Robinhood makes $150 million a year just from instant withdrawal fee
I just discovered that Robinhood will generate approximately $150 million (~₹1,300 crores) in revenue from the fees it charges for processing instant client withdrawals. Their cost to process these is around $35–40 million, which means a clean $100 million to the bottom line, and that’s just from instant withdrawals. 😬
As an Indian startup with some scale, founders dream of generating revenue like this from non-core products. Hence the rush to introduce everything: loans, insurance, payments, and other financial services. But nothing really works 😀 outside the core offering. It just shows how far behind India is compared to the US when it comes to customers willing to pay for add-ons.
By the way, I’m still shocked that people pay 1.75% on an instant withdrawal transaction. This really shows how broken the US banking system is. Even in 2025, there’s still no full-fledged instant payments system like UPI — most fund transfers take a couple of days!
For comparison, we don’t charge at Zeodha clients for deposits (thanks to UPI) or instant withdrawals. We’ve processed over ₹50,000 crores in instant withdrawals in <2 years, at zero cost. 🙈