The Freetrade Pro is too expensive for me. I don’t invest enough to warrant the fees. My meager stakes would lose 30% if I paid an extra tenner a month. I don’t need an ISA because I already have one elsewhere. Which features do I really need on my GIA? Stop-limit and perhaps a few more are what I need. Others will want something else.
Suggestion
Create a set of pick and mix addons to the accounts:
Sell-Stop-Limit : 0.80 GBP a month
Sell-Limit-Order (whole): 0.80 GBP a month
Sell-Triggered-Order (fractional): 0.80 GBP a month
Buy-Limit-Order (whole): 0.80 GBP a month
Buy-Triggered order (fractional): 0.80 GBP a month
Access to Plus stocks: 6 GBP a month
Clients selecting all of these AddOns would pay 1 new pence more than taking a full Freetrade Pro subscription.
The Addons could be available to all account types: SIPP ISA GIA.
Except, all these ideas may seem nice to the user but are only a road to FT not being a viable business Everyone keeps suggesting ways that FT can make it cheaper to use but forget the fundamental fact that it is not a charity and MUST work as a business.
If they introduced this or the many other systems people keep suggesting to save money then FT would either go bankrupt or, as is the only real option, move the costs elsewhere on the platform. What we would then get is a merry-go-round of IDEAs to bring the cost down
Not only would this be a massive revenue loss for :freetrade:, but it would also confuse the hell out of new users. They’d feel like :freetrade: was penny pinching/nickel-and-diming them. Suddenly, paying £10 or £12 a trade would make sense because at least you weren’t paying confusing fees.
If £10 a month is the equivalent of 30% of your :freetrade: portfolio, just don’t use Plus. It’s not necessary for you. It’s also not necessary to try and convince a company to change their entire fee structure just to benefit you.
If I had a very small portfolio here, I’d just use Plus once every few months to setup any limit orders or whatever I felt necessary and then cancel it. I believe you can only activate it every 3 months after cancellation, so that would be fine.
If £10 is 30% of your account then £0.8 is 2.4% which is still too much to pay for a sell-stop limit. Plus is not for everyone specially when you are starting to invest but it is good value for money as it is.
it’s probably worth remembering that a lot of members in this community are freetrade shareholders and are unlikely to support things that stop freetrade from making money.
they aren’t public yet, they do funding rounds every now and then though. I think the last one was last year, I’m sure there will be another at some point
Everyone keeps suggesting ways that FT can make it cheaper to use but forget the fundamental fact that it is not a charity and MUST work as a business.
