What an Independent RIA Platform Actually Costs

The short answer: every layer of the independent RIA market charges in a different currency. Custodians charge in client cash, often with no stated fee at all. Supported-independence platforms charge 10% to 20% of revenue. Corporate RIAs at broker-dealers charge through the payout grid. Aggregators charge in equity, because they are buying rather than renting. And the standalone build charges around $25,000 in cash and a great deal more in your own time. Comparing headline numbers across those layers compares nothing. The only honest comparison is the all-in cost at your own asset mix, in dollars, over ten years, and most platforms will give you the headline instead.

Advisors ask what a platform costs and get a percentage. The percentage is true and almost useless, because it describes one line of a fee stack whose other lines are priced in different units. This is the whole stack, layer by layer, with the numbers that are actually published.

The layers themselves are mapped in independent RIA platforms explained. This piece prices them.

Custody: free is a pricing model, not a price

Whatever you build, client assets sit at a custodian, and the custody market has a peculiar economics: for many RIAs the stated fee is zero.

It is not costless. Financial Planning's reporting on the largest custodian describes roughly 2,000 distinct fee structures across its 16,000-plus RIA relationships, each individually negotiated, with many firms paying no custody fee because the custodian monetizes client cash sweeps, lending, and transaction activity instead. New charges appear at the margins, such as a per-transaction fee on unusually large block trades. The spread retained on swept client cash is the real price, and it is paid by clients rather than by the firm, which is why it does not appear on your fee schedule and why it belongs in your diligence anyway.

Two consequences for pricing. The custody agreement is a negotiation, and your clients' cash is the consideration. And multi-custody, which nearly 30% of RIAs now practice, is partly a pricing strategy: a second custodian keeps the first one's terms honest. How custody actually works sets out the mechanics behind the economics.

Supported independence: 10% to 20% of revenue, and what it buys

Between the standalone build and staying an employee sits the fastest-growing model of the last decade: platforms that rent you an institutional infrastructure for a share of revenue.

The category's pricing is unusually well documented. The long-standing benchmark is 10% to 20% of the fees an advisor collects, structured as a revenue share or as basis points on assets. Dynasty Financial Partners, the category flagship, has published its own arithmetic: an all-in cost around 15% of revenue, delivering a net payout near 62% to RIA owners, against the 5% to 11% of revenue a firm might spend assembling a comparable custodian-based stack itself. Its growth report puts a return on the spread: Dynasty-affiliated RIAs grew at a 14.3% five-year compound rate against 6.4% for comparable independents.

Read those numbers as a trade rather than a price. The spread between 15% and the 5% to 11% self-assembled figure is what you pay for speed to launch, a turnkey middle office, and credibility on day one. Whether it is worth it depends on how much of that lift you would otherwise carry yourself and for how long. For a team leaving a wirehouse under a clock, it is often cheap. For an established independent with a working stack, it is often not.

What the fee sheet does not always show is the second cost: in some arrangements, the platform acquires a role in your future liquidity decisions. That is a term to read, and how to choose an independent RIA platform puts it on the list of questions to ask.

The corporate RIA: priced through the payout

For practices keeping commission business, the hybrid lane runs through an independent broker-dealer's corporate RIA. You affiliate as a 1099 contractor, own your book, and operate under the broker-dealer's ADV, compliance program, and platform. The pricing is the payout grid: you keep a stated percentage of revenue and the broker-dealer keeps the rest.

The stated payout is gross. Ticket charges, program fees, technology, compliance, and E&O coverage all come out of it, and the realistic net lands well below the headline, which is the subject of the IBD ceiling. A net-to-net comparison against a supported-independence platform has to be made at your actual revenue composition, because a practice with meaningful commission business is priced differently from a fee-only one, and because the broker-dealer's convenience is worth more to the former.

The 2025 lesson in this lane is that the platform can be bought. When an independent broker-dealer with 2,900 advisors was acquired, independent tracking recorded roughly 22.5% of its advisors departing within nine months. Nothing about the pricing changed; the owner did. That is a cost to diligence rather than a fee to pay, and it belongs in the ten-year model.

Aggregators: charged in equity

The newest layer does not charge a fee. It buys.

Private-equity-backed rollups and employee-owned aggregators bring advisors in with cash and equity, typically with employment agreements and multi-year commitments, and what the advisor sells is some or all of the practice's future enterprise value. For an advisor who wants liquidity and a platform in one transaction, that can be an excellent deal, and the market for it is at record valuations, as what your book is actually worth sets out.

The pricing point is simply that it is not a platform fee. It is a sale price, and it should be diligenced like an offer sheet: what is the consideration, in what form, what is the earnout, what equity in what entity, and what happens at the buyer's next transaction. Comparing an aggregator's check against a platform's revenue share is comparing a sale against a rental.

The standalone build: cheap in cash, expensive in time

The purest form of independence has the smallest cash price and the largest hidden one.

Published estimates put the average launch around $25,000, ranging from several thousand dollars to over $50,000: formation and registration filings, errors-and-omissions coverage, an initial technology stack commonly in the $3,000 to $9,000 range, initial marketing, and a cash reserve for the transition months. There is no minimum asset level to register.

The real cost is operational. Registration timelines, vendor selection, compliance program build-out, and the months where you are chief everything officer while your book transfers. That lift, not the $25,000, is why the other four layers exist, and it is also the reason the 5% to 11% of revenue a self-assembled stack costs on paper understates what the first eighteen months actually consume. An advisor pricing the standalone build honestly prices their own time at what it earns.

Getting to the all-in

Because each layer charges in its own currency, the only comparison that means anything converts all of them to the same unit: the all-in cost at your actual asset mix and revenue composition, in dollars, over ten years, including the ownership you give up.

Ask every provider on your shortlist for that model with your numbers in it. A custodian's cash spread, a platform's revenue share, a broker-dealer's net payout, and an aggregator's equity consideration are all expressible that way. Most providers will offer the headline instead. That is its own information about how the relationship will go.

The comparison is the same one that governs a recruiting package, where the headline percentage is the loudest number and rarely the decisive one, which is why what a transition deal is worth is worth reading alongside this. We build that ten-year model for every advisor we help move, against the actual fee sheets and the actual offer terms. If a platform has quoted you a number and you want to know what it costs, request an introduction.