Scalable Capital

Scalable sells two plans, and the right one depends entirely on how often you trade.

FREE Broker costs EUR 0 a month. Orders cost EUR 0.99 on EIX - EUR 0 for purchases of PRIME ETFs from EUR 250 - and up to EUR 1.99 on gettex and Xetra. Savings plans are free. PRIME+ Broker costs EUR 4.99 a month and drops EIX orders of EUR 250 or more to EUR 0, with EUR 0.99 below that threshold. The break-even is around five orders a month; above that PRIME+ is cheaper, and it also buys wider statutory deposit cover for Overnight cash (spread across Scalable and four partner banks), a cheaper credit line and cheaper instant deposits.

Xetra used to be the outlier: EUR 3.99 plus a venue fee of 0.01% of order value with a EUR 1.50 minimum, so a typical Xetra order landed near EUR 5.49 on either plan.

That changed on 1 September 2026. gettex and Xetra now both cost up to EUR 1.99 per order, the same on every plan, and the Xetra venue fee is gone. EIX keeps its EUR 0.99 / free-with-PRIME+ terms. The direction is clear: gettex has lost its price advantage, Xetra has become viable, and EIX - the venue where Scalable is the market maker - is now the cheapest route. If your orders were free on gettex under PRIME+, they are not any more; move them to EIX or accept EUR 1.99.

Other lines worth knowing:

• Savings plans: EUR 0 on every plan, from EUR 1, with fractional execution on nine dates a month.
• Crypto ETPs carry a spread surcharge of 0.99% (FREE) or 0.69% (PRIME+) on top of the order fee.
• Funds: no front-end load on more than 3,800 mutual funds.
• Instant deposits cost 0.99% (FREE) or 0.69% (PRIME+) of the amount, but only on the first EUR 5,000 - at most EUR 49.50 or EUR 34.50, with every euro above that free; ordinary SEPA is free.
• No custody fee, no inactivity fee, no withdrawal fee, no minimum deposit.

What is not disclosed is the currency component inside a euro-quoted foreign share. There is no FX line on the contract note because the trade never leaves euro - which means the cost exists but cannot be measured from the fee schedule.

Scalable's regulatory position changed materially in 2025 and the old reviews describing it as a front end for Baader Bank are out of date.

Scalable Capital Bank GmbH received a full banking licence from the European Central Bank in September 2025, making it a CRR credit institution supervised by the ECB under the Single Supervisory Mechanism, together with BaFin and the Deutsche Bundesbank. In November 2025 all client securities were migrated from Baader Bank into Scalable's own custody. Baader's only remaining role is market maker on gettex.

What that means for a client:

• Cash is covered to EUR 100,000 per client per bank under the German statutory deposit guarantee. PRIME+ balances are distributed across Scalable Capital Bank and several partner banks under a 'one account, multiple banks' model, which Scalable states extends statutory coverage to as much as 5 x EUR 100,000.
• Securities are client property held in custody, returned rather than compensated in an insolvency. Where securities could not be delivered, the German investor compensation scheme covers 90% of the claim up to EUR 20,000.
• There is no margin account and no CFD book, so no product in the account can generate a loss larger than the amount invested. The securities-backed credit line is collateralised and subject to a collateral call rather than an open-ended liability.

Two honest caveats. Scalable is privately held, so there is no quarterly filing or listed share price to serve as an outside signal - you are relying on ECB supervision rather than public market scrutiny. And vertical integration cuts both ways: Scalable now handles the client relationship, trading, clearing, settlement and custody itself, and acts as single market maker on EIX. That removes counterparty layers, but it also concentrates every function inside one firm.

There is a web platform and a mobile app, and one login covers the broker, the Overnight cash account, the Scalable Wealth robo-advisor and the credit line. There is no desktop terminal and no public API.

The web platform is well organised for the job it is designed for: portfolio overview with sensible performance attribution, savings plans that take under a minute to create or amend, and an order ticket that shows you the venue and the resulting fee before you commit. The consolidated view across broker, cash and managed portfolios is the strongest single argument for the platform - very few European providers show all three in one place.

Where it stops short is active trading. Charting is serviceable rather than analytical, order types cover market, limit and stop but not conditional or bracket structures, and there is no depth-of-book view. Users also report the platform slowing down during high-volatility sessions, which is exactly when it matters most - not a fatal flaw for a monthly investor, a real one for anyone reacting to news.

The mobile app is the better daily surface: fast, clean, complete parity with the web platform, and the quickest route to adjust a savings plan. There is no demo account on either surface, so there is no risk-free way to try the order flow first.

One structural point about routing: on EIX, the venue Scalable steers you toward with its cheapest pricing, Scalable itself acts as single market maker. Your execution price is therefore set by your broker. Best-execution rules apply, and you can route to Xetra instead, but the cheap route and the conflicted route are the same route.

Scalable's catalogue is broad in instruments and narrow in geography.

The instrument side is genuinely strong:

• More than 8,000 shares, with savings plans on around 4,500 of them.
• More than 2,700 ETFs, all available in free savings plans - the deepest ETF savings-plan catalogue in Europe.
• More than 3,800 mutual funds without the front-end load, which matters if you hold legacy actively managed positions and want them in the same custody account.
• More than 625,000 derivatives - warrants, knock-outs and certificates from the major issuers.
• Crypto ETPs on Bitcoin, Ethereum and others, plus bonds, commodities, precious metals and private-market exposure through ELTIFs.

The geographic side is the constraint. Everything trades on exactly three venues: the European Investor Exchange (EIX) in Hanover, gettex in Munich and Xetra in Frankfurt. There is no direct access to Nasdaq, NYSE, the LSE or any Asian market. You can buy Apple, but you buy it in euro from a German market maker during German trading hours, not on Nasdaq. For a buy-and-hold investor that is usually irrelevant; for anyone trading US earnings reactions or needing US market hours, it is disqualifying.

Also absent: no exchange-traded options, no futures, no spot forex, no CFDs, no short selling. Crypto is ETP exposure, not spot coins - you never hold keys.

Savings plans are where the catalogue turns into a product. Executions run on nine dates a month with fractional purchasing from EUR 1 and zero execution fee on every plan, across ETFs, shares, funds and crypto ETPs. That combination - free, fractional, and this broad - is the reason Scalable sits at the top of most German ETF comparisons.

Opening takes roughly 10-15 minutes online. You complete the application, answer the appropriateness questions, identify yourself by video call or national eID, and sign digitally. The securities account is normally usable within one business day. There is no minimum deposit; a EUR 1 transfer verifies the link to your reference bank account.

Funding is SEPA-only and euro-only. There are no card deposits, no e-wallets and no multi-currency balances. An ordinary SEPA transfer credits in one to two business days and is free; an instant deposit, which raises your buying power for securities purchases before the direct debit is value-dated, costs 0.99% of the amount on the FREE Broker and 0.69% on PRIME+, charged on the first EUR 5,000 only - every euro above that is free, so the charge tops out at EUR 49.50 or EUR 34.50. Because of that cap it weighs most on small deposits: on the FREE Broker it is 0.99% (EUR 9.90) on EUR 1,000, against under 0.1% (EUR 49.50) on EUR 50,000.

The cash structure is worth understanding because it drives the interest you earn. Money sitting in the broker clearing account earns 0%. Money in the separate Scalable Overnight account earns 2.60% p.a., variable, calculated daily and paid monthly, on unlimited cash - the same with or without PRIME+. Transfers between the two are real-time, so the discipline is simply to keep uninvested cash in Overnight and move it across when you place an order. What PRIME+ changes is where that cash is held: with PRIME+ it is spread across Scalable and four partner banks for up to 5 x EUR 100,000 of statutory deposit cover; without PRIME+ it goes to banks with EUR 100,000 of statutory cover each or to UCITS money market funds, and any one of them can hold the whole balance. A money market fund is not a deposit and carries market risk.

Withdrawals go back to the reference account, are free, and take one to two business days. Savings-plan contributions run by direct debit, so the whole flow can be automated once and left alone. For German residents, Abgeltungsteuer is withheld and remitted automatically and annual tax certificates are issued - though users regularly report those documents arriving late in peak season. Outside Germany, tax handling is your own responsibility.

Scalable sits between the neobrokers, which offer nearly nothing, and the full-service brokers, which bundle analyst research. It is closer to the middle than either.

The genuinely useful part is portfolio analytics. The platform breaks a portfolio down by asset class, region, sector and currency, shows contribution to performance, and does it across the broker account and any Scalable Wealth mandate together. For someone running a three-fund portfolio and wanting to know whether they are accidentally 60% US technology, that is worth more than an analyst note.

ETF selection tooling is the other strength, which follows from the business: with 2,700 ETFs in savings plans, Scalable has to help you choose. Filters on index, replication method, distribution policy, TER, fund size and domicile are all there and work properly.

What is missing is single-stock research: no analyst consensus, no target prices, no earnings estimates, no proprietary equity coverage. News is aggregated rather than curated.

Education is solid on fundamentals and German-specific practicalities - how Abgeltungsteuer works, what a Freistellungsauftrag does, how savings plans compound, how ETFs differ from active funds - and Scalable's own market commentary is written by people who ran quantitative portfolios rather than by a copywriter. There is no structured curriculum, no webinar series worth the name and no demo account. Adequate for the investor Scalable is built for; thin for anyone who wants to be taught to trade.

Support is chat and email only. There is no telephone line for broker clients, no branch network and no weekend cover. Coverage runs on business days, in German and English with additional language support in the Italian, Spanish, French and Dutch markets.

The recurring complaint in user reviews is response time, and it clusters in two places. The first is tax documentation: annual Steuerbescheinigungen and loss-offset certificates are reported as arriving late during peak filing season, which is precisely when they are needed. The second is anything non-standard - inbound portfolio transfers, corporate actions, account changes after a move abroad, inheritance cases. These generate ticket threads rather than conversations, and users report waits measured in days.

Straightforward questions get handled competently, and the help centre is better written than most - many routine issues genuinely resolve without contacting anyone.

The fair reading is that support is sized for the price. A broker charging EUR 0-4.99 a month cannot staff a phone desk, and Scalable has chosen to spend on product and licensing instead. That is a defensible trade for a savings plan you check quarterly. It is a poor one if you hold a large or complicated portfolio and expect to reach a named person quickly. Anyone in that position should keep expectations - or a second broker relationship - accordingly.