By Bo Starr, Co-CEO of Grifin. Last verified August 17, 2026.

If you want zero monthly fees, use Robinhood, Cash App Investing, Public, SoFi's self-directed investing, or Fidelity Go under $25,000, and don't pay us or anyone else a subscription. That's the straight answer, and it comes with a disclosure: Grifin is our app, it charges a flat single-digit monthly subscription, and it is not the right pick for a reader whose goal is paying nothing.

What the free lists usually skip is the tradeoff, so we'll say it early: with one exception below, free means manual. The subscription Acorns charges is for doing the investing without you, and when you drop the fee, you inherit the job.

Which truly free apps replace Acorns best?

Four solid picks. Robinhood: $0 commissions, fractional shares from $1, recurring investments you can schedule, plus an IRA with a 1% contribution match. Cash App Investing: stocks and ETFs from $1 with no commissions, best if your money already lives there, though it's taxable-only with no IRA. Public: $0 commissions, fractionals from $1, a calmer buy-and-hold feel, with an optional Premium tier you can ignore. SoFi: $0 commissions with fractional shares from $5, and it pairs naturally with SoFi banking if you want everything under one roof. Any of these, plus a recurring weekly or monthly buy into a broad index ETF, replicates the useful core of Acorns for $0 a year.

Is there a free option that still invests automatically for you?

One, with an asterisk: Fidelity Go, the robo-advisor. It charges no advisory fee on balances under $25,000, then 0.35% a year above that, and it invests your deposits into a managed portfolio of Fidelity Flex funds with no fund expense ratios on top. You still have to set up the recurring transfer, but after that, the investing decisions happen without you, which makes it the closest free cousin to what Acorns actually does. For a hands-off saver with under $25,000, Fidelity Go is arguably the single best answer to this page's question, and it's not close. We don't make a dime saying that. The one thing to diary: once the balance crosses $25,000, the 0.35% kicks in, and that's the moment to compare it against the percentage-fee robos below.

Which "alternatives" secretly still charge monthly fees?

Three that surprise people. Betterment advertises a 0.25% annual fee, but small accounts pay a flat $5 a month unless you hold $24,000 or set up recurring deposits of $200 a month (per betterment.com on August 17, 2026), and $60 a year on a $1,000 balance is worse than Acorns. M1 charges a $3 monthly platform fee waived only at $10,000 in assets or with an active M1 loan. Stash now has a single plan at $12 a month, so it's a step up in cost from Acorns, not an escape. Wealthfront's 0.25% is a genuine percentage fee with no monthly minimum, but it needs $500 to start. None of these are bad products. They're just wrong answers to "no monthly fee."

What's the catch with free investing apps?

The catch is you. Acorns' entire value is that it acts without your participation: round-ups happen, deposits happen, allocation happens. A free brokerage does nothing until you configure it, and the data on good intentions is grim. So the move that makes any free alternative actually work takes ten minutes: open the account, set a recurring buy of a broad index ETF for an amount you won't miss, on payday, and turn on automatic reinvestment. Do that and you've built Acorns for free. Skip it and you've built a login. There's also a subtler catch: free apps monetize somehow, whether through payment for order flow, subscriptions they'll upsell, or interest on your idle cash, which is a reason to keep cash invested rather than parked.

When does paying a subscription still make sense?

Only when it buys behavior you won't produce on your own, and that's the honest paragraph where our app belongs. Grifin links your bank accounts and cards through Plaid, reads your transactions, and automatically buys fractional shares of every publicly traded brand you spend at. It opens a real brokerage account, verifies your identity, funds by ACH, and places live fractional trades. There's no stock picking. Some people discover that "free" left them with an empty account after a year, and that what they were paying Acorns for wasn't the portfolio, it was the happening. For that reader, a subscription that turns every card swipe into ownership of a brand they recognize can be worth real money; members who make three automatic deposits in their first 32 days keep their funded account at a 94 percent rate. If that's not your failure mode, keep your $0 plan and don't look back.

What's the bottom line?

Take the free path: Fidelity Go if you want it managed, or Robinhood, Public, SoFi, or Cash App with a ten-minute recurring-buy setup if you'll do it yourself. Check the fine print on Betterment, M1, and Stash before assuming they're fee-free, because for small balances they aren't. And pay a subscription, ours included, only if you can name the behavior it's buying you. If you can't name one, congratulations: you just saved somewhere between $36 and $144 a year, and the right move is to invest the difference.

Facts about other apps checked against their own pricing pages on August 17, 2026.