• You place manual orders — €1 beats €1.99 at every frequency.
• You want real crypto rather than exchange traded products.
• You want banking features: a card, an IBAN, a current account.
• You want fractional one-off buys from €1, not only through savings plans.
• You want no monthly subscription of any kind.
• You spend abroad — card currency conversion is priced at €0.

Trade Republic’s price list prices the order commission at zero and charges a separate €1 settlement cost flat rate per trade. Anyone describing that €1 as a commission has the structure wrong — the two lines are priced separately, and the flat rate excludes savings plans entirely.

One detail worth knowing and rarely published: on partial fills the €1 is charged once per trading day, not once per fill. A large order that executes in five pieces still costs €1.

• Savings plan coverage is stated as ETFs, shares, ELTIFs and crypto. Bonds are not in that list, so a bond ladder built from savings plans is not available.
• Fractional one-off buys from €1, stated on Trade Republic’s own site.
• No ETF, stock or bond catalogue figure appears in the price list or the customer agreement, so we publish none.
• Real cryptocurrency rather than exchange traded products — the clearest product-level difference between the two.

• Five banking days is the single lead time that governs everything: changing a plan, funding the clearing account, changing the payment method. Later than that and the change applies to the next execution.
• Unlimited plans, but only one plan per security.
• Five intervals — monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, annual — on nine execution days a month.
• Fractions are bought to six decimal places and always rounded down, so the savings rate is never exceeded and a small remainder stays in the clearing account.
• Plan amounts are reserved from the clearing balance several days in advance. Where the balance is short at that moment, a direct debit from your reference account is used as a fallback — so you may see a debit you never selected.
• A savings plan purchase cannot be sold the same day, because the units are only fully booked by the custodian the following day.
• Crypto ETP plans carry the 0.99% / 0.69% spread surcharge. They are the one exception to the savings plan zero.

• No interest rate appears in the price list or the customer agreement. The rate is shown in the app. Trade Republic’s German site advertised 2.25% p.a. on 31 August 2026.
• Interest must be activated in the app — it is not automatic.
• Any rate above the base rate comes from a discretionary top-up Program with eligibility conditions set in the app, which Trade Republic may end at any time on two weeks’ notice.
• Balances blocked by open securities orders or pending card settlement earn nothing.
• Trade Republic reserves the right to pass on negative interest.

Scalable’s crypto exposure is delivered through exchange-listed products that track a crypto price rather than through the coins themselves. Structurally these are securities: your counterparty is the product issuer, not a blockchain.

• A spread surcharge of 0.99% on FREE and 0.69% on PRIME+ applies to every execution, including savings plan executions.
• Scalable’s own footnote extends that surcharge to every instrument tracking a cryptocurrency — ETPs, ETCs and ETNs alike.
• This is the one place where the savings plan zero does not hold.

Scalable offers Credit, a granted overdraft on the clearing account with variable debit interest charged quarterly — 4.49% p.a. on FREE and 3.49% p.a. on PRIME+ on the German fee page. The contract fixes only the cadence and the variability; the rate itself is published on the website and can move.

Related, and more likely to catch you out: Scalable may accept and execute purchase orders against direct debits that have not yet reached their value date, and states plainly that the clearing account may be further overdrawn as a result. Instant deposits are the visible version of this and are priced at 0.99% / 0.69% up to €5,000.

The French fee page carries no Credit row at all, so do not assume availability outside Germany. Trade Republic’s price list marks overdraft facilities as not applicable.

• Full web dashboard plus iOS and Android apps.
• Licence held by Scalable Capital Bank GmbH, granted by BaFin, with BaFin and the Bundesbank as home-state authorities. No card and no personal IBAN — the cash accounts are for saving, expressly not for payment processing.
• Account opening takes up to 3 business days after identification, via POSTIDENT or Fourthline depending on your country.
• Available in Germany, Austria, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, from one legal entity operating cross-border.
• Kids’ accounts are stated as available to residents of Germany, France, Spain and the Netherlands only, at no additional cost.

Scalable Capital names three routes: Support inside the app under Profile, the Support tab on the web platform, and email to its client service address if you have no account or no access. It states that requests submitted through the app are prioritised, and it publishes no general customer support telephone number.

Trade Republic’s price list and customer agreement describe no support channels, so we publish none rather than repeat what other sites assert.

If your strategy is monthly plans and occasional rebalancing, an outage during a volatile morning costs you nothing. You are not trying to execute at a moment. At Trade Republic in particular, the pooled average-price mechanic means the moment is not yours to choose anyway.

If you need execution to be available when prices are moving fast, neither platform is engineered for that. Interactive Brokers is the usual European alternative for that use case, at the cost of a considerably steeper platform.

• Anyone who places manual orders at all — €1 is cheaper than €1.99, at every frequency.
• Investors who want real coin ownership, with transfers priced at €0 plus network fees.
• Investors who want a card, an IBAN and a current account in the same app.
• People who spend abroad — card conversion is priced at €0 in both directions.
• Investors buying fractionally outside a savings plan, from €1.
• Anyone who wants no subscription decision to make at all.