Public.com

Public's schedule is one of the clearest in US retail broking, and the version used here was last updated 17 September 2026. The headline is USD 0 on US-listed stocks and ETFs in regular and extended hours, and on OTC stocks — but the interesting number is negative.

Options. Commission is USD 0 and there is no per-contract fee. On top of that, the Options Rebate Program pays USD 0.06–0.18 per stock or ETF contract, scaled by your current and prior month's volume. Regulatory fees run around USD 0.05 per contract (ORF USD 0.02, OCC USD 0.02, CAT and TAF making up the rest, capped at USD 0.05 per contract for orders under ten contracts). So a typical options trade earns money before the position moves. QQQ, SPY, IWM and API-placed contracts get an adjusted rate — USD 0.06 in tiers 1–3, USD 0.10 in tier 4. Index options cost USD 0.35 per contract for every customer, plus the exchange fees Public passes on.

Where it costs.

• Bonds are charged per USD 100 of par: Treasuries USD 0.10 (0–1 year) or USD 0.25 (1 year+); corporates USD 0.35 or USD 0.50. The former USD 3.99 monthly Bond Account fee no longer applies.
• Crypto through Zero Hash costs 1.25% of the order amount above USD 500, with flat fees from USD 0.49 below that.
• Leaving costs USD 100 (outgoing ACAT), plus USD 115 per security for DRS.
• Inactivity: USD 3.99 per month on accounts under USD 70 dormant for six months.
• FX transactions: 0.30% of volume.

Premium is being replaced by Reserve. Public is replacing its Premium subscription with Public Reserve at USD 20 per month or USD 200 per year, which offers contribution matches, higher savings rates and yield boosts rather than fee discounts. What Premium used to discount is now priced the same for everyone: extended-hours and OTC trades at USD 0, index options at USD 0.35 per contract, no Bond Account fee and no Investment Plan fees on stocks and ETFs. The free Premium for accounts of USD 50,000 or more is being removed.

Margin is the sleeper advantage. The base rate is 5.15%, set as Fed Funds Target Rate + 1.15%, with FFTR at 4.00% as of 17 September 2026, tiering down to 4.20% above USD 50 million. Against Webull's roughly 8.74% standard tier, borrowing USD 25,000 saves about USD 900 a year.

Public's structure is a federation of entities rather than a single broker, and it is worth understanding which one holds what.

• Open to the Public Investing, Inc. is the broker-dealer, a member of FINRA and SIPC, and handles securities, options, bonds, margin and IRAs. Clearing and custody sit with Apex Clearing Corporation, not in-house. SIPC covers USD 500,000 per customer including a USD 250,000 cash sub-limit.
• Public Advisors LLC is an SEC-registered investment adviser and runs Generated Assets, Direct Indexing and Treasury Accounts — advisory products with their own management fees.
• Jiko Securities, Inc. is a separate FINRA/SIPC broker-dealer that operates the 6-month US Treasury bill account.
• Zero Hash LLC executes and custodies crypto under a NYDFS virtual-currency and money-transmission licence. Public states plainly that crypto is neither FDIC- nor SIPC-insured. Crypto IRAs are custodied by Alto Trust Co., a New Mexico trust company.

The structural weakness compared with the other two brokers here is corporate: Public is privately held. There is no public listing, no exchange-mandated disclosure and no parent with a market capitalisation to point at. The broker-dealer files audited annual reports with the SEC, as all US broker-dealers must, but you cannot read a 10-K. Public was founded in 2019, making it the youngest of the three, and it outsources clearing rather than owning it as moomoo does.

Brokaro found no significant public enforcement action against Public Investing while compiling this record. That is a genuine positive — but the absence of a finding is not a guarantee, and no broker should be described as safe without qualification.

Public is a mobile-first product with a capable web client and no desktop application, and that single fact separates it from Webull and moomoo more than any fee does.

The mobile app is the best-designed in this comparison. It handles genuinely different asset classes — equities, options, corporate bonds, Treasury ladders, crypto — inside one coherent interface, which is harder than it sounds and something neither competitor attempts. The options ticket shows the expected rebate before you confirm, which is an unusually honest piece of interface design. The web client carries the heavier tools: bond screening and laddering, Direct Index configuration, the Alpha AI research assistant and portfolio analytics.

What you do not get is a trader's terminal. There is no Level 2 order-book depth, no multi-monitor workspace, no scripting layer, no depth-of-market ladder and no paper-trading environment. Charting is adequate for position management and thin for technical analysis. If your workflow involves reading the book, moomoo gives you that for free and Public does not offer it at all.

One feature genuinely aimed at advanced users: the Public API and Agentic API, with programmatic order entry and its own rebate schedule. Order routing is also user-selectable — Wholesale routing is free, while Smart Order and Lit-Exchange-Only routing cost USD 0.003 per share, which is an unusually transparent way to expose the payment-for-order-flow trade-off.

Public covers over 9,000 US stocks, ETFs, US stock and index options, corporate and government bonds, US Treasuries, 60+ crypto assets, Traditional and Roth IRAs, Crypto IRAs and a high-yield cash account quoted at 3.30% APY in mid-2026. The Bond Account was advertising a 5.74% yield and the Treasury Account 3.91% at the same point — both variable, both worth re-checking before you act on them.

The fixed-income desk is the standout. Fractional access to corporate bonds means you can build a diversified credit sleeve without USD 1,000 minimums per line, and the Treasury laddering tool is the kind of thing that normally lives at a private bank. Pricing is explicit — 0.10%–0.25% of par on Treasuries, 0.35%–0.50% on corporates — rather than buried in a dealer spread, which is unusual and to Public's credit. The Jiko-operated 6-month T-bill account starts at USD 100.

The gaps are firm. No futures, no spot forex, no CFDs, no spread betting, no mutual funds and no international equities. There is no access to European or Asian exchanges of any kind. Public also has no demo account, so there is no risk-free way to rehearse an options strategy.

Geography is the hard limit: Public accepts US residents only, and account opening requires a Social Security number. There is no EU, UK or DACH entity and none announced. For readers outside the United States, this review is comparison material rather than a shortlist entry.

Opening takes minutes. A US resident supplies identity details and a Social Security number, answers the standard suitability and options-approval questions, and is usually trading the same day. There is no minimum deposit — the only balance thresholds are the regulatory USD 2,000 for margin and USD 25,000 for pattern day trading.

Money movement is the cheapest part of the product on the way in and the most expensive on the way out:

• ACH in and out: USD 0
• Incoming wire: USD 0; outgoing domestic wire: USD 25
• Incoming ACAT: USD 0; outgoing ACAT: USD 100
• Instant withdrawal: up to 3.5% of the amount, minimum USD 1
• Outgoing DRS transfer: USD 115 per security
• Overnight check delivery: USD 50; returned item: USD 30

The asymmetry is deliberate and worth naming: Public makes it free to arrive and comparatively expensive to leave. USD 100 is the highest outgoing ACAT charge among the three brokers reviewed here — Webull and moomoo both sit at USD 75 — and if you hold several DRS-registered positions the exit bill compounds quickly.

The account is USD-only. There are no cards, e-wallets, instant-payment rails or multi-currency wallets; a 0.30% foreign exchange transaction fee applies if a non-USD currency is converted. Electronic statements and confirms are free; paper costs USD 5 and USD 2 respectively.

Public's research has shifted decisively toward AI. Alpha is an AI research assistant that answers questions about holdings, summarises earnings calls and produces market briefings, and Public has layered Agents on top for AI-assisted portfolio construction. Used sceptically, Alpha is a fast way to get oriented in an unfamiliar name; used credulously, it is a confident-sounding machine and should not be the last step before a trade. Underneath the AI layer sit conventional fundamentals, analyst data, earnings calendars and screeners, plus specific bond and Treasury analytics that competitors simply do not have — yield-to-maturity comparisons, ladder modelling and credit filtering.

What is missing is market-microstructure data. No Level 2 depth, no options flow, no institutional-holdings tracker. moomoo gives all three away free. If your process depends on order-book information, Public cannot support it.

Education leans toward the beginner and the income investor rather than the technician. The learn library covers portfolio basics, bond mechanics, options fundamentals and tax-loss harvesting in plain language, and the community feed — Public's original social-investing hook — still carries member commentary and shared positions. Treat that feed as sentiment, not analysis; there is no copy-trading function and no vetting of the people posting.

The structural weakness is the absence of a paper-trading account. For a broker that actively markets options, having no risk-free rehearsal environment is a real gap, and it is the main reason the education rating here sits at 3.4 rather than higher.

Support runs through email and in-app chat during US business hours, Monday to Friday, in English only. Public directs users to support@public.com and publishes help articles at help.public.com. There is no prominently advertised general phone line, no weekend coverage and no non-English service — a narrower set of channels than either moomoo, which staffs a US phone line, or Webull, which advertises round-the-clock chat.

What Public offers instead is documentation. The fee schedule is unusually complete and current — every line item, including the ones that make the broker look worse, is stated with a date stamp — and the disclosures pages name each entity and what it is responsible for. In practice, a well-documented product generates fewer support tickets, and a large share of the questions that send people to a chat window at other brokers are simply answered here in writing.

Sentiment is broadly better than Webull's and roughly comparable with moomoo's, with the app consistently well reviewed in the App Store. Complaints, where they appear, cluster around transfer timelines and identity verification rather than the account-access failures that dominate Webull's reviews.

Our 3.3 rating reflects adequate quality delivered through too few channels. If your expectation is a phone call within business hours to resolve a corporate action or an inherited account, Public is not built for that; if you are comfortable resolving things in writing, it will rarely frustrate you.