Our philosophies
Our principles—customer interest over growth, transparency, and our product development philosophies—are the reasons why millions of customers have come to trust us over the years. Today, 1.6+ crore customers trust Zerodha with ~ ₹6 lakh crores of equity investments and contribute to 15% of daily retail exchange volumes in India.
Central to our philosophies are: not advertising, spamming, pushing, or inducing customers to take actions that are not in their interest.
As a for-profit company, we have no external investor pressure, thanks to us being bootstrapped and profitable from our early days. Inside Zerodha, employees do not have perverse incentives as we do not impose any metric-based growth targets; be it accounts opened, app install counts, orders placed, or revenue generated.
Our drive, thus has been an unwavering focus on depth and quality. From an unknown upstart in 2010 to serving crores of customers, word-of-mouth referrals are what have driven our growth.
Practices
No invasive app permissions
Our mobile apps only seek permissions that are necessary for their functioning. There is no direct or indirect tracking or profiling of customer behaviour in any form.
| Permission | Kite (trading) | Coin (mutual funds) |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | (Optional) For profile picture selection. | (Optional) For downloading reports. |
| SMS | – | (Optional) For UPI registration. |
| Telephone | – | (Optional) For UPI registration. |
| Camera | (Optional) For profile picture selection. | (Optional) For UPI QR scanning. |
| Network access | Elementary | Elementary |
| View network connections | To check network status | To check network status |
| Use biometric hardware | For biometric 2Factor authentication. | For biometric 2Factor authentication. |
| Show notifications | To receive and show FCM notifications | To receive and show FCM notifications |
| Ask to ignore battery optimisations | (Optional) To stream live market data in the background | – |
| Prevent phone from sleeping | To keep the phone from sleeping when live charts are being viewed | – |
| *We use Firebase for crash reporting, which is in the process of being replaced with a self-hosted solution. | ||
No third party trackers
We don’t use third-party marketing "pixels" or trackers that are usually used for behavioural tracking and profiling. On our websites, we use on-premise self-hosted tools for basic anonymised statistics. We don’t follow our customers around the internet via third-party trackers.
No annoying user "engagement" spam
We do not subject our customers to incessant push notifications, UI dark patterns, and gimmicks designed to "engage" them. In fact, we fundamentally do not believe in the idea of user "engagement" and instead practice what we call user-disengagement. Apart from important operational and regulatory announcements, we have a rule of thumb of sending a maximum of 4 push notifications a month for product and business updates.
No unnecessary cross-selling
We don't cross-sell personal loans, aggressively push leveraged products, or hawk unrelated financial or other offerings that are not meaningful to customers' trading and investing experience. We are not in the business of monetizing user attention.
No gate-keeping
Varsity is one of the largest open financial courseware in the world today. Since its launch in 2014, it has been freely accessible and open to all. Be it RupeeTales books, or Varsity Junior animated series for children, or the classic Innerworth newsletters, all our high-quality, free, educational material has been easily accessible. No forced sign-up, no dark patterns, and no push to open a Zerodha account.
Transparency
When we first introduced our brokerage calculator in 2011, it was a radical step in price transparency in an otherwise opaque industry. Today, it is a standard offering. From that, to the first mainstream commission-free direct mutual platform in 2017, to full public disclosure of the regulatory filings on technical glitches, we have always had transparency at the heart of the business.
But ...
"If it is free, then you are the product" ..
Not at Zerodha. We offer equity delivery and a wide range of products for free, charging only a nominal annual maintenance fee. More importantly, the very existence of this webpage describing our practices over 15+ years of operations, is in itself a USP and competitive advantage—an offering to our customers.
Tracking, profiling, and user "engagement" are standard practices globally
We don't care.