TBF there's an enormous precedent to these kinda of financial infrastructure things being free: Retail Banking. And it's worth noting that Robinhood isn't the

TBF there's an enormous precedent to these kinda of financial infrastructure things being free: Retail Banking. And it's worth noting that Robinhood isn't the one who forced big brokerages to do zero-free equity trades; it was Schwab doing it purely because 1) their income streams were generally not dependent on trade commissions and 2) they were predicting that executing retail trades was going to quickly become a commodity that costs pennies or nothing, so why not get a big PR boost by just cutting straight to zero, while dealing a large blow to competitors who did rely on that (outdated) business model? So I'd argue that their service being no-charge-to-most-users (you do have to pay for "real" margin accounts, extended hours trading, etc) is actually unrelated to all the shady and, imo, negligent things they do.