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Primary data · 16 August 2026

Steppa house challenge results.

Sixteen completed house cards, transcribed from the Steppa iOS app. Buy-in, how many people finished, and what each winner actually received. Nobody else publishes this. Steppa does not publish it. The screenshots stay in a private archive. The numbers are the point.

The table

Newest end date first. Return if you finished is what a winner took home relative to the implied buy-in. It is not a promise you will finish. People who missed a day got zero.

Buy-in is implied as prize pool ÷ entrants, as displayed. Where that is not a round dollar (for example $32.03, $80.31), the pool likely includes promotional credit or mixed stakes. We did not invent a rounder number. “~0%” means the settlement screen showed a rounding remnant and the note “the processing fee dropped to 0% because most players finished.” “15%” means the screen labelled a 15% processing fee taken from the pool. Hosted by Steppa. Observed 16 August 2026.

How to read “expected return”

Two different numbers get called that. This page prints both, because mixing them is how people get misled.

If you finished (the × column) is payout each ÷ buy-in. On Locked In that was 1.69×. On 1 Day, 25k it was 1.07×. An easy card pays finishers almost nothing extra. That is the same arithmetic as how Steppa payouts work.

Before you know whether you will finish, expected value on the stake is (winners’ share) ÷ (entrants × buy-in), which is the same as winners’ share ÷ prize pool:

• On every card that took 15% from the pool, expected value was 85 cents back per dollar staked. Win rate does not change that average. It only changes how the remaining 85% is split among finishers. Losers get $0. The platform keeps 15%.
• On cards where the fee dropped to 0%, or the screen said 100% of the pool went to winners, expected value on the stake was about $1.00. You are not making money in expectation. You are betting that you finish when others don’t.

That second number is why “the fees eat the pot” was a fair complaint on the 15% cards, and why the up-front model (100% of the pool to finishers, fees on top) is a different product. The Weekly Split editions are up-front. Several house cards in this sample still settled with 15% gone from the pool. All of those started before 18 June 2026, consistent with the cutover in the terms. The model is fixed at creation, not at the end date. Go hard for 75 days in a row is the proof: it started 1 June, ended 14 August, and still settled at 15%.

What this means for a $70 week

House finish rates in this sample ran from 53.6% to 93.1%, median about 77%. A 77% finish on a 100%-to-winners pool pays about 1.30×. A 67% finish (the band The Weekly Split is tuned to) pays about 1.50×. The house cards that finished near 90% paid finishers 1.07× to 1.12×. That is an accountability week, not a payout week.

Buy-ins here ran from about $22 to $105. Duration ran from 1 day to 75 days. Ours is $70 for 7 days at 9,000 steps. The comparison is not pool size. It is finish rate, fee model, and how long your money is locked. Full house-vs-us argument: /about.

Methodology

Figures are transcribed from settlement screens in the Steppa iOS app on 16 August 2026. Challenge-level counts and dollar amounts are as displayed. Buy-in, win rate, and the × multiple are derived: buy-in = prize pool ÷ entrants; win rate = winners ÷ entrants; return if finished = payout each ÷ buy-in. Payout each is the on-screen “each winner” figure, which already reflects Steppa rounding down to the cent. Individual handles are not published. Errors are corrected in place with a dated note.

This is not a complete census of every house card Steppa has run. It is every completed house settlement we had in front of us on that date. A missing card is not a hidden one.

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