How Basic Capital makes money

If you’re reading this, we hope you’ve had a chance to explore our earlier posts.

So far, we’ve gone over whether Basic Capital is too good to be true, why we started it, how it works, and why anyone would offer funding to everyday people to invest in the market.

Now, you might be wondering: “Who is Basic Capital? And how do they make money?”

Who we are

Basic Capital is a venture-backed financial technology company. “Venture-backed” means our investors are professional institutional venture capital funds managing money for endowments and pension funds. These investors back ideas like ours with the vision of creating transformative companies. Many iconic businesses—Google, Apple, Uber, and Airbnb—were also venture-backed, and we share investors with some of them.

Venture capital funds typically have a 10-year horizon, meaning our investors take the long view. They’re not looking for quick returns—they expect us to build a meaningful, enduring business that changes the way the world works.

This long-term perspective is central to our ethos. At Basic Capital, we prioritize creating a company built to last for decades. That philosophy drives everything we do: we focus on delivering value to our customers and ensuring their success because your success today lays the foundation for ours tomorrow.

How we make money

Currently, we earn revenue through a combination of a monthly account service fee and an AUM (Assets Under Management) fee. You can explore our transparent pricing here.

You might ask: “Why isn’t Basic Capital available at Fidelity or Charles Schwab?

The answer lies in how these large institutions operate. Similar to Walmart’s dominance in distribution, these platforms control access to American retail investors. To integrate with their systems, we need to show there’s strong demand for the Basic Capital product. Once that demand is clear, they’ll be more open to working with us. In essence, we need to earn our “shelf space.”

Looking ahead, our plan is to license the Basic Capital technology infrastructure to major players like Fidelity and Vanguard so they can offer it to their clients. At that point, we would charge a small service fee for providing the technology.

Our mission: Universal Basic Capital

Our mission is to give as many Americans as possible better access to the stock market. Today, the bottom 50% of Americans own less than 1% of all stocks held in the U.S. We aim to change that by creating a world where everyone has an opportunity to build wealth through the stock market.

Our vision is bold: to make stock market investing even more rewarding and accessible by giving every American the ability to create their own “endowment.” We believe that enabling over 100 million Americans to own a larger share of the market has enormous potential—for both society and Basic Capital. Even if we charge just $25 per month, the scale of increased participation could be transformative.

Join us

If you’ve made it this far, we hope you feel like you truly understand what Basic Capital is about. We’d love for you to join our early access community and be part of a financial revolution for the average American worker.

Send us your questions at abdul@basiccapital.com and we’ll reply directly to your message.