How to Create an Trading App Like Robinhood for the US: Fractional Share Purchases, Compliance, and More
By idea2appAdmin
November 24, 2025
Table of Contents
The US retail trading scene has transformed dramatically over the last decade, moving away from traditional brokerages to mobile-first trading platforms built for ease of use, speed, and zero-commission access. Robinhood disrupted this space by allowing everyday Americans — students, the self-employed, career professionals, and first-time investors — to purchase fractional shares, trade cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC), automate investing, and engage in markets with little friction. This shift kick-started an entirely new generation of DIY traders and put the entire fintech ecosystem on notice to bring more transparency, clean UI, and easy onboarding. Those looking to create a trading app similar to Robinhood, targeting the fintech and trading market in the US: Now, this is an opportune time to develop a trading app like robinhood application that brings together robust backend market infrastructure with an extremely user-friendly experience.
US investors are also increasingly gravitating toward mobile-first apps as they provide real-time market access, low barriers to entry, and educational materials that can help newcomers make informed financial gains. The tide turned with zero-commission trading: Brokerages that previously could feel satisfied to coast by began modernizing in an effort to compete on customer experience, speed, and scale. When launching a trading platform today, you enter the market where demand has long been established, a large number of users from different age groups have already adopted it, and the ability to generate significant revenue via brokerage fees, premium / paid subscription, and market-driven income models. For entrepreneurs and fintechs who decide to build an app like Robinhood, it means that you’re staking a claim at the intersection of accessibility, innovation, and growth with your capital market app.
More than half of US adults now own stock, and a substantial share trade using mobile apps. Younger investors are gravitating toward apps that feel friendly, fast, and educational, not complex institutional platforms. Robinhood raised the bar by debuting an app-first UI that streamlined everything from KYC to making your first trade. When you decide to create a trading app like Robinhood, you are responding to a widespread expectation that investing should be as simple as any other digital app known, and without the outmoded complexity of legacy broker systems.
Fractional shares cracked the door to millions of US retail investors by enabling them to buy small increments of high-priced stocks such as Amazon or Tesla. It was this one feature that restructured the participation of the market. Instead of setting aside thousands to invest, users can contribute a few dollars. For an app like Robinhood, fractional investing is still one of the biggest reasons to build this type of trading app, as it perfectly matches the attitude of nowadays short-term and price-conscious investors who need flexibility and availability.
With its zero-fee trading, Robinhood upended the industry by making it rethink how it made money. Investors today demand low fees, instant deposits, fast execution, and seamless withdrawals. New concerns should be taken into account while building new platforms, as those that fail to do so will find it hard for users to trust them. Creating a next-generation trading platform means going toe-to-toe with the table stakes Robinhood set, and then bringing significantly stronger educational tools, diversification options, and more advanced investment products customized to wider US audiences.
If you want to develop an app similar to Robinhood, it’s important to know Robinhood’s internal logic, market infrastructure, UX design, and onboarding flow. What gives Robinhood its allure is a combination of sleek simplicity on the surface and intricately engineered brokerage systems underneath. Everything is built to minimize the friction — from account creation, instant depositing of funds, purchasing fractional shares, tracking a watchlist, and order flow routing — all working in concert to create the easiest of trading platforms.
Robinhood’s onboarding flow reduces friction by showing the user as few screens as possible to verify identity and open a brokerage account. Sophisticated KYC and AML procedures are conducted in the background whilst signing up, confirming user information in seconds. Funding functions in much the same way, with users able to take small instant deposits and have larger transfers settled through ACH. Replicating this smooth on-ramp is crucial when you’re building trading apps like Robinhood, as US users are quick to abandon apps if the onboarding feels sluggish or complicated.
Not only did Robinhood leverage sophisticated routing systems to identify liquidity, split trades, and execute market orders with as little latency as possible. Under the covers, the platform consolidates fractional demand, orders trades, and maintains the customer ledger to reconcile correct positions. What users are presented with is a simple interface, while on the Backend, complex brokerage services are executed accurately. Implementing a backend that enables micro-trading, order netting, instant quotes, and batch processing is one of the most critical engineering aspects when you look to make a trading app like Robinhood.
A reduction of cognitive load that Robinhood’s lack of a design interface creates. The charts, buy buttons, educational insights, and portfolio metrics all look integrated and intuitive. The ease of the interface is exactly what made beginner investors comfortable placing bets in the markets. A current US trading portal should mix a clean UI and robust toolkit without confusing end users. Utilitarian UX is a must-have when opting to make an app like Robinhood, especially for first-time traders who require trust and insight.
A first-of-its-kind US trading platform must provide simple on-the-surface, but iron-clad under-the-hood market infrastructure. If you want to create a trading app like Robinhood, your set of features needs to be attractive for both entry-level investors and power traders. That is, a platform that allows for live price feeds, instant onboarding, transparent order placement, a range of asset classes, as well as secure portfolio management. The features need to walk a fine line between accessibility and regulatory exactness, as even minor UX friction can result in US trading platform drop-offs, given the tight competition.
End users want to be able to assess price movements, easy-to-view charts, and clear signals before they consider placing a trade. Robinhood helped popularize the idea that real-time data could be integrated with an interface that feels lightweight and accessible to beginners. If you are developing your own platform, make sure that your charting system can accommodate real-time updates, dynamic marketing data, and eye-friendly visualizations. Informative content, such as definitions, plain examples of market movements , and beginner’s guides, encourages new investors to keep interacting with the app. This mix of drive and financial transparency is the key when you want to create a trading app like Robinhood US.
U.S. investors are looking for options in a variety of asset classes. Robinhood succeeded in part because it went beyond stocks and ETFs to become a platform for options trading and cryptocurrencies. Supporting multi-asset drives more DAUs, increases potential for revenue. Every asset class comes with different backend logic for order execution, risk management, and compliance control. If you want to build an app like Robinhood, it’s crucial to offer more than stocks to attract the broadest range of retail investors.
Today’s users want an instant reward with their financial apps.” Quick deposits and easy withdrawals, along with fine watchlists and smart search tools, can help smooth the experience. Portfolio screens should be straightforward enough for novices but comprehensive enough for active investors. The capability to monitor results, trace gains, and display dividends or crypto funds in parallel is further enhancing user trust. Together, these make the seamless trading experience that US newbies are demanding.
Fractional investing entirely changed the US investment scene by allowing people to buy fractions of high-value stocks with as little capital as they wanted. This is one of the most powerful differentiating features for anyone who wants to think about building a trading app like Robinhood. With micro-investing features, a wide array of order types, and real-time price streaming, it seamlessly serves millions of retail traders.
Fractional trading also means the system will have to calculate accurately when it comes to handling fractional positions. When a user invests dollar amounts rather than entire shares, the Backend must do the math to derive exact fractions, batch them up with orders from other users, and place one trade for full shares on the market. The accounting needs to be accurate for each user’s fractional share. This is one of the more complicated parts to implement while designing your system, since prices need to be synchronized in a secure way, which will keep track of their exact value over time and round automatically. One of the biggest reasons to build a trading app rather than a clone of a telephone brokerage is fractional shares, which can make investing available to anyone regardless of income level.
Having a variety of order types lets the users trade with confidence. The market orders must be executed if possible and at the current price, whereas limit and stop orders offer greater precision. More complex order types need to be plugged into market data feeds and respond in real-time to price changes. Every order type is subject to specific compliance requirements and risk treatment processes as well. If you are to create a stock trading app like Robinhood, taking care of these types of orders will help attract American traders, both newbies and pros.
In order to feed the total user experience, only accurate and instantaneous real-time data flows in. Whether users are tracking prices or making trades, market data latency is the difference between trust and no trust. Quotes had to be pulled from market data providers who were licensed for such circulation , and they then needed to be evenly distributed among all the parts of the app. The ultra-low-latency streaming capability gives your app a competitive edge over US-based top trading platforms and fast user interaction.
The most important requirement when preparing to launch a trading platform in the US is compliance. When you decide to develop an app like Robinhood, compliance is one of the most important aspects of your product roadmap. The US trading landscape is tightly regulated to safeguard investors, with rules in place to prevent manipulation and keep the market stable. These are requirements you must fulfil (and will fulfill) to be approved as a brokerage or an introducing partner.
All brokerage operations are regulated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). These are the bodies that are inspecting your platform’s formation, order execution methods, market data procedure, disclosure systems, and how to protect users. All trading platforms 186 shall comply with the best execution requirements, transparency obligations, and order routing disclosures. If you’re looking at how to make a trading app like Robinhood, FINRA and SEC licensing steps decide if your system will be able to offer actual US securities legally.
KYC, AML, and CIP policies should be incorporated into the onboarding flow. This is what its processes do – verify the identity of a user, find wrongdoing, and cut off unlawful transactions. The system also needs to be able to track the trades for fraudulent activity, wash trading potential, or unusual volume activity. Strong security practices help design platform limits and build trust with US regulators.
SIPC (Securities Investor Protection Corporation – coverage) covers the recovery of assets in customer brokerage accounts if the account holder’s broker can not return the value of his/her position. Exchanges usually collaborate with clearing brokers who process the execution, settlement, and custodial services. Capital requirements, reporting obligations, and operational disclosure provide the necessary safety of user funds. When constructing a US exchange, those partnerships and compliance integrations are building blocks that the fate of your platform depends on: whether it can be trusted, whether it is legal at all.
And the trading platform is entirely different from any other stand-alone mobile application since it has to deal with real-time data, make trades with full-speed actions, as well as secure user funds and ensure regulatory compliance. And when you are preparing to craft a trading application like Robinhood, the tech stack choice is more of strategic relevance as it defines the speed, compliance readiness, user experience quality, and long-term scalability. The system will need to integrate ultra-fast mobile interfaces, high-performance back-end execution engines, secure data flows, and multiple layers of integration with brokerage APIs and clearing partners. As the whole architecture has to run 24/7 with little downtime, it is necessary, given that financial markets are fast-paced and users expect around-the-clock access.
The frontend will need to be as close to real-time in chart rendering and price ticks while constantly polling the server. Fast and effective mobile experiences are built using React Native, Swift, and Kotlin. The UI needs to be simple enough for beginners and powerful for traders. When looking to create a trading app like Robinhood, minimalist design, concise fonts, lightning-fast animation response time, and one-tap browsing are key elements that can significantly impact your user retention. Each screen, whether watchlists, stock pages, order screens, or portfolio charts, should load on demand instantly and flow freely.
The back-end is the moneymaker of the platform. It has to handle user portfolios, order routing, fractional share logic, compliance rules, risk checks, and settlement flows. Technologies like Node. JS, Go, Python, or. NET for high-speed trading. We will need the platform to integrate with broker APIs, clearing houses, ACH processors , and payment gateways. When designing any stock trading app like Robinhood, your Backend has to be architected to grow dynamically during market stress [Market Volatility] (The time when Trading Volumes suddenly shoot up and data traffic gets spiked). A crash-hard backend ensures those outages never happen, so that the user can trust it.
Accurate and fair straddle quoting requires real-time market data. WebSockets are used in trading apps to make sure updates are pushed up to consumers in no time. All of the quotes, every candlestick change, and any market alert have to show up instantly in order not to lose trust. Market data vendors provide live feeds of stocks, ETFs, Options, and Crypto, and your system needs to be able to efficiently process these feeds. Real-time streaming is not a choice; it’s essential when developing any trading platform.
It is also extremely capital-intensive to build a trading platform due to the compliance work, sophisticated back-end systems, and real-time data infrastructure. When assessing how much it costs to make a trading app like Robinhood, you have to account for development hours, integration for compliance factors, market data costs, and running expenses. Unlike a simple consumer app, a trading platform should work in all extreme and edge cases, which are tested for months, so that everything falls back as expected. A mobile money app not working would obviously cause too much customer loss, but the impact is different compared to a stock trading system failing for minutes. Also, we build systems taking into account spike traffic during market open, etc.
Key cost considerations are mobile app development, backend trading infrastructure, market data licensing (real-time and historical), KYC/AML integrations, brokerage API partnerships , and clearing services. You also need to do additional engineering around compliance modules – investor disclosures, audit trails, SIPC requirements, and FINRA-approved workflows. While attempting to create a stock trading app like Robinhood, keep in mind that regulatory expenses and continued operational compliance comprise a major part of the investment as well.
Have no active plans to release trading apps. They need a multi-phase, structured product plan starting with MVP features (onboarding, funding, basic stock trading) and moving toward more advanced capabilities (options, crypto, educational modules, instant deposits). Security audits and compliance are made for every phase that gets under the belt. A real time frame could be several months, subject to the feature set and complexity backend-wise. And last but not least: The more automated and real-time your platform wants to be, the longer it will take to develop.
US Exchange Platform Monetization for US exchange platforms is heavily dependent on the trading volume, execution order models, premium features, and financial operations. When you launch a trading app like Robinhood, your monetization strategy should be in accordance with US laws and also satisfy the transparency that a user expects. Robinhood was a pioneer of modern monetization models, which have upended the way brokerages make money without charging trading commissions.
Payment for Order Flow (PFOF) is still a major revenue driver; the market pays brokerages to flow orders to them. Margin accounts generate interest for people who borrow money to trade. Platforms also produce yield from uninvested cash that users keep on the platforms. Together, these models generate recurring revenues. When creating a homegrown system, a firm should develop the appropriate architecture pursuant to SEC and FINRA regulations.
Simply put, many customers are willing to pay for more advanced analytics, level-two market data, and deeper chart insights or even priority customer support. Robinhood Gold proved to be a winning business model for subscription-based revenue. By adding premium tiers, you make your platform more secure and keep end users happy in the long term. The hits are an upsell for heavy traders, who invest in premium tools.
If cryptocurrencies are part of your platform, you may also make extra money on transactions through spreads or network fees. Further indirect revenue opportunities could also be generated through relationships with banks, custodians, and clearing firms. As you can see, when building an app like Robinhood, a combination of monetization paths is the best guarantee for its financial longevity and scalability.
Building a trading platform in the US takes extreme focus on performance, liquidity management, compliance, and user trust. After shipping your first product, the next challenge becomes scalability: supporting hordes of users, massive data ingests, variances in market volatility, and more instruments in each asset class. Scaling up isn’t as simple as adding more servers” It’s one thing to build a clone of Robinhood, but it takes more than just the click of a button and some added servers to scale the system- down to fine-tuning order execution pipelines, maintaining UI responsiveness in volatile markets, handling liquidity partners and making sure there are no misfires with compliance or constantly-changing financial regulations across all 50 states.
The US markets see significant activity before and after hours, which can generate millions of data points and orders per second. Your infrastructure needs to perform with ultra-low latency at the peaks. This involves reading all the elements from a file in a distributed way and then fanning out the data to n number of services, with n being ~ 1500. To speed up these operations, we can use an optimal and efficient caching mechanism supported by our scalable microservices, distributed computing, and a durable data streaming infrastructure. As per A, Market volatility events—i.e., earnings announcements or a meeting of the Federal Reserve generate abnormal load spikes. When you create a trading app like Robinhood, system stability during these periods of intensity becomes a key competitive advantage, one that determines whether or not users continue to trust and use the app.
Scaling involves going beyond basic stock buying as a feature. American retail traders increasingly expect features like crypto, do-it-yourself options, recurring investing (dollar cost averaging), automatic rebalancing of the overall portfolio, and social investing to be long-term wealth-building tools. Every additional asset class takes new compliance wheels, order-execution-partner wheels, risk-management logic, and UI design. A growing features platform retains better and competes more. From that perspective, growth is possible, but it’s much more deliberate in terms of product sequencing and not just slapping things together really quickly and having the risk exposure to a very potentially wild-west type market, regardless of how regulation or compliance oriented you are.
Trust is the cornerstone currency in the US trading space. And even a small interruption in service or a late order can induce panic among users and regulatory scrutiny. You need to be transparent, fast, and proactive in your communication systems. And if they don’t have the ability to find sponsors by meeting state-by-state requirements, disclosure, and compliance audits, it is a good stepping-stone towards national scale. When you build trading software like Robinhood, you need to view compliance not as a one-time thing, but as an ongoing operational obligation.
Creating trading technology is a mixture of technical expertise, market knowledge, and compliance. If you’re looking to make an app like Robinhood trading, your developers should help create a rock-solid and regulation-proof brokerage ecosystem for US retail traders with a clean, hassle-free interface. With a focus on fintech and trading platform development, Idea2App provides end-to-end support (from architecture to launch) to get you into the US market with assurance. As a leading trading solution development firm, we are here to help you.
Idea2App creates trading platforms via a compliant framework that are adapted to comply with US regulator expectations. From AML/KYC cycles to audit trails and disclosure, we include all the necessary procedures that a broker in this day and age must account for. Our network of experts can help with the nuances of clearing partners, custodial needs, and investor protection structure – ensuring your trading app has a sound regulatory footing.
Trading apps evolve continuously. There’s also a time and place for bringing new exhibitions, asset classes, and investment vehicles to the market in a thoughtful manner. Idea2App is committed to long-term development of the product by introducing advanced tools, optimizing performance, and improving platform stability. Whether you want to add options, crypto, learning content, or premium analytics, our team supports your scaling needs as you grow your user base.
The US retail investing boom is showing no signs of slowing down, with more consumers wanting to experience convenient, commission-free, and mobile-first trading. The success of Robinhood showed how technology can make investing easy, approachable, and cheap for millions of people. This transition has created great opportunities for new players to cater to niche trading requirements, incorporate better educational resources, or build specific investment products. It’s the perfect time for entrepreneurs to get into the market and innovate.
To create a trading app like Robinhood, you need to make a strong combination of easy-to-use UI with a backend that enables real-time trading, rigorous compliance, and seamless asset diversification. If you concentrate on these elements — fractional investing, instant deposits, market intelligence, and trust in the user experience/reliability of your platform as an investor — you can build a really good product for the US. By partnering with Idea2App for development, you can leverage fintech expertise within financial regulations and rocket-boosted engineering that powers your trading platform in the world’s biggest financial market.
It varies based on backend complexity, real-time market integrations, logic of fractional trading, and compliance rules, but also on what assets. In general, trading apps have a higher investment than regular fintech applications.
Yes, US regulation is strict. Your app should be developed according to the following SEC, FINRA, SIPC, AML, and CIP standards. But integrating allowed compliance APIs can help expedite the workflow, along with using a clearing firm to publish.
Yes, but fractional trading depends on accurate ledger systems and routing logic. Bits. This functionality requires special attention to prevent miscalculations and incorrect compliance.
Most of the platforms have entered into a partnership with clearing firms, which do trade execution, settlement, and custody. It takes a pretty good deal of capital and licensing to build your own clearing system.
Absolutely. There are a host of niche platforms that focus on crypto, long-term investing, education, and community-driven features that are thriving because they provide less generic experiences than Robinhood.
Revenue comes from payment for order flow, subscriptions, margin interest, and spreads in crypto and cash management.