Freetrade: Building a mobile app that keeps investment simple, beautiful, and commission-free
About Freetrade
Commission-free stock trading service Freetrade is on a mission to make investments in the stock market easier for individual investors. The Freetrade app allows users to discover, trade, and hold positions in the stock market with ease and without commission. In 2020, the Freetrade app was voted Best Online Trading Platform at the British Bank Awards.
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Contact usFreetrade used Cloud Composer, Cloud Functions, and Firebase to build its own brokerage platform.
Google Cloud results
- Scales automatically with demand using Firebase and Cloud Functions
- Scaled from 10K to 100K users in less than a year
- Low infrastructure costs allow basic trades to remain “free forever” and addition of free instant trades (since 2020)
Cuts customer wait times for deposits by 99.97%
More than half of people in the UK are considering buying stocks and shares, according to a survey by comparison site Finder. This number cuts across age groups, and there is a wide range of reasons for investing; some simply want to grow their savings, while others are looking to support brands they love. Despite this varied demographic, until a while ago, investment wasn’t widespread or accessible. That’s when Freetrade stepped in, with a mission to make trading “simple, beautiful, and free.”
“Everything in the market at that time was needlessly complicated or too expensive, with high charges for transactions,” says Viktor Nebehaj, CMO and co-founder of investment platform Freetrade. “We wanted to provide a simpler, low-cost platform for individual investors.” When people invest in the stock market, they’re putting their capital at risk, and Viktor notes that this risk is just one of the reasons why they value a clear, straightforward, and reliable platform.
“We wanted an infrastructure that allowed us to monitor user engagement and respond to any changes very quickly. At the same time, we didn’t want to worry about issues such as scaling or maintenance. With Google Cloud, we didn’t have to sacrifice control for ease of use.”
—Ian Fuller, CTO and co-founder, FreetradeToday, Freetrade offers commission-free trading to more than 100,000 investors across the UK via its mobile apps on iOS and Android. It has also launched its own independent digital stockbroking platform. In just two years, the company went from concept to internal testing to successful brokerage. Such rapid growth needed a reliable foundation on which to build, and for Freetrade, that foundation was Google Cloud.
“We wanted an infrastructure that allowed us to monitor user engagement and respond to any changes very quickly. At the same time, we didn’t want to worry about issues such as scaling or maintenance,” says Ian Fuller, CTO and co-founder of Freetrade. “With Google Cloud, we didn’t have to sacrifice control for ease of use.”
An infrastructure that changes with the times
Newcomers in the financial services industry aren’t just competing with huge, multinational institutions with access to vast resources; they also need to be as nimble and as hungry as the hundreds of smaller players disrupting the market. But the Freetrade team was confident that it had correctly identified an untapped seam and believed that cloud technology would enable it to adapt more quickly and gain a strong competitive edge. Before officially selecting Google Cloud, the crucial question in 2018, when the company began to build out Freetrade, was which cloud platform to use.
For Ian, the priority was developer experience. His previous job with a leading social media company had taught him the importance of responding to user feedback and publishing new features quickly and efficiently. To do that, developers needed to focus on the matter at hand and not worry about infrastructural issues. A startup like Freetrade couldn’t afford a big IT team, so a cloud with managed services was the ideal solution.
After evaluating the leading cloud providers, Ian says, “We found Google Cloud products more mature and a much more enjoyable experience for our developers. It had better documentation and was more intuitive and better able to adapt to our needs than any other cloud-based infrastructure.”
Adaptability would be key to Freetrade’s growth. The infrastructure initially depended heavily on services run with Google Kubernetes Engine. However, as Freetrade prepared to launch its beta and invite new users to trade with its platform, the company switched its core infrastructure to Firebase and Cloud Functions, which automates more operations and frees up more developer resources. The beta phase saw a jump from tens to thousands of users, and thanks to its new, serverless infrastructure and smart use of Cloud Functions, the platform successfully coped with the influx. When Freetrade officially launched its Android app in April 2019, its user base quickly grew to 10,000.
Alongside the core components of Firebase and Cloud Functions, BigQuery allows Freetrade to collect and analyze data for business intelligence purposes. Google operations tools (formerly Stackdriver) provide total logging and monitoring services, enabling the company to respond quickly to any issues.
“We’re growing as a business, gaining new customers and adding more engineers, so Cloud Composer is perfect for us. It makes orchestrating all our workflows very simple, and we can onboard newcomers very quickly.”
—Ian Fuller, CTO and co-founder, FreetradeScalability and simplicity with Google Cloud
Before starting its own brokerage platform project, Freetrade had used third-party products to power its app. The objective was to take as much development in-house as possible in order to offer its customers even more features with better in-app performance. This ambitious goal called for bigger and more complex workflows, so Ian and his team of engineers set out to adapt the infrastructure again.
Freetrade opted for Cloud Composer, a hosted orchestration service built with the open source project Apache Airflow. This service allows the company to intuitively and efficiently manage workflows without having to worry about maintaining specific instances. With Cloud Composer, Freetrade can simultaneously scale up and simplify.
“We’re growing as a business, gaining new customers and adding more engineers, so Cloud Composer is perfect for us,” says Ian. “It makes orchestrating all our workflows very simple, and we can onboard newcomers very quickly.”
“Google Cloud has given us the freedom to take charge of our own platform. We can decide how to handle our orders, and we’re not waiting on the timelines of third-party providers. Our customers can react to the market so much more quickly than before.”
—Viktor Nebehaj, CMO and co-founder, FreetradeTrue independence with Google Cloud
By the time Freetrade had released the first iteration of its brand new brokerage platform, Invest, its customer base had exploded from 10,000 to 100,000.
The Invest platform lets Freetrade take full ownership of its product and delivers a number of benefits to customers. Wait times for deposits, for example, have been cut by 99.97%. The time to complete basic orders has gone from more than 90 minutes to just half an hour, sometimes even less.
“Google Cloud has given us the freedom to take charge of our own platform,” says Viktor. “We can decide how to handle our orders and we’re not waiting on the timelines of third-party providers. Our customers can react to the market so much more quickly than before.”
The solution’s simplicity and the lack of third-party dependency has also significantly reduced costs for Freetrade. And, in keeping with its mission to lower barriers to investment, the company has passed on those savings to its customers, who can still execute basic trades free of commission.
Freetrade is developing plenty of features for upcoming iterations of the Invest platform, such as the addition of premium subscription accounts, the ability to buy fractional shares of U.S. stocks, and a planned increase in the number of available stocks to trade in. As the Invest platform grows, Freetrade has been working with a number of different products such as Cloud SQL and Dataflow to overhaul its data handling capabilities, and most recently with Secret Manager, to ensure sensitive information is encrypted and stored with the highest levels of security.
“Every time we come across a new situation or challenge, we just turn to Google Cloud, and it has exactly the right product available for us,” says Ian. “At each level of growth, Google Cloud is helping us move up to the next one. Without it, that kind of constant evolution wouldn’t be possible.”
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About Freetrade
Commission-free stock trading service Freetrade is on a mission to make investments in the stock market easier for individual investors. The Freetrade app allows users to discover, trade, and hold positions in the stock market with ease and without commission. In 2020, the Freetrade app was voted Best Online Trading Platform at the British Bank Awards.