It’s been 10 years since we went zero brokerage on stocks, ETFs, and more. Back in 2015, if you had asked whether Zerodha would keep brokerage on investing at zero in 2025, I would’ve probably said no.

The backstory of how we decided to go zero is a bit funny. K(Kailash, CTO) and I were sitting at Bengaluru airport on our way to Kochi, talking about the need to change Zerodha’s image of being meant only for traders. We had just launched Kite.

We did some back-of-the-envelope math to calculate the revenue we were letting go of, and we decided to make investing free on November 30, 2015, on a whim. We published this post on December 1st, and the rest is history. Zerodha customers have saved thousands of crores in brokerage because of this.

By the way, Zerodha = Zero + rodha (barriers in Sanskrit), not zero + brokerage. We charged a brokerage fee for investing with Zerodha for the first five years. 😀

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