Zerodha, the online discount broking firm, has completed 10 years of offering zero brokerage on equity delivery trades, a move co-founder and CEO Nithin Kamath says was taken “on a whim” but went on to redefine retail investing in India.
In a post on X, Kamath said it has been a decade since Zerodha stopped charging brokerage on stocks, ETFs and other investment products. “Back in 2015, if you had asked whether Zerodha would keep brokerage on investing at zero in 2025, I would’ve probably said no,” he wrote, adding that customers have collectively saved “thousands of crores” in brokerage costs due to the move.
Nithin Kamath recounted how the decision was taken in November 2015 during a conversation with co-founder and CTO Kailash Nadh at Bengaluru airport, on their way to Kochi. The brokerage had just launched its trading platform Kite and was looking to shed its image of being only for active traders.
“We did some back-of-the-envelope math to calculate the revenue we were letting go of, and we decided to make investing free on November 30, 2015, on a whim,” Kamath said. The company formally announced the move in a blog post dated November 30, 2015, stating that all equity investments would be “absolutely brokerage free” from December 1, 2015, with no conditions attached.
In that 2015 note, Zerodha framed the decision as part of a broader push to deepen India’s capital markets, pointing out that the country then had no more than a million active investors, or less than 0.1% of the population. It said 65% of Indians were below 35 and argued that “something has to be done to attract them to start investing in the markets,” including bringing “coolness into the brokerage business”.
Why the name ‘Zerodha’?
Kamath also clarified that the firm’s name — Zerodha — was coined from “zero” and “rodha” (barriers in Sanskrit), not “zero brokerage”. The broker had in fact charged brokerage on investments for its first five years before going free on equity delivery.
To make the zero brokerage model viable, Zerodha leaned on other revenue streams, including fees from institutions using Kite trade APIs, margin lending on equity delivery, and brokerage on F&O and intraday trades, which continued to be charged at ₹20 or 0.01% per executed order, whichever is lower.
The strategy, Kamath said in his latest post, helped Zerodha expand its retail investor base while keeping barriers low for first-time market participants — in line with the original vision behind the company’s name.
