A different way to run a brokerage

We’re still one of the very few brokers that charges zero brokerage on delivery trades. But that’s just one part of it. We don’t send you notifications designed to make you trade more. We don’t push margin funding (MTF) to get you to borrow and trade. We don’t have differential pricing for trading, MTF, or anything else. We don’t cross-sell financial products. We don’t advertise. We don’t track your usage data or mine it to find new ways to extract revenue from you.

We’re able to (not) do all this because we’ve never raised external capital. There are no investors to show growth numbers to, no pressure to justify revenue targets. That freedom is something we don’t take lightly.

It matters more in this business than most. Broking is cyclical, directly tied to how markets are doing, and you genuinely cannot predict when it’s going to be a feast or famine. Layer on top of that the constant regulatory risk. In the last couple of years alone, we’ve watched entire industries disappear overnight because of a single government or RBI regulation. That’s the reality of operating in this space.

And yet, despite not advertising or throwing incentives at people, 25 to 30% of our accounts still come from referrals. Traders and investors who use Zerodha like what they see and tell their friends and family. That number means more to us than most metrics, and we’re genuinely grateful for it.

The temptation to make small tweaks, to nudge users a little harder or squeeze a bit more revenue, exists. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t. But the philosophy we started with on day one has stayed unchanged: don’t do unto others what you don’t want done unto you.

The only way we can stick to these philosophies is by not having to spend on acquiring customers in the first place. If we were burning money on advertising and incentives, we’d need to find ways to make it back, and that’s where the compromises start. We can offer zero brokerage on equity investing, free direct mutual fund investments, and dirt-cheap intraday rates. Our brokerage has stayed flat even as the rest of the industry has revised theirs. In fact, if we’d simply adjusted for inflation, we’d have to charge ₹50 today.

The way we think about it is that as long as we offer genuinely good products and don’t break your trust, we’ll be fine. We’d rather grow with our customers than at their expense.

If you’re happy with Zerodha, we’d love it if you referred a friend or family member and helped them start their investing journey. Word of mouth is what got us here, and it’s what we’re betting on going forward.

Just out of curiosity, we looked at how much Zerodha customers saved in brokerage because we don’t charge for equity delivery trades.