A Decade of Zero Brokerage: How Zerodha’s 2015 Gamble Reshaped India’s Retail Investing Culture

Image taken from livemint.com

Zerodha has hit a rare milestone in India’s financial markets — ten full years of offering zero brokerage on equity delivery trades. What began as an impulsive decision by co-founder and CEO Nithin Kamath in November 2015 has since evolved into one of the most transformative shifts in the country’s retail investing landscape.

Kamath, reflecting on the journey in a post on X, said he never imagined Zerodha would keep equity investing free all the way to 2025. But doing so has saved customers “thousands of crores” in brokerage fees and helped democratise access to the markets. The idea, he revealed, was born during a conversation at the Bengaluru airport with co-founder and CTO Kailash Nadh, just as the duo were boarding a flight to Kochi. Zerodha had recently launched its trading platform Kite and wanted to broaden its appeal beyond active traders.

That airport conversation led to some quick mental calculations on lost revenue, and by November 30, 2015, Zerodha announced it would make all equity investments “absolutely brokerage free” from the next day. The blog post releasing the announcement pitched the idea as part of a bigger mission — to deepen India’s capital markets at a time when the country had fewer than one million active investors. With 65% of the population below 35 back then, Zerodha argued that India needed a cultural shift that made investing more accessible and appealing to younger citizens.

Kamath also revisited a long-standing misconception: the name “Zerodha” was not based on “zero brokerage.” Instead, it was formed from “zero” and the Sanskrit word “rodha,” meaning barriers — signalling the company’s ambition to remove obstacles to investing. In its early years, the firm did charge brokerage on investments before later dropping it entirely.

The zero-fee model did not come without challenges. To sustain it, Zerodha built alternative revenue channels over the years. These include income from institutions accessing Kite’s trading APIs, margin lending on equity delivery, and continued brokerage fees on intraday and F&O trades, capped at ₹20 or 0.01% per executed order. This balanced approach allowed it to scale while remaining profitable, even as it reduced entry costs for millions of new investors.

A decade later, Zerodha’s bet on zero brokerage has not just paid off — it has reshaped expectations across the industry. It lowered the threshold for participation, encouraged younger investors to take their first steps in the market and helped redefine the broader ecosystem of how India trades and invests today.