Spreads, Markups & Commissions — Pricing Your Broker to Win.

Two brokers can run the same platform, the same liquidity and the same marketing budget — and end the year in completely different places, purely on pricing. Price too wide and comparison-shopping traders never fund; price too tight and volume grows while margin evaporates. The uncomfortable truth is that most new brokers never really decide their pricing at all: they copy a competitor's homepage, set one global spread, and leave it untouched for a year.

Professional pricing is more deliberate and, with the right controls, not much more work. This is how the three revenue levers combine, and how per-group control in eTrader Broker turns them into an actual strategy.

The Three Levers, Precisely

• Spread — the gap between bid and ask. Part of it is the raw market (what your feed or LP shows); the rest is yours to set.
• Markup — the amount you add on top of the raw price. Invisible as a line item, collected on every trade, on both sides of the book. For most retail brokers this is the primary revenue engine.
• Commission — an explicit per-lot or per-trade charge, usually paired with tighter, near-raw spreads. Transparent, easy to compare, favoured by active traders who watch execution costs.

Every retail pricing model is a mix of these. The classic "standard account" is markup-only: a clean headline ("zero commission") with the margin inside the spread. The classic "raw" or "ECN-style" account inverts it: minimal markup, explicit commission. Neither is inherently better — they price the same margin for different psychologies. Casual traders prefer no visible fees; volume traders prefer visible fees and tight spreads. A broker that offers only one model silently forfeits the other segment.

Why One Global Price Is a Losing Strategy

A single firm-wide spread means your most price-sensitive, highest-volume clients are priced the same as your smallest casual accounts. The consequences are predictable: the volume traders leave for tighter pricing elsewhere (taking most of your flow with them), while the casual majority is under-monetised relative to what they'd happily pay. You end up competing on your weakest axis in every segment at once.

The fix is segmentation — and this is where platform capability decides strategy. In eTrader Broker, spreads and markups are controlled per group, from the same dashboard that manages leverage, instruments and routing. That makes tiered pricing an edit, not a project:

• Standard group — wider markup, no commission; the frictionless default for new clients.
• Pro / raw group — tight markup plus commission for active traders who ask for it (and would leave without it).
• VIP group — negotiated pricing for accounts whose volume earns it, moved there deliberately, not by default.
• Campaign groups — sharpened pricing for a market entry or promotion, ended by moving clients back, not by re-platforming.

Setting the Actual Numbers

Three anchors keep the numbers honest:

• Your cost basis. On hedged (A-book) flow, your floor is the LP spread plus fees — markup below that is charity. On internalised (B-book) flow the marginal cost is near zero, which is why the routing decision and the pricing decision must be made together: groups that route A-book need pricing that clears LP costs; warehoused groups have more room to compete on headline spread.
• The competitive board. Traders compare EURUSD and gold spreads first. You need to be credible on the benchmarks people screenshot, and you can recover margin on crosses, indices and metals where comparison pressure is lower — per-instrument markup control makes that differentiation possible.
• Session reality. Raw spreads widen at rollover and through news. Pricing that looks great at London open and ugly at 22:00 UTC generates support tickets and mistrust; sanity-check your effective pricing across sessions, not just at the desk's convenience.

Then let data adjust the numbers. Because eTrader Broker shows volume, exposure and P&L live on the same console, you can see what a pricing change does to flow within days — which groups grew, which flow got more expensive to hedge, where margin per lot actually landed. Pricing becomes an iterated experiment instead of an annual guess. The wider monitoring discipline is covered in broker risk management.

Pricing as a Retention Tool

Acquisition gets the headlines, but pricing does quiet retention work too. A visible path from Standard to Pro to VIP gives your best clients a reason to consolidate volume with you rather than split across brokers — the upgrade is a reward you control, delivered by moving the account between groups. Conversely, nothing churns a good client faster than discovering a competitor's pricing mid-relationship; scheduled group reviews (are your top accounts still priced like strangers?) cost minutes and save relationships. Pricing sits alongside community and copytrading in the broader retention playbook.

The Cost Side of Competitive Pricing

You can only price as low as your cost base allows — and this is where the stack decision becomes a pricing decision. eTrader's 70ms-updated data feed is included free, removing the recurring market-data contract entirely; the platform itself starts at $6,600/month for brokers plus a one-time $3,300 setup fee and a $1.50 per-account fee, a fraction of legacy platform licensing; hosting is fully managed, so there is no infrastructure team amortised into every spread you quote. A leaner cost base is spread-pricing headroom your legacy-stack competitors simply don't have — the full arithmetic is in the broker cost breakdown.

"Pricing a broker is a design exercise: spreads, markups and commissions each say something to your clients. Say it on purpose."

— Roman Onta, Executive Director, Broker CRM & UI/UX

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