BUX

BUX restructured its pricing in August 2025 into three plans, and the important thing about the grid is that the free plan is not the cheap plan.

ETFs and ETCs are the exception to the whole structure. They are a separate column in BUX's schedule, not a variant of the European share line, and they cost EUR 0.99 a market order on all three plans. A Basic customer who only buys index ETFs therefore pays the same commission as a Prime customer, which is the single most important thing to know before concluding that the free tier is unusable.

The 0.20% annual service fee on Basic is the line that matters and the one buried furthest down the page. It is quoted per year and billed monthly against your invested assets. On a EUR 20,000 portfolio that is EUR 40 a year — more than the EUR 35.88 a full year of BUX Plus costs, and Plus removes the fee entirely below EUR 250,000. The break-even is roughly EUR 17,900 of invested assets: above that, paying for Plus is cheaper than staying free, before you count anything else.

Everything else pushes the same way, as long as you are buying shares rather than ETFs. Ten European share orders a year cost EUR 39.90 on Basic against EUR 19.90 on Plus, or EUR 0 as Zero Orders — but the Zero Order route is capped at 3 a month on Plus and 5 a month on Prime, so it covers a monthly savings rhythm and not an active one. EUR 7,200 of annual US turnover recovers the Plus subscription on the FX markup alone (0.75% versus 0.25%). Prime only makes sense against Plus if you place roughly 60 or more European share orders a year — the EUR 60 annual difference divided by the EUR 1.00 saved per order — since ETF and US orders already cost the same on both.

Free items are genuinely free: deposits, withdrawals, real-time quotes and Investment Plan purchases, which run as Zero Orders without consuming the monthly allowance. The only odd line is EUR 10 including VAT to register for a shareholder meeting.

The safety story changed fundamentally in July 2024, when ABN AMRO acquired BUX and it became a subsidiary within the ABN AMRO group. Before that, BUX was a venture-funded startup founded in Amsterdam in 2013 by Nick Bortot, a former BinckBank executive. After it, the entity sits behind one of the largest banks in the Netherlands.

BUX B.V. is authorised and regulated by the Autoriteit Financiële Markten (AFM) and registered with the Amsterdam Chamber of Commerce under KvK number 58403949. It is an investment firm, not a bank — it holds no banking licence of its own — and prudential supervision of Dutch investment firms sits with De Nederlandsche Bank. Clearing and custody run through ABN AMRO Clearing Bank, which is both a consequence of the acquisition and a meaningful upgrade on the custody arrangements of a small independent broker.

Two separate protections apply, and conflating them is the most common mistake:

• Securities are covered by the Dutch investor compensation scheme (beleggerscompensatiestelsel) up to EUR 20,000 per person. Like every such scheme it pays only if the firm fails and client securities cannot be returned — your shares are held in a segregated structure and are not BUX's property in an insolvency.
• Cash is a different question because BUX is not a bank. Client money is placed with a credit institution, and BUX states coverage of up to EUR 100,000 under deposit guarantee scheme conditions. That is the bank's guarantee reaching through to you, not BUX's own.

One enforcement action belongs in this picture. On 18 November 2024 the AFM imposed a EUR 1.6 million fine on BUX B.V. for breaching the Dutch ban on inducements, and published the decision on 12 March 2025; the last breach it covers dates from 21 April 2023. The conduct at issue was paying introduction fees — to finfluencers, to comparison websites and to existing customers who brought in new ones. It is worth being blunt about what that means on a page like this one: the regulator's finding is precisely about the payment of acquisition commissions to sites that compare brokers. It is a conduct penalty, not a prudential one; it says nothing about the safety of your securities or the segregation of your cash, and the conduct predates both the ABN AMRO acquisition and the current compliance regime. But it is on the record, and a reader deciding on the strength of a recommendation deserves to know that BUX has been fined for paying for recommendations.

BUX B.V. is not itself listed; the listed company is its parent, ABN AMRO Bank N.V. That is the normal shape across this comparison, which is why the listing column reports the group rather than the licensed entity. BUX offers no leverage on the investing product, so an account cannot go negative. None of this makes any broker guaranteed safe, and the EUR 20,000 securities ceiling is noticeably thinner than the FSCS or SIPC figures readers may be used to.

BUX's order model is unusual and deserves more attention than its fee table gets, because the cheapest route is also the least controlled one.

A Zero Order costs EUR 0.00 and is BUX's headline feature — but it is available only on Plus and Prime, it is rationed to 3 a month on Plus and 5 a month on Prime, and it executes in an end-of-day batch rather than immediately. You submit during the day and BUX aggregates and executes at a single point between 16:00 CET and the close. Orders generated by an Investment Plan run through the same batch but do not count against the monthly allowance, so a savings plan never eats into it. Reported price-protection thresholds of roughly 4–5% exist to cancel the order if the market moves violently, but within that band you accept whatever the batch price is. For a monthly ETF purchase that is irrelevant — you were never trying to time anything. For buying a single share on a news day it is a real cost that does not appear anywhere in the fee schedule.

A market order executes immediately at the prevailing price and costs EUR 3.99 (Basic), EUR 1.99 (Plus) or EUR 0.99 (Prime) on European shares, EUR 0.99 on US shares on every plan, and EUR 0.99 on ETFs and ETCs on every plan. This is the route to take when the price matters, and for an ETF buyer it is cheap enough that the Zero Order cap rarely bites.

Limit and GTC orders cost the same as the matching market order on Plus and Prime — EUR 0.99 on ETFs and US shares, EUR 1.99 on European shares under Plus, EUR 0.99 across the board under Prime — and are not available on Basic at all. That is a genuine functional restriction, not just a pricing one: on the free plan you cannot set a price you are willing to pay. For a beginner-oriented product that is a defensible simplification; for anyone who has learned why limit orders exist, it is a reason to pay.

Investment Plans — recurring scheduled purchases — are free on every plan, buy side only, and are the single best thing about BUX's pricing. Combined with fractional dealing from EUR 5, a EUR 100 monthly ETF contribution costs nothing in commission on any tier, including Basic. If that is your entire use case, BUX is competitive even at the free level, provided your portfolio stays small enough that the 0.20% service fee does not overtake the subscription.

The investable universe is roughly 3,000 instruments, and the composition is narrow by design:

• Shares on major European exchanges — Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, Brussels, Milan, Madrid — and on NYSE and Nasdaq
• ETFs and ETCs, which are the backbone of the product and the focus of the Investment Plan feature
• Exchange-traded products including crypto ETPs, where local rules permit
• Fractional dealing from EUR 5, on both European and US names
• Expert-built portfolios, available on the Prime tier for investors who would rather delegate selection

What is absent is a long list: no bonds, no mutual funds, no listed options, no futures, no spot forex, no CFDs, no warrants or certificates, no margin and no demo account.

The removals are worth stating plainly because they represent a strategic narrowing rather than a product that never had these things. Direct cryptocurrency trading was discontinued in March 2024 — BUX previously let you hold coins and no longer does. The old BUX X CFD app and the BUX Markets business, which were leveraged trading products under separate arrangements, are no longer part of what a retail customer sees today. The BUX you can open in 2026 is an equity and ETF investing app inside a bank, and nothing else.

For a first portfolio built around a couple of index ETFs and a handful of shares, that is sufficient and arguably healthy. For anyone whose interests broaden into fixed income, derivatives or holding actual crypto, BUX will not follow you, and you will end up running a second account.

For German and Austrian investors this is the section that decides the account, and it deserves a direct answer: BUX does not act as a German paying agent, so no Abgeltungsteuer is withheld at source — and there is no automatic KESt deduction for Austrian investors either.

With a German domestic broker, the platform withholds 25% Abgeltungsteuer plus Solidaritätszuschlag and any Kirchensteuer on realised gains and dividends, applies your Freistellungsauftrag against the EUR 1,000 Sparer-Pauschbetrag, and settles the whole thing with the Finanzamt. You often do not need to touch Anlage KAP at all. With BUX, none of that happens. Gains and dividends arrive gross, your allowance is not applied automatically, and you are responsible for declaring everything yourself each year.

The practical consequences are concrete rather than theoretical:

• You must complete Anlage KAP (and Anlage KAP-INV where fund and ETF income is involved) every year you hold or sell
• The Vorabpauschale on accumulating ETFs — the notional annual advance lump sum German investors owe even without selling — is yours to calculate and declare, not BUX's to withhold
• Teilfreistellung relief on equity funds has to be claimed by you rather than applied at source
• Foreign withholding tax on US dividends is reduced by a W-8BEN to 15% for treaty residents, and crediting it against German tax is again your paperwork
• Austrian investors face the equivalent problem: a foreign broker without Austrian paying-agent status means self-declaration rather than automatic KESt settlement

BUX provides an annual statement you can work from, and for a small portfolio of two ETFs bought monthly the extra effort is a manageable evening once a year. But it is not zero, and it is not a rounding error compared with the EUR 35.88 a year the Plus plan costs. A German investor who values tax-simplicity should weigh a domestic broker that withholds automatically before choosing BUX on price, because the price difference is small and the administrative difference is not. Dutch and Belgian investors do not face this trade-off in the same form and should judge BUX on its fees and range instead.

Onboarding is fully in-app and fast. You need an ID document, a SEPA bank account in your own name, and residency in one of the eight countries BUX serves: the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Austria and Ireland. Most applicants complete the process in well under half an hour, and there is no minimum deposit — fractional dealing from EUR 5 means a first order can be genuinely small.

The appropriateness questionnaire is short, because BUX offers no leveraged or complex products that would require a knowledge assessment. It also means there is no demo account and no paper-trading mode: you learn with real money from the first order, which is worth knowing if you are a complete beginner.

Funding is EUR only and free. iDEAL and Tikkie are effectively instant for Dutch clients and are the smoothest route by a distance. Everyone else uses SEPA transfer, which typically credits in one to two business days. There are no cards, no PayPal, no e-wallets and no cryptocurrency funding. Because the account is euro-denominated, buying a US share triggers an automatic conversion at the plan's markup — 0.75%, 0.25% or 0.20% — with no option to hold a dollar balance and convert once. For a US-heavy portfolio that is a recurring, compounding cost rather than a one-off.

Withdrawals are free and return to the account the money came from, typically within one to three business days. There is no withdrawal fee at any tier and no limit on frequency worth mentioning.

Interest on uninvested cash is a plan benefit rather than a universal one: BUX publishes 1.75% on Plus and up to 2.00% on Prime, while Basic pays nothing on idle cash — one more way the free tier costs you money quietly.

The app is the reason BUX has the customer base it has. The order flow is unusually clean, fractional amounts are handled in euros rather than share counts, Investment Plans automate recurring purchases in two taps, and the portfolio view is legible in a way that bank apps rarely manage. Expert-built portfolios on the Prime tier give a delegated option for people who do not want to choose. It is a well-designed consumer product, and app-store sentiment reflects that.

Web access exists for account administration, portfolio review and order entry, but BUX is mobile-first and the browser surface is clearly the secondary one. There is no desktop platform, no multi-window layout and no API.

Research is thin. Each instrument gets a price chart, a short description, basic key figures and news where available. There is no screener worth the name, no analyst consensus, no proprietary analysis and no third-party research marketplace. Real-time quotes are free, which is a nice touch, but free quotes are not research. In practice BUX users decide what to buy elsewhere and execute here.

Education is modest — explainer content on ETFs, diversification, risk and the mechanics of the app, aimed squarely at people making a first investment. There are no webinars, no structured courses and, with no demo account, no way to practise.

Support is the weakest dimension and the most common complaint. Channels are in-app chat and email during weekday business hours in Dutch, English, German, French, Spanish and Italian. There is no telephone line at any tier, and priority routing is a Prime benefit — so the free plan queues behind two levels of paying customers by design. Public sentiment has been noticeably harsher since the August 2025 subscription launch, which converted a largely free product into a paid one and drew a predictable reaction from long-standing users. That reaction is about pricing rather than reliability, but it is real and it is visible in the recent review record.