How Robinhood makes money: The zero-commission paradox that redefined investing

Robinhood has achieved the rare feat of generating more than $1B in annual net income while charging zero commissions. Instead of billing users directly, the company profits from the behavior of its 20M+ active traders.

The engine behind this success is payment for order flow (PFOF), where Robinhood routes customer trades to market makers in exchange for small fees. Customers see free trades, but the company collects fractions of a cent on every order. This structure has drawn regulatory scrutiny, yet it has also reshaped the economics of the brokerage industry.

The playbook extends beyond Robinhood. It shows how digital platforms can scale by removing friction for users while monetizing activity in subtle ways. By turning financial behavior itself into a revenue stream, Robinhood continues to push the boundaries of modern fintech.

Robinhood was founded in 2013 by Vladimir Tenev and Baiju Bhatt in Menlo Park, California, with a mission to “democratize finance for all.” Two years later, it became the first brokerage to offer commission-free trading at scale. By 2019, incumbents like Charles Schwab and Fidelity had dropped their own fees and validated Robinhood’s model.

Today, the company operates as a digital-first brokerage that lets users trade stocks, ETFs, options, and cryptocurrencies with no commission. As of July 2025, Robinhood serves 26.7 million funded accounts managing $298 billion in assets, a 106% increase year-over-year.

The platform’s pitch is simplicity. Users can open an account in minutes, receive instant deposits, trade fractional shares for as little as $1, and buy or sell crypto 24/7. These features cater to “ultra-retail investors”—a younger, mobile-native audience historically excluded from markets by high fees and complex interfaces.

Robinhood’s edge lies in infrastructure and design. Its in-house clearing system, launched in 2018, cuts out third-party costs and gives the company more control over trade settlement. The app’s gamified interface encourages activity, while viral features like its referral program award free stock worth $5 to $200. Premium offerings include Robinhood Gold ($5 per month), a 1% IRA match, and the Gold Card credit card introduced in 2024.

A critical insight underpins the model: users who sell their first investment are far more likely to stay engaged. That’s why Robinhood emphasizes products like options and crypto, where frequent trading generates higher PFOF revenue. This feedback loop—low friction onboarding, high trading activity, recurring revenue—defines the company’s flywheel.

Robinhood’s top line has accelerated. Net revenue rose 58% year-over-year, from $1.87 billion in 2023 to $2.95 billion in 2024. That growth delivered the company’s first year of sustained profitability at $1.41 billion in net income in 2024. 

Operationally, Robinhood runs on three revenue pillars:

Monetization per customer is rising as well. Average revenue per user reached $151 in Q2 2025 on a trailing twelve-month basis, up 34% year-over-year. The increase highlights Robinhood’s ability to deepen revenue capture even as its user base expands.

Transaction-based revenues remain Robinhood’s largest income stream. In 2024, they totaled $1.65 billion, equal to 55.8% of overall revenue and up 110% from the prior year. The engine behind this growth is payment for order flow (PFOF). 

Under this model, Robinhood routes customer trades to market makers such as Citadel Securities and Virtu, which pay fractions of a cent per share for the right to execute those orders.

The revenue mix shows how trading behavior has shifted toward higher-margin products. In Q4 2024 alone, cryptocurrencies brought in $358 million, rising more than 700% year-over-year. Options generated $222 million, up 83%, while equities contributed $61 million, up 144%. By mid-2025, options accounted for 27% of total revenue compared to just 7% from equities, underscoring Robinhood’s incentive to steer users toward more complex instruments.

This model is highly lucrative but not without controversy. During the 2021 meme-stock frenzy, Robinhood earned roughly $0.50 per equity trade and significantly more on options activity. Yet regulators have questioned whether PFOF compromises trade execution quality. 

The SEC fined Robinhood $65 million in 2020 for misleading customers about PFOF and for exposing them to potential execution losses estimated at $5 to $15 per order on larger trades.

Net interest revenue reached $1.11 billion in 2024, accounting for 37.6% of total revenue and growing 19% year-over-year. 

The segment had been Robinhood’s largest in 2023, when it contributed $929 million—nearly half of overall revenue—thanks to an elevated federal funds rate. The shift underscores how sensitive the company’s business model is to interest rate cycles.

Earnings come from several sources: interest on $11.4 billion of margin balances as of July 2025, securities lending programs, and uninvested customer cash that Robinhood sweeps into partner banks. 

The company captures the spread between what it earns on customer and corporate cash and what it pays out to users. For example, Gold subscribers received a 4.9% APY in 2023, well below the yield Robinhood collected on those deposits.

This dynamic allows Robinhood to profit from both active and inactive customers. Idle cash balances, once unproductive during the near-zero rate environment of 2021, have become a meaningful driver of earnings. The result is a revenue stream that provides stability when trading volumes cool, complementing the volatility-driven income from payment for order flow.

Other revenues totaled $195 million in 2024, equal to 6.6% of total revenue and up 29% year-over-year. 

The largest contributor is Robinhood Gold, which had 3.5 million subscribers by Q2 2025—an increase of 76% year-over-year. For $5 per month, Gold members receive margin access, larger instant deposits, Level II market data, and Morningstar research reports.

The segment also includes:

Though still small relative to transaction and interest income, these services matter strategically. They diversify Robinhood’s revenue mix, reduce dependence on payment for order flow, and create recurring streams that persist regardless of market conditions.

Robinhood crossed a turning point in 2024 by cutting total operating expenses 21% to $1.90 billion, a reduction critical to achieving net profitability. Cost discipline came through a series of restructuring moves, including a 23% workforce reduction in August 2022 and broader post-IPO efficiency programs that pared back overhead while preserving growth initiatives.

Technology and development remained Robinhood’s largest expense line at $818 million in 2024, a 2% increase from 2023. Spending covers the company’s cloud infrastructure, its roughly 2,300 engineers, and proprietary development efforts, including the Robinhood Layer 2 blockchain.

This sustained investment has become a strategic moat. The in-house clearing system reduces third-party costs, the 24/7 crypto infrastructure supports constant trading, and the Legend platform targets advanced users. 

Key initiatives also include AI-driven features, real-time market data processing, and blockchain infrastructure for tokenized assets. Together, these projects turn technology spending into a barrier that competitors struggle to match.

General and administrative costs fell sharply in 2024, dropping 61% to $455 million from $1.17 billion in 2023. The decline reflects workforce optimization, restructuring after the IPO, and a steep reduction in stock-based compensation, which alone accounted for $871 million in 2023.

The company’s cost base had ballooned in the wake of its public listing, with G&A surpassing $1.3 billion in 2021. Robinhood has brought these expenses under control by reining in equity grants and aligning overhead with revenue growth. 

Marketing spend rose 123% to $272 million in 2024. Robinhood directed funds toward a reward referral program, promotional campaigns for the IRA product with a 3% match, and entry into the UK market. 

This expansion marks a deliberate shift from the $106 million spent in 2022, when the company pulled back during a market downturn. The contrast highlights Robinhood’s ability to control customer acquisition costs in lean periods while deploying capital aggressively when conditions favor expansion. 

Brokerage and transaction expenses climbed 12% to $164 million in 2024, while the provision for credit losses rose 77% to $76 million. These recurring costs include regulatory transaction fees, clearing fund contributions, and compliance staffing required for Robinhood’s role as a registered broker-dealer.

One-time regulatory penalties have also weighed on results, including a $65 million SEC fine in 2020 and a $70 million FINRA fine in 2021. In Q4 2024, Robinhood released $55 million it had previously reserved for legal settlements, providing a one-time boost that offset some of its past regulatory costs.

The company continues to invest in compliance infrastructure—including anti-money laundering programs, identity theft protection, and record retention systems—that are essential to operating in a tightly regulated financial services environment.

Robinhood’s decision to eliminate commissions reshaped the brokerage industry, forcing incumbents to drop trading fees by 2019. With price no longer a differentiator, competition now revolves around product breadth, platform sophistication, and integration of financial services. Despite managing $298 billion in platform assets, Robinhood remains far smaller than legacy rivals that oversee trillions.

Fidelity and Charles Schwab pose the greatest competitive threat. Schwab alone manages more than $10 trillion across 36.5 million accounts. Their scale supports a wide range of advantages, including:

These firms also operate under fundamentally different revenue models. They earn primarily from net interest income and asset management fees rather than payment for order flow. Their core demographic skews older—averaging around age 50—with significantly larger balances. By contrast, Robinhood’s average customer is 35 years old with account sizes closer to $5,000. This makes them more prone to “graduate” to full-service competitors as their wealth grows.

Robinhood has moved to counter this threat. In 2024, it acquired TradePMR for $300 million, gaining access to the $7 trillion RIA custody market. The acquisition creates a retention pathway for customers whose financial needs become more sophisticated, reducing the risk of losing them to incumbents.

Webull represents Robinhood’s closest peer in the commission-free brokerage space, with 66 million monthly active users worldwide. The platform appeals to more sophisticated traders by offering advanced charting tools, extensive technical indicators, paper trading functionality, fractional options, and full pre- and after-hours trading access.

Its U.S. market presence accelerated after the 2021 GameStop saga, when Robinhood restricted trading and many frustrated users migrated to alternatives. Like Robinhood, Webull generates revenue from payment for order flow, margin lending, and premium data services.

Robinhood’s countermeasure has been the launch of Legend, a professional-grade platform that adds features such as short selling, Level II market data, and advanced options strategies. The initiative is designed to narrow the sophistication gap and reduce customer churn to platforms with richer toolsets.

Coinbase dominates the crypto-native category. It has over 100 million users and $3.1 billion in revenue in 2023, largely from explicit trading fees averaging around 1%. Robinhood’s core advantage in this segment is its zero-commission model, which stands in sharp contrast to Coinbase’s fee-heavy approach.

Yet Robinhood has lagged in crypto functionality. Until recently, users faced limited coin availability, delayed wallet features, and restrictions on withdrawals and transfers. To close the gap, the company has expanded its crypto roadmap by acquiring Bitstamp for European market entry and launching its own Web3 Wallet in 2022.

The payoff is already visible. In Q4 2024, crypto trading generated $358 million for Robinhood, more than 700% growth year-over-year. The surge underscores the segment’s volatility but also its outsized potential as a revenue driver during favorable market conditions.

Interactive Brokers caters to active and professional traders, offering global market access, futures contracts, and complex options strategies. Its strength lies in execution quality and the breadth of its product suite. 

Robinhood, by contrast, competes on simplicity and mobile-first design, appealing to less experienced investors who prioritize accessibility over professional-grade tools.

The rivalry highlights a familiar trade-off in brokerage: sophistication versus accessibility. IBKR delivers advanced functionality for professionals, while Robinhood optimizes for ease of use and speed, positioning itself as the entry point for a younger, mobile-native demographic.

Robinhood is evolving beyond rapid-fire trading into a full-service financial platform designed to support customers throughout their financial lives. Its forward strategy rests on three pillars:

The strategy is already showing results. Robinhood has delivered six consecutive profitable quarters, with trailing twelve-month revenue growth of 59.4% and gross margins of 91.5%. Investor confidence has followed—its stock surged 229.2% year-to-date through September 2025, making it one of the best performers in the S&P 500.

Robinhood’s long-term vision is to control everything from trade execution to asset custody. And its success will depend on keeping the app simple and accessible while adding the deeper services needed to compete with traditional financial institutions.