Lightyear vs Trade Republic — which broker is better?

Pros

• Zero commission and zero custody fee on ETFs, so a monthly ETF plan costs nothing to execute or hold
• US stock orders cost 0.1% capped at USD 1 — a USD 20,000 trade still costs a single dollar
• No account fee, no platform fee, no inactivity fee and no withdrawal fee, in a genuinely short fee schedule
• Fractional shares from EUR 1, with multi-currency EUR, GBP and USD balances held free of charge
• Cash earns interest through AAA-rated BlackRock and J.P. Morgan money market funds, quoted around 2.2% APY on euros
• Two regulators: EFSA in Estonia (licence 4.1-1/31) and the FCA in the UK (FRN 987226), with US securities held at SIPC-member Alpaca
• Mobile app is genuinely well built — earnings-call audio, fundamentals and Auto-Invest plans without clutter

Cons

• 0.35% FX conversion is fine against a bank but expensive against Interactive Brokers, and it applies every time you buy a US stock from a euro balance
• No options, futures, CFDs, forex or margin, and no commodities — the product list is short by design
• Only market, limit and recurring orders. No stop-loss, no good-till-cancelled, no conditional orders
• No demo account and no structured education, which is an odd gap for a platform aimed at newer investors
• Support is email and in-app chat only, with no phone line and reported response times of several days on complex queries
• Founded in 2020 and privately held, with no track record through a full market cycle — audited accounts are filed publicly for all three entities

Pros

• Flat EUR 1.00 external settlement cost per order with no percentage, no minimum and no maximum - a EUR 50,000 trade costs the same as a EUR 50 one.
• Savings plans in stocks, ETFs, bonds and crypto execute at EUR 0 from EUR 1 per instalment, with fractional shares across roughly 4,900 assets.
• Full ECB banking licence held directly since December 2023, with cash covered to EUR 100,000 by the German statutory deposit guarantee.
• Interest paid on uninvested cash - 2.5% p.a. in Germany and around 3% p.a. in several other markets - instead of the zero most brokers pay.
• One app carries the securities account, a personal German IBAN, a Visa debit card and Saveback of up to 1% of card spend, capped at EUR 15 per month.
• Around 500 bonds tradable in small denominations, giving retail investors direct access to a market that usually starts at EUR 100,000 tickets.
• German residents get Abgeltungsteuer withheld and remitted automatically, so no capital gains filing is required.
• Transferring securities out to another broker costs nothing, so a portfolio built here is not locked in by exit fees.

Cons

• Since the EU banned payment for order flow in June 2026, the default 'Best Price' route fills against Trade Republic's own book - it sets the price it profits from, and publishes no spread data.
• Customer support is started from inside the app - by phone or live chat, 24 hours a day, according to Trade Republic - and there are no branches to walk into; stalled transfers and locked accounts are the dominant complaint in a Trustpilot score of roughly 3.3.
• FX cost on US shares is embedded in the quoted euro price on the default route rather than itemised, and a Direct Price order to Nasdaq or NYSE is converted at execution with no disclosed markup, so the real cost of a foreign-currency trade cannot be verified from Trade Republic's documents.
• No options, no futures, no mutual funds and no direct exchange access on the default route - the product range stops well short of a full-service broker.
• The price list we could obtain is the April 2023 edition; the current version is only reachable inside the app, so any fee you read elsewhere should be checked against the schedule in your own account.
• Tax is handled at source for German residents only; investors in the other 17 markets file everything themselves.