Savings plan executions are free, and the €1 settlement flat rate that applies to ordinary orders explicitly does not apply to them. Trade Republic is one of the few brokers here that publishes both ends of the instalment range rather than just the floor: €10 minimum, €10,000 maximum per execution. Direct debit is priced free on the schedule, which makes this the most genuinely hands-off funding loop in the group.

• Cost: free per execution, covering ETFs, shares, ELTIFs and crypto values.
• Limits: €10 to €10,000 per execution. If you have seen “from €1” on a comparison site, that is the Scalable figure attached to the wrong broker.
• Rounding: instalments are rounded to the fourth decimal place, which can make the executed amount slightly smaller than the amount you set.
• Pricing across customers: where the same instrument is bought for several customers on one execution date across multiple partial fills, Trade Republic determines a single average price and settles everyone at it.
• The sourced negative: a plan is terminated after nine months of failed executions caused by insufficient funds, and may be cancelled after five consecutive failures. Instruments already accumulated remain intact.
• Currency: Trade Republic publishes FX margins as absolute amounts in the quoted currency, not percentages, and frames their scope as conversion of foreign-currency income. Whether a margin applies to the purchase of a non-euro asset is not stated in its documents.
• Best fit: investors who want the broker to collect the money and want a published ceiling as well as a floor.

AutoInvest runs in two modes and they are not the same product. With a Pie, the recurring contribution is split across slices in proportion to their target weights. With an individual instrument, there is no Pie, no rebalancing and no target weights — and that single-instrument variant is the one Trading 212 also labels a savings plan on EU-facing screens. Commission is €0 and there is no custody fee on the EU tariff.

• Minimums: €1 minimum order value. For a Pie, the contribution must be large enough for the smallest slice to be worth at least €1, so a 4% smallest slice implies roughly €25 per contribution. That figure is published in the help centre, not the terms, and can change without a terms update.
• Failure handling, and it is the best here: if a scheduled investment cannot execute for any reason, the firm notifies you and the investment does not run for that date. No silent skip.
• Direct debit is narrower than it looks: SEPA direct debit is available to German-resident EU clients only, is a funding method for AutoInvest alone, and cannot be used as a general deposit method. Collected funds are ring-fenced as Reserved Balance and are not part of your available balance.
• The German refund trap: German law gives you eight weeks to reclaim a collected direct debit from your bank, and that right cannot be excluded. If you exercise it after the money has been invested, the refund is debited from the Invest account and can leave a negative balance you remain liable for.
• Currency: 0.15% with no minimum, applied to Pie deposits and withdrawals and to dividend reinvestment inside a Pie. Choosing the instrument currency per order avoids it.
• Best fit: multi-fund allocations where you want one contribution split automatically, and anyone who wants to be told when something didn’t run.

Recurring investing costs nothing extra per execution here, because ETF trades carry no execution or custody fee to begin with. There are three tools: Plans, a self-built allocation that auto-invests on a schedule; Ready-made Plans, three risk-based options built on BlackRock and Vanguard funds; and Repeat Orders, a scheduled buy of a single instrument. EU clients are served by Lightyear Europe AS, the Estonian entity — the UK personal pricing quoted on some comparison sites does not apply to you.

• The constraint to check first: auto-invest in a Plan works only on instruments Lightyear has made fractional. Anything non-fractional added to a Plan is grouped under “Auto investing unavailable” and must be bought separately. Look for the Fractional label before building a plan around a specific fund. Money market funds cannot be added to Plans at all.
• Frequencies: weekly, fortnightly or monthly for Plans; daily, weekly or monthly for Repeat Orders. Plan allocations must total exactly 100%.
• Funding: from your Lightyear cash balance or by standing order from your bank. Lightyear does not collect by direct debit, so the transfer is your side of the loop.
• The sourced negative: a Repeat Order is skipped silently if there isn’t enough cash at the scheduled time. No alert, no retry. Worth a monthly glance.
• Other pricing: ETF trades free; EUR-denominated stocks, bonds, ETNs and ETCs €1 per order; US shares 0.10% (min USD 0.10, max USD 1); UK shares £1. FX is 0.35% on the interbank rate for EU clients.
• Fractional mechanics, disclosed: minimum €2, structured as co-ownership of the underlying share rather than a derivative wrapper, market orders only. For instruments Lightyear fractionalises, the whole instrument is sourced from a trading venue and the fractional part is executed against Lightyear Europe AS’s own book, outside any trading venue.
• Cash: uninvested EUR earns no interest. Cash interest is paid only to UK residents on GBP and Hungarian residents on HUF. The roughly 2% figures quoted elsewhere refer to Savings, a money market fund with capital at risk, not a deposit.
• Best fit: investors buying USD- or GBP-priced assets on a schedule who want lower published FX than most neobrokers, and who can keep their recurring list to fractional-eligible instruments.

Mintos added an Investment plan for self-selected ETFs, confirmed live on its ETF product page on 25 August 2026. That closes the one gap that kept it off this page. On cost it is now the strongest line in the table: no buy commission, no sell commission, no custody fee, fractional orders from €1, and a catalogue of more than 1,000 ETFs described as UCITS. It ranks fifth rather than first for two structural reasons, not as a matter of taste — and the first one is exactly what this page measures.

• Cost: €0 buy, €0 sell, €0 custody on self-selected ETFs per Mintos’ price list. Minimum order €1, fractional. No minimum is stated for the plan itself.
• What isn’t published: Mintos’ current Terms and Conditions, Version 20 dated 20 July 2026, define an Investment Plan as a standing instruction to increase the cash of a designated Portfolio. A self-selected ETF holding is not a Portfolio, so the published mechanics — including what happens when your cash account is short on the execution date — do not describe the new plan. Ask Mintos directly rather than assuming the Portfolio rules carry across.
• Two ETF products, and they are not the same: self-selected ETFs (minimum €1, fractional, executed during exchange hours) and the Core ETFs portfolio (minimum €50, automated and rebalanced, executed at 11:00 EET, and pausing is not offered). Every fee is €0 in both, which is exactly what makes them easy to conflate.
• The exit constraint, and it is the reason for the ranking: fractions may only be sold through Mintos to other users of the platform and may not be sold or transferred to another person, and the platform is stated as the sole place of purchase and sale. A €1 order is fractional by construction, so a position built this way cannot be moved to another broker — you sell and withdraw cash. On a plan you intend to run for a decade, that is the most consequential line on this page.
• Cash earns nothing while it waits: Mintos does not pay interest on cash account funds, and states it may place those funds in money market funds and keep the interest for itself. Earning anything requires actively moving cash to Smart Cash, at 0.19% p.a. to Mintos plus 0.10% to BlackRock.
• Funding: manual bank transfer is free with no limits on Mintos’ side; open banking transfer is free with a €50 minimum and is not available in the Baltics; card, Apple Pay and Google Pay cost 2% of the deposit.
• Best fit: a deliberate second account for cheap ETF accumulation, opened by someone who has read the exit rule and accepted it. Not the home for the portfolio you plan to hold for twenty years.

IBKR’s Recurring Investment feature lets you set an amount and a frequency and invest on a repeating schedule. It is not a free savings plan. On IBKR Pro — the tier every EU and EEA retail client is onboarded to — each execution is charged under the standard commission schedule. IBKR Lite prices differently but is available to US residents only, so any European page showing you Lite pricing is showing you a product you cannot open.

• Cost: standard commission per execution on Pro. Under Fixed pricing on euro markets, the minimums are €1.25 on a fractional order and €3.00 on a whole-share order.
• The Euronext exception: a €0.75 per-execution exchange fee is passed through on ETF products at Euronext Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels, despite Fixed pricing being advertised as carrying no third-party fees. A €3.00 Fixed trade there is €3.75 all-in — on a monthly plan, that is the number to use.
• The mechanic that bites small investors: a modified order counts as a cancellation plus a replacement, on some exchanges each partial fill carries its own commission minimum, and an order running overnight counts as new for minimum purposes.
• FX, stated properly: auto-conversion is charged at 3 basis points of trade value; a manual spot FX order starts at 0.20 basis points but carries a minimum of USD 2.00 per order. On a €500 conversion that floor is roughly 0.4%. The widely quoted 0.002% is only reached above roughly USD 100,000 per conversion.
• Fractional availability: not offered in the Baltics, Czechia, Hungary, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania or Slovenia. IBKR’s own published material is inconsistent on the Netherlands, listing it in one place and omitting it in another — check in-platform before assuming either way.
• Best fit: investors already at IBKR for multi-currency or market access, running larger contributions where a per-execution commission is a small percentage.

DEGIRO’s order execution policy lists eight order types and two validity durations; none is a scheduled or recurring purchase. Recurring investing here therefore means a manual routine: same date, same fund list, same rules, every month. Whether that is a real limitation depends entirely on whether you will actually do it.

• Order by value, not just quantity: for specific assets a Waardeorder lets you place an order by value combined with a limit. Any page telling you every DEGIRO purchase requires typing a share count is wrong.
• Fractional shares are not offered, so the order fills in whole units and the remainder stays in the account as cash until the next month. On a fixed monthly amount, that residue is the practical cost of the missing plan feature.
• Cost: Core Selection products — all ETFs, ETCs and ETNs listed on Tradegate Exchange, over 1,000 of them — carry a €1 handling fee and no connectivity fee. Currency or external product and spread costs may apply. Products on other exchanges are priced on the standard schedule at €3 per trade plus a connectivity fee of €2.50 per exchange per calendar year, capped at 0.25% of total account value, whichever is lower.
• Currency: AutoFX applies 0.25% automatically on any product priced outside your account currency. On a monthly plan buying non-euro assets that is a recurring cost, and buying a euro-listed line of the same fund avoids it — though the fund’s underlying holdings still carry currency exposure.
• Before you commit: Core Selection trades route through Tradegate, and not every broker accepts incoming Tradegate positions, so check transferability with any broker you might move to later. Outgoing transfers are €20 per position plus external costs on the Dutch, French, Irish, UK and Swiss schedules; the German schedule prices them free.

Figures verified August 2026 against DEGIRO’s published Fee Schedules effective 1 January 2026. UK and Swiss clients are on separate schedules where several of these figures differ. Fees are subject to change. Investing involves risk of loss.