MEGATHREAD: New subscription plans šŸ”

You can always transfer your isa

Thanks, selling at a loss but I guess I have to weigh the pros and cons.

Is there and advantage of closing ISA and then re purchasing the stock in GIA?

I have not been buying any stocks and have been paying the monthly fee so I believe I have been loosing money by having this isa anyway

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Make it £50/year for standard and 100£/year for plus and it would be a very good proposition in my opinion.

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FT aren’t going to change anything based on comments here - They will have spent a lot of time modelling this. It feels like in the current environment they are more concerned about revenue per user, rather than just adding users as an end in itself. It makes sense.

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What is a bit naughty is Freetrade doing a £50 promotion to get people to open an ISA, and then putting the price up less than 6 months later to claw that money back

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As a long time ISA customer I’m really disappointed in this. I don’t want the ā€˜Plus’ features and if I did I’d pay for it.

Just a real kick in the teeth to ISA holders and making me consider my options.

Maybe you could’ve locked in the old ISA price for loyal long time customers that have helped you to establish your product? Just a thought.

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ISA increase will make commercial sense. The additional income from the price increase will outweigh the income lost from customers who leave. It’s a pretty sticky customer base, particularly considering the exit barriers on the ISA. And those who leave are likely low value unprofitable customers anyway.

The cheaper plus account will mean more SIPP customers, which will build greater long term engagement and a more sustainable path to profitability. Again, higher exit barriers, stickier backbook = higher ARPU.

Personally I have no intention of opening an ISA/SIPP here, so will carry on as is with my ETFs and the odd UK stock. But from a business perspective, it makes sense - you can see that in the opinion split between FT shareholders and non-shareholders.

And I’m also fairly happy from a user perspective. A bankrupt broker isn’t something I’d like to see, so a path to profit is beneficial for all of us to one extent or another.

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Agreed re path to profitability.

I was a member of Orca and that went belly up.

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This.

The signs were there when surveys came out about what features you’d pay for.

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Also one piece of advice from me- if you want more people in your standard plan, start thinking of ways to improve functionality.

DRIP, dividend tracking features, auto invest are just some things on top of my head that would make people(me included) pay some extra to have access to.

Especially a separate tab for dividends would be great. A place where you can see how many dividends you are getting month by month with maybe a nice graph and a yearly/monthly breakdown.

There are a lot of services that already do that and people pay fees for it. You can easily develop those kinds of things in house and attract more investors to the app.

The more value you can add to your plans the broader market you can attract, I really hope we see some improvement in time in terms of functionality.

Overall I like the structure of the pricing plans, but you need to work on the perks people get for signing up to standard.

At the moment if you don’t use an ISA there is nothing much enticing there. The only thing is you are getting locked out of certain stocks, but I doubt people will pay extra to access certain stocks that are already available for free in other providers.

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You’re very repetitive…

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Good news for me, as I currently have Plus + SIPP.
So if I maintain £4K in cash, then effectively everything is free.

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Another option to look at it.

Standard is now plus, and plus is SIPP. If you were paying for plus and don’t need a SIPP there’s little reason to pay for it. Downgrade to standard and you save Ā£5/month

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This is ultimately a question only you can answer, yes the extra Ā£2 isn’t ideal if you’re at the beginning of your investing journey but in the long run having an ISA is orders of magnitude better. When you invest you’re hoping for your stocks to rise, if they do to well you’ll need to file tax returns, but only when investing outside of an ISA.

I can’t tell you what’s right for you but if you’re healer to build wealth for long term financial security then ride out the short term price rise and it’ll be worth it in the long run.

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If I have a look on the stock/ETF google sheet I can conclude the following:

  • 4721 stocks+ETF options available to BASIC user before the introduction of the new Subscription plan.
  • 3196 stocks+ETF options would be moved from BASIC to Standard/Plus after the introduction of the new Subscription plan.

As BASIC subscriber I would see the number of investment options going from 4721 to just 1525 :frowning: :frowning:

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You’re literally getting a free service? Perhaps they receive some FX fees for those who invest/trade in US stocks but otherwise I don’t see how anyone can complain about less stocks in Basic when you literally don’t pay anything for the service.

Freetrade need to become profitable or they won’t be here in 5 years time (maybe less). Those on Basic who have no intention of ever upgrading to Standard/Plus are costing Freetrade money.

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Revenue sharing would be more palatable than the old plan, but I hope it would also mean an option to opt out.

I’m still not particularly comfortable with the idea of securities lending. With the new standard plan having exposure to the full list of stocks I’m now thinking about downgrading my Plus plan to Standard instead of staying on Plus and moving my SIPP over to Freetrade. This is simply because of the possibility of compulsory securities lending in SIPP.

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There is an opt-out, of sorts, it’s called an ISA. I hold all of my investments with :freetrade: and while I don’t care about sec lending it won’t affect all of my ISA stocks.

Sec lending is part of an active and healthy market, if you’re holding an ETF / Fund of any kind they’re likely doing it already.

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Currently, a fiver will kill my current divs by 20%.

I bought into FT for GIA access to US stocks. Many of my earlier and current positions were caps hovering just above $1 billion, but these dropped because of the general drop putting these <1 billion and now out of scope of the new FT US list.

I’m guessing they limited us basic worthless people to 1500 stocks in the hope we either upgrade or leave and stop costing them money :joy::see_no_evil:

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