In 2010, Nithin Kamath was 30 years old and had spent a decade doing something most Indian professionals quietly avoid: trading in the stock market for a living.

He’d made money. He’d lost money. He’d watched friends and fellow traders do the same. And through all of it, one thing never changed: regardless of whether you won or lost, the broker always got paid.

Brokerage — a percentage of every trade, typically between 0.3% and 0.5% — was simply the cost of playing. It had always been the cost of playing. Every firm in India charged it. It was the industry’s oxygen.

Kamath decided to stop breathing it.

When Kamath launched Zerodha in 2010 with his brother Nikhil, the core product decision was radical in its simplicity: zero brokerage on equity delivery trades.

Not discounted. Not a promotional offer. Zero. Permanently.

For intraday trades, Zerodha would charge a flat fee of ₹20 per order — a fraction of what percentage-based broking cost active traders. But for someone buying shares to hold — a long-term investor, a first-time participant, someone just beginning to build wealth through markets — the cost was nothing at all.

India had roughly 20 million active stock market investors in 2010. That sounds like a large number until you consider that India’s population was over 1.2 billion. Fewer than 2% of Indians participated in capital markets. The reason most gave, when asked, was some version of the same answer: it felt too expensive, too complicated, too rigged in favour of someone else.

Kamath’s hypothesis was that the barrier wasn’t knowledge or risk appetite. It was cost. Remove the cost, and the barrier largely disappears.

Every business decision sends a signal. Most companies signal confidence in their product, or exclusivity, or aspiration. Zerodha’s zero-brokerage decision sent a different signal entirely:

This matters because the traditional broker-client relationship in India was structurally adversarial. Brokers earned more when clients traded more — regardless of whether those trades were good for the client. Commissions created an incentive to churn. Hidden charges created an incentive to obscure. The entire model was built around extracting value from the client, not generating it for them.

Zerodha’s model inverted this. By removing brokerage, they removed the conflict of interest. Their incentive was now aligned with the client’s: help them invest well, keep them active, make the platform so good they never leave.

That alignment is the Gestalt principle made structural: when what you do for yourself is the same as what you do for your customer, trust compounds automatically.

Established broking firms were dismissive, then confused, then concerned.

The traditional argument against zero brokerage was straightforward: you can’t run a business without revenue. Zerodha’s response was that revenue could come from multiple sources — flat fees on intraday trades, interest on idle funds, margin financing, subscription products for advanced traders — without requiring the most fundamental transaction to carry a cost.

Zerodha didn’t advertise. They had no sales team, no marketing budget, no celebrity endorsements. They grew entirely through word of mouth. This is the most reliable indicator of genuine product-market fit: when people tell other people not because they’ve been asked to, but because they feel they’d be doing them a disservice not to.

By 2020, India’s retail investing landscape had been transformed. Zerodha had become the country’s largest retail stockbroker — not by acquisition, not by advertising, but by consistently doing one thing: making participation free.

In an industry that runs on capital leverage, they built the largest player by refusing to charge for the thing everyone else considered non-negotiable.