already taken from the account. Whether an account is A-booked or B-booked, it is what stops the same full risk being taken on again after every payout.
Other firms solve this problem differently. One approach is to move traders between risk books as their performance changes and then exclude profits generated while the account was placed on the B book. That transfers the consequences back to the trader after the trades have already happened.
We prefer to fund the max loss allowance offered at the beginning and adjust our exposure openly as money is withdrawn.
This is what the program is built around. We fund you, and as you cash out, we scale out. When you scale up, we fund you again. That keeps our operations stable under any market conditions, and it means the risk can be managed behind the scenes without interfering with how you trade or what you keep.
Consider Your Game Plan
Combining these rules creates a trade-off worth considering before your next payout request.
Every payout counts equally toward scaling. A 1% payout moves you one step closer, just as a 6% payout does. However, the effect on your max loss allowance depends on how much you withdraw.
Four smaller withdrawals after your first payout will preserve more of your allowance on the way to the fifth. Four larger withdrawals will put more cash in your pocket sooner, but may leave you trading closer to the 1% floor until the cycle resets.
Neither approach is inherently wrong. The right choice depends on whether you value immediate withdrawals or more room to trade between payouts.
What matters is understanding the exchange:
- Payout frequency determines how quickly you reach scaling.
- Payout size determines how much allowance remains along the way.
- The fifth payout completes the cycle and restores the full allowance.
If you intend to request a particularly large payout, the fifth is the natural time to do it. Because that payout triggers the scaling reset, it does not reduce your allowance for the next cycle.
For context, only 14.8% of accounts that receive a first payout go on to receive a third. If you reach the point where this mechanism begins influencing your decisions, you are already performing ahead of most funded traders.
The New Scaling Cycle
The complete cycle is simple:
- Your first payout from the account leaves your max loss allowance untouched. This applies once only.
- Your second, third and fourth payouts reduce your allowance by the amount withdrawn.
- Your allowance can never fall below 1%.
- Your fifth payout triggers your scaling increment and restores the full allowance.
- The next five-payout cycle begins from the larger account balance.
Everything happens within the same account. There is nothing to claim, no new account to manage and no scaling review to pass.
If you are already funded, your previous payouts count and the new program applies from your next payout.
Full details, including how far an account can scale and the increment for each rank, are in the Sustainable Scaling Program guide.
That is how we keep the program sustainable while preserving low challenge prices, high profit shares and meaningful room to grow.
You scale up. We scale out.
