flatex

flatex's pricing is unusually easy to reason about, which in this market is itself a feature.

EUR 5.90 per order. German exchanges, Xetra, US and Canadian venues and other foreign venues all carry the same commission, and it does not scale with order size. The only percentage component is 0.04% on the portion of a US or Canadian order above EUR 40,000. Third-party costs are passed through separately: a flat EUR 2.00 Fremdkostenpauschale at Tradegate, Lang & Schwarz, LS Exchange, Baader Bank, gettex, Quotrix and Société Générale, or the exchange's own tariff elsewhere — Xetra from EUR 1.98, Frankfurt from EUR 1.08, Stuttgart from EUR 1.05, Vienna from EUR 1.80, SIX Swiss from CHF 1.50.

Worked example on a EUR 10,000 Xetra purchase:

Savings plans are free. Every ETF and fund savings plan executes at EUR 0.00 commission, with more than 5,000 plans on the list and no cap on the rate. Stock savings plans are the exception at 1.00% of the savings rate. Certificates and leveraged products from Platinum partners (J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Société Générale) are free on orders of EUR 500 or more; Gold partners (BNP Paribas, UBS, UniCredit, Vontobel) cost EUR 2.90; other issuers cost EUR 5.90 below EUR 1,000 and EUR 15.90 above it.

Custody, the cash account, joint and second depots, foreign-currency accounts, order changes, dividend processing, corporate actions, depot transfers and the annual tax certificate are all free. There is no inactivity fee.

The two real costs are not commissions. Credit interest on the cash account is 0.00% p.a., and currency conversion carries an absolute margin on the interbank rate — USD 0.0040 and CHF 0.0040 per euro, GBP 0.0020, CAD 0.0070 — which on a EUR/USD rate in the 1.10–1.20 band is roughly 0.33%–0.36% each way. Real-time quotes are metered at EUR 0.01 beyond a small monthly allowance, and flatex trader 2.0 costs EUR 15–39 a month.

Your account is held at flatexDEGIRO Bank SE, Omniturm, Große Gallusstraße 16–18, Frankfurt am Main, registered at the Frankfurt commercial register under HRB 141330. It holds a full German banking licence and is supervised jointly by BaFin and the Deutsche Bundesbank. This is not a passported investment firm using a partner bank — flatex operates its own regulated bank, which is why it can pay interest, extend Wertpapierkredite and act as the German tax withholding agent directly.

Deposit protection. Cash is covered by the statutory Entschädigungseinrichtung deutscher Banken (EdB) up to EUR 100,000 per depositor. Claims for the return of securities are covered at 90% up to an equivalent of EUR 20,000. In practice that securities sub-limit rarely matters: your shares, ETFs, bonds and funds are your property, held in custody, and stay outside the bank's insolvency estate — in an insolvency the bank must hand the depot back unless the holdings are pledged as loan collateral.

There is, however, a gap worth naming. flatex's own Impressum lists only the statutory EdB. Commerzbank (comdirect) and BNP Paribas Germany (Consorsbank) both additionally belong to the voluntary Einlagensicherungsfonds of the Bundesverband deutscher Banken, which currently protects private individuals up to EUR 3 million. If you routinely hold six figures in cash, that difference is real — although at flatex's 0.00% credit interest you should not be holding six figures in cash anyway.

Transparency. The parent, flatexDEGIRO SE, is listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in the Prime Standard under ticker FTK (ISIN DE000FTG1111) and is an MDAX constituent, with roughly 110.1 million shares outstanding. That means quarterly audited financials anyone can read. The group reported record results in July 2026 and passed EUR 100 billion in customer securities under custody the same month, serving more than 3.6 million customers in 16 countries across the flatex, DEGIRO and ViTrade brands. Client securities are held in segregation; retail negative balance protection applies to the CFD account under EU rules.

flatex runs three of its own front ends plus a third-party option, and which one you land on matters more than the marketing suggests.

flatex next is the current platform, delivered as both a browser application and an iOS/Android app from the same codebase. It gives you a portfolio overview with allocation charts, multiple portfolio views, savings and withdrawal plan management, individual watchlists, a simple order ticket for routine trades and an enhanced order mask that exposes every order type and every available venue, so you can compare Tradegate against Xetra against gettex before committing. There are ETF and fund screeners with filters, chart analysis, real-time news, order history with execution status, and light and dark modes. flatex cites over 100,000 downloads with average store ratings above 4 stars.

flatex classic is the legacy web platform. It still exists and long-standing customers still use it, but it is visibly a generation behind — dense, functional and unloved.

flatex trader 2.0 is the professional tier, built with TeleTrader. It covers German exchanges and Xetra plus off-exchange direct trading with 15 certificate and leverage-product issuers, and Tradegate and Lang & Schwarz for equities. It is not free: four weeks of trial, then EUR 15 a month for the Basis data package or EUR 39 a month for Premium, which adds the Study Editor and wider real-time coverage. Charging separately for the serious platform is a defensible way to keep the base commission at EUR 5.90, but it does mean the headline price understates what an active trader pays.

stock3 integration lets you watch markets, analyse, discuss and place orders into your flatex account from a third-party terminal.

The honest summary: flatex next is good enough for investors and adequate for occasional traders, but flatex has no answer to comdirect's ProTrader or Consorsbank's free ActiveTrader unless you pay a monthly subscription.

flatex reaches 40 trading venues and covers most of what a European retail investor needs, with two conspicuous holes.

What is there:

• Shares on German exchanges and Xetra, plus NYSE, NYSE American, Nasdaq and Nasdaq OTC in the US, Toronto in Canada, Euronext Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels and Lisbon, Vienna, Zurich, and Milan for sales only
• ETFs and funds with more than 5,000 free savings plans, plus KAG purchases at a 50% discount on the front-end load
• Bonds on the same EUR 5.90 schedule
• Certificates, warrants and knock-outs — around 2.1 million products, with free direct trading against the Platinum issuers on orders of EUR 500 or more
• Spot crypto in about 25 coins at 0.6% for liquid names and 0.7% for less liquid ones, all-in including spread, held inside the regulated bank
• Crypto ETNs, precious metals, and a CFD account with Société Générale as market maker covering shares, indices, commodities, currencies and interest-rate futures
• Wertpapierkredite at 6.25% p.a. within an approved credit line

What is missing:

• No Eurex or US listed options and futures. flatex simply does not run a derivatives desk. If you want to sell covered calls on a German blue chip or trade a MicroDAX future, Consorsbank and comdirect both offer it and flatex does not
• No spot forex
• No direct access to London, the Nordics or Asia. The foreign list stops at North America and western Europe, so a UK or Japanese listing has to be bought as a German-listed line or a depositary receipt

The spot crypto position is the genuine differentiator. comdirect and Consorsbank both restrict clients to crypto certificates and ETNs — you never hold a coin. flatex lets you hold the coin, inside a BaFin-supervised bank, with the tax paperwork handled for you.

Opening is fully digital. flatex advertises becoming a customer in about five minutes, with identification by video or electronic ID, and there is no minimum deposit. Joint accounts, second depots, custodial accounts for children and a new Altersvorsorgedepot for the German state-supported pension framework all sit in the same onboarding flow at no extra cost.

Funding is deliberately plain: SEPA bank transfer only, to and from a registered reference account. There are no cards, no PayPal, no e-wallets and no instant top-ups. Online transfers are free; a transfer instructed through the flatex team costs EUR 5.90. Money typically moves in one to two business days each way. Free foreign-currency sub-accounts are the useful part of the funding setup — sell a US position and you can leave the proceeds in dollars rather than paying the conversion margin twice.

The tax question, which in the DACH market decides the argument. flatex is steuereinfach in both countries it serves:

• Germany. As a domestic bank, flatex withholds Abgeltungsteuer of 25% plus solidarity surcharge and, where applicable, church tax, applies your Freistellungsauftrag against the Sparer-Pauschbetrag, and runs the statutory Verlustverrechnungstöpfe for you. The annual tax certificate, annual depot statement and loss certificate are all free
• Austria. flatex.at settles Austrian KESt at 27.5% automatically and credits foreign withholding tax against it, so an Austrian investor does not have to declare capital income separately

That combination is rare. Most cheap pan-European brokers make Austrian clients file themselves, and several make German clients handle the Vorabpauschale manually. flatex does neither. For a German or Austrian investor, this alone often outweighs a euro or two of commission difference — and it is the reason a flat-fee broker with a German banking licence still makes sense in 2026.

Research is flatex's weakest dimension, and the metering of real-time quotes is the reason.

Market data is not free. New customers get 50 real-time quotes; existing customers get 25 per month plus 10 for every executed securities order. Beyond that allowance each real-time query costs EUR 0.01, billed monthly against the cash account, with unused balances capped at 500 and reset every 31 December. For a buy-and-hold investor placing a handful of orders this is invisible. For anyone watching a portfolio daily it is a small but constant irritant that competitors simply do not impose — Consorsbank includes real-time data in ActiveTrader, comdirect includes push quotes in ProTrader.

The information that is free is decent rather than deep. flatex next carries real-time news, market overviews with top-10 lists, an ETF and fund screener with meaningful filters, security detail pages and chart analysis. The Produktfinder helps locate certificates and leveraged products across the 2.1 million-strong universe. The stock3 integration is the real research answer: if you want screening, charting and a community of active traders, that is where flatex expects you to go, and it works well.

Education is more convincing than the research. The flatex Academy runs a free webinar programme, a Wissenszentrum organised by topic, an Aktien und Indizes reference section, and a Female Finance strand aimed at closing the participation gap. flatex states that it reaches more than 100,000 people a year with financial education content, and the material is instructional rather than promotional — it explains how an instrument works instead of urging you to trade it.

What flatex does not have is house research: no analyst notes, no price targets, no in-house strategy commentary. If you want a broker with an opinion, this is not it. flatex gives you cheap execution and expects you to bring your own thesis.

Support is the area where flatex quietly outperforms the other two German incumbents, which says as much about them as about flatex.

The published setup is modest: German-language telephone support (+49 9221 7035898 for customers, a separate line for prospects), e-mail to info@flatex.de, and an in-application support ticket system for logged-in customers. flatex does not publish fixed service hours on its public contact page, which is a fair criticism. It does state that it employs around 200 service staff and it markets "telefonischer Kundenservice EUR 0.00" as an inclusive feature — phone support is free, unlike the EUR 15.90 surcharge for placing an order by phone.

The evidence that matters is the public review record. flatex sits at 3.7 out of 5 on Trustpilot across 3,561 reviews, with reviewers commonly praising the low, transparent pricing and the clarity of the platform. Service feedback is mixed rather than uniformly bad — some reviewers describe competent, friendly handling, others report slow responses. That is an ordinary result for a discount broker.

For context, the comparison is stark: comdirect scores 1.4 from 4,117 Trustpilot reviews and Consorsbank 1.6 from 300, both dominated by complaints about telephone hold times and access problems. flatex is more than two full points ahead of both. We have weighted this rather than dismissed it — Trustpilot skews toward complainants everywhere, so the absolute numbers are pessimistic, but the relative gap between three brokers measured on the same platform is meaningful.

The realistic expectation: German-only support, no live chat, no 24/7 desk, no named contact — but a functioning phone line, free to call, from a company that has not outsourced the problem away.