Free savings plans and zero-commission ETFs: the broker observatory, updated monthly

“Zero commissions” is the most overworked phrase in broker marketing — and it almost never means what it seems. This observatory surveys the European brokers offering zero-fee savings plans (PAC) or zero-commission ETF lists in Italy, by reading their official price lists, contracts and terms: what is genuinely free, who pays for it, when it ends, and what the zero leaves out. We re-verify everything monthly.

Why an observatory (and why it isn’t a ranking)

Almost every broker comparison you’ll find online lives off affiliate links: the site earns money when you open an account with one of the brokers it reviews. In some cases, the comparator even belongs to the same corporate group as a broker featured in its comparison — the sites themselves disclose it in their own notes. That’s not an accusation; it’s simply the business model of that market. But it explains why nobody publishes the three pieces of information that actually matter: who funds the zero, when it expires, and what happens to your taxes.

We do the opposite: no ranking, no “best broker”, no commission for us. Just the terms, read from the binding documents (price lists, customer agreements, terms and conditions), with the source linked and the verification date next to every card. Where an official number doesn’t add up — it happens more often than you’d think — we say so.

The table: 8 brokers side by side

Eight brokers from European companies (UK included) with an effective zero on savings plans or ETF lists. Where official lists exist we counted the ETFs ourselves rather than repeating marketing claims. Click a name to jump to the full card.

Look up your ETF: where is it zero-fee?

Five of the eight brokers publish their zero lists security by security. We downloaded and cross-checked them: enter your ETF’s ISIN to see where it is commission-free — savings plan only, single buys too, with what minimum, and until when.

Zero is never zero: who funds it and when it ends

A broker that doesn’t earn on commissions earns somewhere else. Across the survey we found five models of zero — and knowing them is worth more than any table:

• Built-in zero on a partner list (Directa, BG Saxo): ETF issuers pay the broker for distribution. Directa is the only one to say it in writing: “AMUNDI pays Directa a fee of up to €7 per execution. A conflict of interest may therefore arise.” A broker’s zero list maps its commercial deals, not the best ETFs.
• Monthly per-ISIN promo (Fineco): the list renews every month within per-issuer agreements that have their own end dates. A plan on a promo ETF can start paying again next month.
• A bundle of per-issuer promos (Moneyfarm): nine promotions with expiries staggered from 2026 to 2029 — three of which appear already expired while the page claim stays unchanged.
• Zero from internalisation (Trade Republic, Trading 212): your order doesn’t go to an exchange but executes “against” the broker itself, at a price anchored to reference markets. The margin sits in the spread — legitimate, but not quantified in any public document.
• Zero up to a threshold (XTB): free up to €100,000 of purchases per month — a ceiling no retail plan will ever hit, so effectively a full zero, funded by the rest of the group’s business.

The common thread: every zero has either an expiry date or an owner. For a savings plan — which by nature outlives any promotion — the right question isn’t “where is it free today?” but “what happens to my plan when the zero ends?”. That’s why this page gets re-verified every month.

Administered vs declarative: the column that outweighs fees

For a first-time PAC investor, the difference between Italy’s administered and declarative tax regimes often matters more than a few euros of fees. In plain words: under the administered regime the broker acts as withholding agent — it computes, withholds and pays taxes on sales and dividends, and applies the stamp duty. You do nothing. Under the declarative regime, capital gains, losses, IVAFE and the RW/RT tax forms land in your own tax return, on you or your accountant, every single year.

The survey map: the four “Italian” brokers (Fineco, Directa, BG Saxo, Moneyfarm) are all administered, as you’d expect. Among the foreign ones there is a single, big exception: since 30 January 2025 Trade Republic is the only foreign broker acting as an Italian withholding agent, covering crypto proceeds too. Scalable, Trading 212 and XTB remain declarative — with huge practical differences between them: Scalable hands you a free KPMG-prepared tax report with the Italian forms filled in, XTB a pre-filled statement, Trading 212 nothing.

Related note: with a foreign declarative broker you don’t pay the 0.2% stamp duty via the intermediary, but its twin — IVAFE — through your tax return: same rate, more work. We covered it in detail in our stamp-duty article.

The cross-broker traps

Seven things to check before trusting any “zero”, whatever the broker:

• Selling. Almost every zero applies to buys only: Directa, BG Saxo and Fineco charge standard fees on the way out, Moneyfarm €3.95–5.95 (more than its own promo buys). On a ten-year plan that’s a certain cost, merely postponed.
• FX. Trading 212 charges 0.15% even inside its plans; XTB 0.5% (0.8% at weekends on currency transfers); Fineco applies an FX spread without Multicurrency. A plan on a dollar-denominated ETF is never truly free.
• Fractions. With Trade Republic, Scalable and Trading 212 you invest exactly €100 even if a unit costs €500. Moneyfarm requires “at least one unit”: small contributions can simply skip. XTB has fractions, but not across the whole list.
• Thresholds. Directa’s zero-fee single buys start at €500–5,000 depending on the agreement; Moneyfarm wants €1,000 on promo single orders; Scalable’s PRIME €250.
• Expiries. Every zero list rests on agreements with end dates — monthly (Fineco), staggered (Moneyfarm, Directa), or changeable at any time (BG Saxo, Trade Republic). No zero is forever.
• Where it executes. Borsa Italiana, German venues, the broker’s own internaliser or the closing auction: the implicit spread you pay changes. Scalable even executes on an exchange it co-runs (EIX). No public document quantifies these spreads: they are the category’s real hidden cost.
• Who holds your assets. An account at an Italian or German bank protects cash up to €100,000; Trading 212’s Cypriot entity stops at the €20,000 ICF scheme, with securities held at Interactive Brokers. Your securities remain yours in any case (segregated assets), but the difference is worth knowing.

How much the fee weighs on each contribution (and the false small-contribution dilemma)

A fixed fee is the one cost that grows, in percentage terms, as the contribution shrinks. The table is pure arithmetic — how much the fee absorbs from each contribution, and the total paid over twenty years of monthly instalments — with no return assumptions whatsoever:

On a €500 contribution even a €5 fee is 1%: annoying, not decisive. On a €50 contribution the same €5 is 10% of every instalment — and the classic workaround, “save up and invest quarterly to dilute the costs”, is worse than the disease: money waiting in the account sits out of the market, and historical analyses of the topic show the time lost tends to cost more than the fees saved (see Dedalo Invest’s backtested analysis of PAC myths, in Italian).

This is where the zero genuinely changes things: it dissolves the dilemma at the root. With free execution you can invest little and often — €50 a month, even weekly — without fixed costs eating anything and without trading frequency against fees. That’s why the zero matters most for small plans, which are also the plans of those just starting out. The usual caveats stand: the zero doesn’t cover FX and spreads, and without fractions a small contribution can still stall — the traps from the previous section apply here too. And since every plan is different, you can run the numbers with your own figures below:

To play with starting capital, frequencies and inflation too, there’s our compound-interest calculator.

The broker cards, one by one

The same structure for everyone, so the comparison stays honest: who they are, who supervises them, what the zero covers, the plan terms, who funds it, what to know beforehand — plus official sources and the date of our last verification.

The criteria for making the cut

A comparison is only as good as its criteria, so we state ours. To enter the observatory a broker must meet all three; several well-known operators, including big ones, stay out precisely because of one of these rules — which apply to everyone equally:

• European parent company (UK included). It’s our first editorial choice: we start from operators supervised within the European framework; the perimeter may widen in the future.
• An effective zero, documented on the official site: a free savings plan or a zero-commission ETF list published by the broker itself. Zeros tied to monthly subscription tiers don’t count, nor do “zeros” that come with fixed handling fees on every order.
• Real ETFs, held in custody. Some platforms offer “stocks and ETFs” as derivative contracts mirroring the underlying: you don’t own UCITS units segregated in your name, you hold a claim against the platform — and both protection and taxation change. Not necessarily bad, but not the same thing: here we only compare brokers that put real units in your portfolio.

If a broker meets the criteria and you don’t see it here, we probably haven’t verified it yet: the observatory grows with every monthly round.

News from the verification rounds

What has emerged, round after round:

• July 2026 — First full survey: 8 brokers verified on primary sources (binding price lists, contracts, T&Cs, official FAQs and tools).
• July 2026 — Moneyfarm: in the published T&Cs the Vanguard, Xtrackers and WisdomTree promos appear expired (30/6 and 22/5) and not renewed — 565 ETFs under active promo vs the “over 700” claimed on the page.
• July 2026 — Directa: the Fidelity spot agreement (zero above €1,500) expires on 31/07/2026.
• July 2026 — Scalable Capital: from 1 September 2026 gettex orders move to €1.99.

Method and sources

Every term reported here is verified against a primary source: binding price lists, customer agreements, promotion terms and conditions, official FAQs and tools. Where lists are published per-ISIN (Fineco, Directa, Moneyfarm, BG Saxo, XTB) we count the ETFs ourselves instead of repeating marketing claims — which is why some figures here differ from what you read elsewhere, sometimes in the broker’s favour and sometimes not. Sources are linked in every card together with the verification date; the round repeats monthly, and anything new lands in the section above.

FAQ

Is “zero commissions” forever?

No, never. Behind every zero sits either a promotion with an expiry (Fineco, Moneyfarm, Directa’s spot thresholds) or a clause letting the broker change the list at any time (BG Saxo, Trade Republic). That is this page’s reason to exist: photographing the terms every month.

Which broker is best?

We don’t say — not out of false modesty, but because it depends on your variables: how much you invest monthly (below €200, fractions matter more than the zero), the currency you invest in (FX can cost more than commissions), and how much skipping the tax return is worth to you (administered vs declarative). This page gives you the facts; the account you open yourself.

Why do you count ETFs instead of using the brokers’ numbers?

Because they often don’t add up. In the July round we found an “over 700” claim against 565 ETFs under active promo in the official terms, a “900+” that counts to 850, and well-known comparators publishing figures that differ from the brokers’ own binding documents. When an official list exists, counting it takes an afternoon and removes all doubt.

What are fractional units, and why do they matter?

They let you buy 0.2137 units of an ETF: you invest the amount you choose, not a multiple of the unit price. For a €100/month plan they are close to indispensable — without them, ETFs with expensive units stay out of reach or make contributions skip (the limit of Moneyfarm’s model, and of part of XTB’s list).

Does a €50/month plan make sense, with fixed fees around?

It’s the case where the zero matters most. With a €5 fixed fee, a €50 contribution loses 10% every single time; at zero, nothing. And the old workaround — saving up to invest quarterly — keeps money out of the market longer than it saves in fees: with free plans the problem simply disappears (the numbers are in the small-contribution section above). One caveat: where fractions aren’t available, a €50 instalment on an ETF with an expensive unit price may fail to execute.

Can I pause or stop the plan whenever I want?

Yes, at all eight brokers in this survey: automated plans can be changed, paused or closed at any time, with no penalties — that’s the nature of the instrument, and what you’ve bought stays yours. The flexibility, however, belongs to the plan, not to the terms: pausing doesn’t “freeze” a promotion, which can meanwhile expire or change its list.

How do you make money, with no affiliations?

Rebalix is a product: a tool that keeps your portfolio, savings plan and tax lots in order — whatever broker you use. This observatory is the kind of content we wished existed anyway, and we want it to stay independent: if that ever changed, you’d read it here first.