Trade Republic

The headline is genuinely simple. Every manual trade in shares, ETFs, bonds, crypto or certificates costs EUR 1.00 - described as an external settlement cost rather than a commission, because Trade Republic passes it through rather than keeping it. There is no percentage component, no minimum and no maximum, and if one order fills in several partial executions on the same day you are still charged once. Savings plans cost EUR 0, at any amount from EUR 1, across roughly 4,900 instruments.

Since July 2026 there are two routes:

• Best Price (default, EUR 1.00): Trade Republic is your counterparty and fills the order at the best available price it derives from an aggregated book across the relevant liquid exchanges.
• Direct Price (EUR 2.00): you choose the venue yourself from the 22 exchanges currently listed, including Xetra, Euronext, NYSE and Nasdaq; which of them are offered depends on the instrument, and four more, among them London and Tokyo, are marked 'available soon'.

That second euro is the price of removing a conflict of interest, and for larger orders it is usually worth paying.

What is absent is a long list: no custody fee, no platform fee, no account fee, no inactivity fee, no withdrawal fee, no minimum deposit. Cash earns interest - 2.5% p.a. in Germany and around 3% p.a. in several other markets, ECB-linked and variable.

What you cannot see is the important part. Trade Republic does not publish its spread. With PFOF banned across the EU from 30 June 2026, spread income replaced roughly the 30% of revenue that order-flow payments used to provide. On a euro-denominated ETF that spread is likely small; on a US share bought through Best Price, where the currency conversion is folded into the quoted euro price rather than billed separately, it is unmeasurable from the outside. Estimates in the 0.1-1.0% range circulate, and none of them are verifiable. Assume a EUR 1.00 headline plus an unknown but non-zero spread, and use Direct Price when the order is large enough for the difference to matter. For a US share, Direct Price can route the order to Nasdaq or NYSE, where the currency is converted at the moment of execution and the trade confirmation shows the rate applied; Trade Republic discloses no FX fee or markup on either route.

Trade Republic is not a broker that partners with a bank - it is the bank. Trade Republic Bank GmbH received a full banking licence from the European Central Bank in December 2023 and is supervised as a credit institution under the Single Supervisory Mechanism, jointly with BaFin and the Deutsche Bundesbank. That is a materially stricter capital, governance and reporting regime than the investment-firm licence most neobrokers hold.

What that buys you:

• Cash is covered to EUR 100,000 per client by the German statutory deposit guarantee scheme, held directly by Trade Republic rather than parked at a partner bank.
• Securities are held in custody as your property and are returned rather than compensated in an insolvency. Where delivery failed, 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 the maximum you can lose on any Trade Republic product is the amount invested. Even the knock-out and factor certificates cap at total loss of the position.

The transparency gap is that Trade Republic is privately held. There is no quarterly filing, no published capital ratio you can look up as an outsider, and no share price to act as a market signal. Against that: the ECB does not hand out banking licences casually, and the firm reported more than 8 million clients and over EUR 100 billion in client assets when it opened national branches in France, Spain and Italy in January 2025.

One structural point deserves flagging rather than reassurance. Under the post-PFOF model the default execution route makes Trade Republic your counterparty. That is legal, disclosed and BaFin-authorised, but it means the firm's revenue comes from the spread on your trade. Best execution obligations apply; independent verification does not exist yet.

The app is the product, and it is very good at what it sets out to do. Search, tap, choose an amount, confirm - a first-time investor can place a real order within a minute of opening the account, and setting up a savings plan takes about as long. The design is deliberately calm: no confetti, no streak counters, no leaderboards. Portfolio, watchlist, savings plans, the cash balance and the card all live in the same place, which is the whole reason people consolidate here.

Since July 2026 there is also a web terminal, which adds charting, watchlists and a screener in the browser. It is a genuine improvement for anyone who dislikes researching on a phone, but it is a companion surface rather than a workstation. There is no native desktop client and no public API, so algorithmic strategies and portfolio tooling are out of reach.

The limits show up quickly if you actually trade. Order types stop at market, limit and stop - no OCO, no bracket orders, no trailing stops, no conditional logic. Charting is adequate for a sanity check and useless for technical analysis. There is no depth-of-book view, which follows logically from the Best Price model: on the default route there is no order book to show you, only Trade Republic's quote.

The honest summary: as an interface for putting money into the market on a schedule, this is best in class. As a platform for deciding what to buy or for managing a position actively, it is not competing.

Trade Republic covers five asset classes and covers them broadly rather than deeply:

• Shares: more than 9,000, spanning European and US listings, with fractional trading from EUR 1.
• ETFs: more than 2,000, including the full iShares, Vanguard, Xtrackers and Amundi core ranges, all available in free savings plans.
• Bonds: around 500 European and US government and corporate bonds, in denominations down to roughly EUR 1. This is genuinely unusual - most retail investors cannot access the bond market below institutional ticket sizes, and bond savings plans are a Trade Republic original.
• Crypto: around 50 coins, tradable and available in savings plans, commission-free with the usual EUR 1.00 settlement cost and an undisclosed spread.
• Derivatives: roughly 10,000 knock-out certificates, factor certificates and vanilla warrants from HSBC, Societe Generale, UBS and Vontobel.

What is missing matters as much as what is there: no exchange-traded options, no futures, no mutual funds, no spot forex, no CFDs and no direct exchange access on the default route. If you want to write a covered call, hedge with a Bund future or hold an actively managed fund, this is the wrong account.

The savings-plan engine is the reason most people are here. Recurring investments in shares, ETFs, bonds and crypto run at EUR 0 per execution with fractional amounts from EUR 1, across roughly 4,900 instruments. No other pricing model in Europe makes a EUR 25 monthly contribution economically sensible in quite the same way, and that single fact carries most of the case for the account.

Opening takes about ten minutes and never leaves the app. You enter your details, answer the appropriateness questions, identify yourself by video call or national eID, and sign digitally. There is no printing, no posting and no branch visit, and the account is usually tradable the same day. The minimum deposit is zero - you can begin with a EUR 1 savings plan.

Funding is where the banking licence pays off. Every account gets a personal German IBAN, so the brokerage account doubles as a current account: salary can land in it, direct debits can run from it, and a Visa debit card spends from it. Cash sitting in the account earns interest rather than nothing - 2.5% p.a. in Germany on the whole balance once activated in the app, around 3% p.a. in several other markets, ECB-linked and variable - and Saveback returns up to 1% of card spending as an investment, capped at EUR 15 per month when you save at least EUR 50 monthly. Trade Republic says the payout combines interest from partner banks with dividends from liquidity funds, and that those funds carry market risk.

Deposits arrive instantly by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay, and within a business day by SEPA transfer. SEPA is free; card, Apple Pay and Google Pay top-ups cost 1% of the amount - the price list bills it as instantly available trading balance, so a EUR 1,000 card deposit costs EUR 10 that a free SEPA transfer would not. Withdrawals go to the linked reference account and typically take one to two business days. ATM cash withdrawals are free from EUR 100 and cost EUR 1.00 below that.

One friction to plan for: the account is euro-only, with no multi-currency balances, so every foreign-currency trade involves a currency conversion - embedded in the euro price on Best Price, made at the moment of execution on a Direct Price order to a non-euro venue, and with no disclosed markup either way. Leaving, by contrast, is cheap. An outgoing securities transfer is free of charge, plus any third-party costs the receiving custodian passes on - the EUR 25 in the price list belongs to postal instructions, voluntary custody confirmations and voluntary tax reporting, not to moving a portfolio.

Research is the weakest part of an otherwise polished product. Instrument pages give you a price chart, key figures, a short company description, dividend history and a news feed. There is no analyst consensus, no target prices, no earnings estimates, no fundamental screener and no proprietary research desk. If you want to compare two ETFs on tracking difference or check whether a stock is expensive relative to its sector, you will do it somewhere else.

The July 2026 web terminal improved things - it added a screener and better charting - but the underlying data layer is still shallow compared with what a full-service broker bundles in.

Education follows the same pattern. Trade Republic publishes clear introductory material on ETFs, compounding, diversification and how savings plans work, and the writing is genuinely good at demystifying a first investment. What it is not is a curriculum: no structured learning paths, no regular webinars, no certification, no options or technical-analysis content, and no demo account, so there is nowhere to practise before committing real money.

The design logic is coherent. Trade Republic's thesis is that most people should buy a broad index fund every month and stop reading, and the product is built to make that easy rather than to make you a better analyst. The company even flags the behavioural risk itself: checking a portfolio app daily is a good way to undo a passive strategy. Just know that if your process needs inputs, this account supplies almost none of them.

This is the single clearest weakness, and it shows up unmistakably in public sentiment. Trade Republic scores roughly 3.3 out of 5 on Trustpilot across more than 33,000 reviews - a polarised distribution: the score is dragged down by a large block of one-star reviews rather than by mediocre ones.

The split is easy to explain. If nothing goes wrong, the product is excellent and people rate it accordingly. If something does go wrong, help starts inside the app. Trade Republic says support is available by phone or live chat, 24 hours a day, both started from the app, with its own staff rather than chat bots and at no extra fee. Its support page lists no public number to dial, and there are no branches to walk into. That page still carries a note, dated April 2026, that the service is being rolled out to everyone in the coming weeks; the homepage, as retrieved in September 2026, states round-the-clock call and chat without that caveat. The complaints cluster on a small number of recurring situations: incoming transfers rejected or left hanging for days when the sender name does not match exactly, portfolio transfers in from another broker stalling, accounts locked pending verification, and tax documents arriving late.

Language coverage is reasonable across the 18 markets - German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese - and the company has opened national branches in France, Spain and Italy, which should improve local escalation over time.

The realistic framing: you are trading a support desk for a price. At EUR 1.00 per order with free savings plans and interest on cash, Trade Republic cannot fund the kind of service a EUR 10 per trade bank offers. For a set-and-forget savings plan that is a defensible trade. If you expect to need help with anything unusual - an inheritance, a complex corporate action, a cross-border move - factor in that it may take days, not minutes.