A 7-minute lesson
How “free” platforms actually make their money
No names, no league tables — patterns only. Any word with a dotted underline can be tapped.
If a platform charges you nothing to buy shares… who's paying the staff?
Nobody works for free. The only question is who's paying, and how.
The quiet ways “free” pays
Buy an American share and your pounds have to become dollars first. A small percentage is taken on the way through, and again on the way back.
Tiny on one trade. Enormous across millions of them — which is rather the point.
Your idle
Money sitting in your account waiting to be invested still earns interest. The platform holds it, so the platform earns it.
They may pass a little of it back to you. They keep the rest, and they'd rather you didn't notice.
Some platforms lend the shares you own to large institutions, who pay a fee for borrowing them.
You usually still own them and still get the dividends — but your shares are quietly working a second job.
The
The gap between the price to buy and the price to sell at the same moment. It exists on every trade, and nobody calls it a fee.
You pay it the instant you buy, before anything has gone up or down.
The main event: the nudge upstairs
Free share dealing is often the shop window. The profits frequently come from somewhere else entirely: , and trades, where the platform earns from every trade and often from the spread itself.
- The riskier products sit one tap away, inside the same app you already trust.
- The wording makes it feel like progress: you've mastered shares, now try trading.
- Notifications, colourful gain screenshots and "pro" labels all point the same direction.
- Nothing is hidden. It's simply arranged so the next step is the profitable one.
These firms are legally required to publish how many of their retail customers lose money on these products. It is printed on their own websites.
65–80%
of retail accounts lose money trading them. Not a critic's estimate — their own disclosure.
The free part gets you in the door. The profitable part is hoping you'll wander upstairs.
There's a watch-out on exactly this, if you'd like the red flags in one place.
Penny's close
None of this is illegal, and free platforms can still be a fine place to buy shares. Just know how the shop makes its money — so you notice when you're being guided somewhere. Saverz works differently: members pay £4.99 a month, so I work for you and nobody else. No commissions, no upsells, no upstairs.
The other half of this
This lesson is about the money you can't see. The companion piece shows the charges you can — percentage, flat monthly and commission-free, side by side for a year.
Every revenue source here is disclosed publicly by the firms themselves, and the loss-rate figures are a legal requirement on their own marketing. I describe patterns across the industry, never a particular company — and I never tell you where to buy.