Prop Firm Software Uptime and SLA: What the Percentage Actually Means
99.5%, 99.9% and 99.99% look close on a pricing page but imply very different downtime budgets. More importantly, a marketing uptime claim is not a contractual SLA unless measurement, exclusions and remedies are defined.
Downtime arithmetic
| Availability | Approx. downtime per 30-day month | Approx. downtime per year |
|---|---|---|
| 99.5% | 3h 36m | 43h 48m |
| 99.9% | 43m 12s | 8h 46m |
| 99.99% | 4m 19s | 52m 34s |
These are mathematical availability budgets, not statements about any provider's actual downtime.
Current public vendor signals
PropsEngine publishes a 99.5% monthly uptime target excluding maintenance in its terms. Tradaxi's Enterprise plan publishes a 99.9% uptime SLA. ZenPropTech and PropForge have publicly claimed 99.99% uptime. The latter claims should be distinguished from a contractually enforceable SLA unless the agreement defines them.
What counts as downtime?
Ask whether the clock includes trader dashboard, checkout, admin, API, risk engine and trading connectors. A CRM can be technically “up” while account provisioning or trading-state synchronization is unavailable.
Exclusions can dominate the SLA
- Scheduled maintenance.
- Third-party trading platform outages.
- Payment/KYC provider outages.
- Customer configuration errors.
- DDoS or force-majeure clauses.
- Beta/preview features.
Broad exclusions can make a high headline percentage much less useful operationally.
Incident response is separate from uptime
Define severity levels, acknowledgement time, engineering response, update cadence and escalation. For critical risk or payout failures, knowing who responds at 03:00 may matter more than a historical percentage.
Service credits are not business compensation
An SLA may refund a portion of subscription fees while the firm's actual loss from failed checkout or operational downtime is larger. Evaluate the SLA as an accountability mechanism, not insurance.
Ask for evidence
Request historical status data, incident summaries where available and architecture/recovery explanations. Test failure behavior in the demo: queues, retries, idempotency and reconciliation after connectivity returns.
SLA checklist
- Measured services/endpoints.
- Measurement period.
- Exclusions.
- Maintenance notice.
- Severity definitions.
- P1 response/escalation.
- Recovery objectives.
- Service-credit calculation.
- Repeated-breach termination rights.
- Third-party dependency treatment.
Enterprise buyers should pair this with our enterprise guide and RFP framework.
FAQ
Is 99.9% uptime good for prop firm software?
The percentage alone cannot answer that. Buyers need to know what is measured, which failures are excluded and how quickly critical incidents are handled.
Is 99.99% much better than 99.9%?
Mathematically yes: the allowed downtime is roughly one tenth. Contract scope and actual architecture still determine whether the number is meaningful.