Alternatives to DEGIRO

DEGIRO

🇳🇱 Netherlands

Five former BinckBank employees founded DEGIRO in Amsterdam in 2008 with a straightforward premise: the cost of executing a stock trade is almost entirely software and settlement infrastructure, so why are retail investors still paying as if someone is physically handling their order? The incumbents had no good answer. DEGIRO pivoted to retail in 2013, charged per-trade fees that undercut traditional brokers by factors of five to ten — not percentage points — and expanded to nine European countries within a year. What the current description calls a "subscription model" is actually something simpler and more disruptive: just very low per-trade costs, with no monthly fee required to access serious markets. By 2025 the platform had 3.5 million customers across 18 European countries, having grown from under a million at the time of its 2020 acquisition by German broker flatex AG for €250 million. The merged entity, now listed in Frankfurt as flatexDEGIRO AG, posted €560 million in revenue in 2025 with €160 million in net profit — numbers that tend to surprise people who think of DEGIRO as a scrappy Dutch startup rather than one of Europe's larger listed financial technology companies. The product has always been deliberately unglamorous. No gamification, no social investing features, no notifications congratulating you for saving €5. DEGIRO is built for people who want direct access to multiple exchanges across Europe and the US, real market data, and the ability to construct an actual portfolio without paying away a meaningful percentage of their returns in transaction costs. It speaks the language of investors who already know what they want to buy and don't need the platform to hold their hand while they buy it. That positioning — utilitarian, functional, priced for volume — has aged well as the novelty of investing apps has worn off and a generation of European retail investors has matured beyond the onboarding experience into actually wanting to invest efficiently. The broader comparison to the neobank wave is fair. Where much of European fintech spent the 2010s competing on brand, lifestyle positioning, and the aesthetics of a well-designed debit card, DEGIRO competed on economics. It's not trying to be your financial companion or teach you to think about money differently. It set out to make capital markets participation cheap enough to be rational for ordinary Europeans with modest portfolios — and it accomplished that more completely than almost any other platform on the continent. Robo-advisors and savings apps have their place, but there remains an enormous and persistent appetite for straightforward, low-cost access to public markets. DEGIRO found that market early and has held it.

Founded 2013