DEGIRO

DEGIRO's pricing has two layers, and only understanding both tells you what a trade really costs.

The first layer is commission. On the euro schedule, home-market European shares are EUR 2.00, Euronext Paris is EUR 1.00, US and Canadian shares are EUR 1.00, ETFs outside the Core Selection are EUR 2.00, and Core Selection ETFs are EUR 0. Options and futures are EUR 0.75 per contract.

The second layer is the EUR 1.00 handling fee, which DEGIRO applies per order on top of almost everything. That makes a Core Selection ETF purchase EUR 1.00 all-in, a US share trade EUR 2.00 all-in, and a home-market share trade EUR 3.00 all-in. On a EUR 5,000 order that is 0.02% to 0.06% - excellent. On a EUR 250 order it is 0.4% to 1.2% - poor. DEGIRO rewards size.

Then come the frictions people forget:

• AutoFX at 0.25% on every conversion into and out of a foreign currency. A round trip in a US share therefore costs roughly 0.5% in FX on top of the EUR 2.00 commission.
• Connectivity fee of EUR 2.50 per non-home exchange per calendar year, capped at 0.25% of account value. Your home exchange is free; a portfolio spread over Xetra, LSE, Nasdaq and Euronext Paris costs a few euros a year.
• Outgoing transfers at EUR 20.00 per position plus external costs on the euro schedule.

What is genuinely absent: custody fees, inactivity fees, deposit fees, withdrawal fees and account-opening fees. The minimum deposit is EUR 0.01. DEGIRO also pays no interest on idle cash, which at current euro rates is a real opportunity cost against neobrokers paying above 2%.

DEGIRO trades under flatexDEGIRO Bank Dutch Branch, the Dutch branch of flatexDEGIRO Bank SE, a German credit institution. Primary prudential supervision sits with BaFin in Germany; the Dutch branch is registered with DNB and supervised for conduct by the AFM. The group changed the bank's legal form from AG to SE at the end of 2025.

The practical consequences of holding a banking licence rather than an investment-firm licence:

• Cash balances are covered to EUR 100,000 per client by the German statutory deposit guarantee scheme (EdB).
• Securities remain your property and are held separately from the bank's own balance sheet. In an insolvency they are returned rather than compensated; where delivery fails, the German investor compensation scheme covers 90% of the claim up to EUR 20,000.

Parent flatexDEGIRO SE — an SE since 29 December 2025, when the company converted from an AG; registered at the Frankfurt am Main local court under HRB 141306, previously HRB 103516 — is listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker FTK, so audited accounts, capital ratios and client numbers are published quarterly. That is a stronger transparency signal than any privately held neobroker can offer.

The honest caveat: the group has been under intensified supervision. BaFin installed a special commissioner at the bank and only terminated that mandate in October 2024, once the ordered measures were complete. Client assets were not affected, but a broker that needed a supervisory monitor is not the same risk profile as one that never has. Note also that DEGIRO offers leveraged exchange-traded derivatives without a CFD-style negative balance guarantee: a margin shortfall on futures or written options can leave you owing money.

There are exactly two ways in: the WebTrader in a browser and the mobile app on iOS and Android. There is no desktop terminal and no public API, which immediately rules DEGIRO out for algorithmic traders and anyone who wants a custom order router.

What the WebTrader does well is get out of the way. The search bar finds an instrument across all connected exchanges in a couple of keystrokes and shows the venue options with their respective costs, which is more routing transparency than most brokers give. The portfolio view is clean, position-level P&L is easy to read, and placing a limit or stop order takes three clicks. For a monthly ETF purchase or a considered share position, it is close to ideal.

Where it runs out of road is anything active. Charting is functional but shallow - a handful of indicators, no drawing-tool depth, no multi-chart layouts, no chart trading. Order types stop at market, limit, stop-loss and stop-limit; there is no OCO, no bracket entry and no trailing stop worth the name. Real-time prices on several exchanges require a paid subscription, so the default experience is delayed quotes on some markets.

The mobile app is the better-liked of the two and has genuine parity for the things retail investors actually do, including options and futures order entry. It is fast, it does not nag and it does not gamify. If you want a platform that helps you think, though, DEGIRO is not it - it is a well-built order pipe.

Product breadth is DEGIRO's second-strongest card after price. You get direct access to more than 50 marketplaces across 30 countries, which in practice means:

• Shares on every major European exchange plus NYSE, Nasdaq, Toronto, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney and Singapore.
• ETFs across roughly 29 exchanges, more than 5,000 lines in total, with a curated Core Selection that carries no commission.
• Options on eight derivatives exchanges including Euronext Amsterdam, Paris and Brussels, Eurex and the US venues, at EUR 0.75 per contract.
• Futures on Eurex (DAX, EURO STOXX 50, Bunds), Euronext (AEX, CAC 40) and CME (S&P 500, Nasdaq 100), also EUR 0.75 per contract per side.
• Bonds, investment funds, warrants and structured products from Societe Generale and BNP Paribas.
• Cryptocurrencies since 2025 in a growing subset of markets, at 0.50% per order for German, French and Irish clients and 0.29% for Dutch clients, from a EUR 1 minimum.

What is missing is deliberate: no CFDs, no retail spot forex, no spread betting, no social or copy trading. DEGIRO is an exchange broker, not a leveraged-products shop. For most investors that omission is a feature. For anyone who wanted to trade EUR/USD or a share CFD, it is a hard stop.

The other structural gap is fractional shares, which DEGIRO does not offer at all. That makes a systematic EUR 100-200 monthly plan awkward in a way it simply is not at a neobroker.

Opening is entirely online and free. You supply identity details, complete a knowledge assessment for whichever account profile you want, verify yourself by iDIN, national eID or document upload, and confirm the link to your bank by sending a token amount - as little as EUR 0.01 - from an account in your own name. Most accounts are tradable within one to two business days.

That verification transfer is the funding model in miniature: DEGIRO only ever moves money between your brokerage account and one verified reference bank account. There are no card deposits, no e-wallets and no crypto funding. Depending on your market you can use SEPA transfer, and instant rails such as iDEAL in the Netherlands or Sofort in German-speaking markets. Instant methods credit in minutes; a plain SEPA transfer takes one to two business days.

Withdrawals go back to that same reference account, are free and unlimited, and typically land in one to three business days. There is no withdrawal minimum beyond EUR 0.01.

Two frictions worth planning around. First, DEGIRO pays no interest on cash, so parking a large uninvested balance costs real money against brokers paying 2% or more. Second, the account is single-currency by default: any purchase in a foreign currency triggers AutoFX at 0.25%. Where your entity offers Manual FX you can hold foreign-currency balances instead, but each conversion costs EUR 10.00 + 0.25%, so it only pays off on conversions of roughly EUR 4,000 or more. UK clients are on AutoFX only.

This is where DEGIRO is weakest, and it is not close.

There is no analyst consensus, no target prices, no proprietary equity research, no earnings estimates and no meaningful stock screener. Instrument pages show price history, key figures and the available listings, and that is broadly it. News coverage is thin. If your process depends on reading research inside your broker, you will be running a second subscription elsewhere - which at EUR 20-40 a month can easily exceed everything you save on commission.

Education is better than research but still modest. The Investor's Academy covers the basics competently: what an ETF is, how an order book works, what a market versus a limit order does, how options are priced. It is written clearly and is genuinely useful for a first-time investor. Beyond the fundamentals it thins out quickly, and there are no regular webinars, no structured learning paths and no practice environment - DEGIRO has no demo account, so the first order you place is with real money.

The pragmatic reading: DEGIRO has priced itself as an execution venue and spends nothing on the content layer. If you already have a view and an information source, you lose nothing. If you expected your broker to help you form the view, this is the wrong shop, and the EUR 1-2 you save per trade will not compensate.

Support runs on telephone and email only. There is no live chat, no in-app messaging thread and no support over social channels. Lines are open on business days, roughly 08:00 to 22:00 CET, with local-language desks across the markets DEGIRO operates in - German, English, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Danish, Swedish, Czech and Polish are all covered.

Quality is the single most polarising thing about DEGIRO in public reviews. Trustpilot scores vary widely by country page - the Irish and Spanish sites sit near 4.8, the Dutch and Italian ones nearer 4.3, the German one lower - and negative reviews cluster almost entirely on response times and on the difficulty of reaching a human for anything non-standard. Simple questions get answered. Corporate actions, transfers in from another broker, tax documents and account-profile changes are where people report waiting days.

Set expectations accordingly. DEGIRO is a self-service product with a support function sized for a self-service product. If you are the kind of investor who contacts a broker twice a year to confirm something, that is fine. If you want a named contact, weekend cover or a chat window that answers in two minutes, the price you are paying does not buy that here.