Account caps: read the scope before you read the number

A cap is a limit applied to a set of accounts, and the scope wording defines the set. Change the scope and the same number means something different: five accounts for you alone is a different allowance from five accounts across everyone living at your address.

The move that ends accounts is the workaround: you reach a cap, so you open a second login in a partner's name and pay from their card. Household and beneficial-control wording exists precisely to catch that pattern, and it catches it after the accounts are funded rather than at signup, which is when the money is already in them.

So read the scope clause first and write down which of your rows it pulls in. The published wording across covered firms uses several different scopes, and each pulls a different set.

• Per trader or identity, the count follows one person, or one username, wherever those accounts sit.
• Per household or family, shared address and shared IP are the usual tests, so a second person in the same home does not create a second allowance.
• Same beneficial control, the widest form, reaching people, companies and connected entities, and in one firm's wording across drawdown families and every platform it supports.
• Payment or billing identity, check whether the terms tie the count to the buyer of record; where the wording does not resolve it, record it as unknown and ask.

Evaluation caps and funded caps are separate counters and are counted separately. A firm can allow a generous number of active evaluations while allowing far fewer funded accounts, then cap the two together at a third figure below their sum. Three published numbers, three ways to be blocked.

A fourth kind of limit caps the rate of buying rather than the stock you hold: a fixed number of evaluation purchases per 30 days, or per month. That one leaves the number you may hold untouched and instead governs how fast you can replace what you lose, which changes reset-versus-repurchase arithmetic more than it changes your account list.

The practical consequence: you can sit under the funded cap and still be unable to buy an evaluation, or hold a stack of evaluations legitimately and be unable to activate them when they pass.

Three things vary underneath a firm-level headline. The plan family varies. One firm publishes a ladder where the smaller sizes allow several funded accounts and the larger sizes allow fewer, counted across all its plans, and a separate plan allows one per user. The account size varies within a plan family. And the phase varies, as above.

Flattening a ladder like that into one number asserts a false cap on most of it, which is why NANO stores the firm's published wording per cell instead of a single figure, and why the reference below can show a firm several caps rather than one.

Silence is its own state. One covered firm publishes a per-identity cap and states plainly that it publishes no per-household cap; that leaves the household question unresolved, and the honest handling is to ask the firm in writing rather than to read the gap as an allowance. Another firm's per-size relationship is explicitly marked as inferred and flagged for verification at checkout. Unknown stays unknown on this site, and it should stay unknown in your count too.

The expensive version of this mistake looks like a bargain: a sale lands, you buy several evaluations at once because the per-account price is low, and every purchase clears without a warning. Checkout is not where a funded cap bites.

In the worked example below, the block never appears at checkout, all six evaluations are bought without incident. It appears the week three of them pass, when the household funded count would have to move from four to seven against a funded cap of five. Two passed evaluations then sit unusable until a funded seat closes.

So the recount that matters is a projection: take the accounts you hold today, then add every account still in evaluation as though all of them passed at once. If that projected funded number exceeds the funded cap for your scope, you are buying seats you cannot open.