'₹2,000–20,000 crore saved in fees in 10 years': Nithin Kamath defends Zerodha’s no-brokerage delivery stance

For many retail investors, the fine print costs of trading often go unnoticed — until they start adding up. Brokerage fees, though seemingly insignificant on each trade, can quietly eat into returns over time. Especially for high-frequency or small-balance traders, these fees can be the silent dealbreaker, turning a marginal gain into a disappointing loss.

Zerodha founder and CEO Nithin Kamath has reignited the conversation around trading costs, highlighting the long-term impact of brokerage fees. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Kamath underscored Zerodha’s decision to waive brokerage charges on equity delivery trades a decade ago — a move that, he claims, has saved users between ₹2,000 crore and ₹20,000 crore over the years.

“It’s been around 10 years since we waived off brokerage for equity delivery. Even though there is extreme pressure to change the stance, given option trading volumes are down significantly, we've stuck with this so far,” Kamath wrote.

In a more detailed post, Kamath called out a common investor oversight — underestimating the drag of trading costs. “One of the biggest mistakes both investors and traders make is ignoring the significance of costs to their overall returns. What they fail to realise is that costs are one of the biggest drags on realised returns,” he wrote.

He pointed to what he termed “percentage blindness,” noting, “A brokerage of 0.5% seems small so most people tend to ignore it. The irony is most people don’t even make enough to recover their trading costs.”

Kamath warned that even with a low-frequency strategy, costs mount quickly. “Costs are the first hurdle to profitability. So, being conscious of costs can easily increase the odds of your profitability by a non-trivial margin,” he added.

A strong advocate of low-cost investing, Kamath emphasized Zerodha AMC’s focus on ETFs and index funds. Yet, he observed that many investors still pay significant brokerage on these low-cost products. “What boggles my mind is that a decent number of investors know the benefits of low-cost ETFs but still pay up to a 0.5% brokerage. This is just percentage blindness in action,” he said. “The whole point of ETFs is to save costs, but the brokerage on such transactions is already 1–5x the expense ratio of these ETFs!”

Kamath also took a moment to clear up a long-held misconception about the company’s name. “By the way, Zerodha = Zero + Rodha (barriers in Sanskrit) and not Zero + brokerage that many think. Like I said earlier, we were Zerodha for 5 years before we went Zero on delivery brokerage. 🙂”

Alok Jain, founder of Weekend Investing, hailed Kamath's post and wrote, “I will hope @zerodhaonline never loses this unique model that revolutionized India mkts.  A big role played by them in making access to markets easy and cheap. Options trade has come back to 2021 levels and zerodha was running well then as well so I would think if there is a corporate intent, this unique proposition should continue.”