Building Freetrade

Announcing our latest funding round

We’ve raised £30m from existing and new investors.

Beta testing for Freetrade Web is here

We’re rolling out the beta version of Freetrade’s web interface, Freetrade Web, for Plus members to test. 

Europe, here we come!

We’ve received our licence from Sweden’s financial regulator, Finansinspektionen.

We’re updating our terms and conditions

How we’re building a sustainable business for millions more investors.

Amsterdam calling! Dutch stocks now available

Following hot on the heels of German and Finnish stocks, Dutch stocks have now arrived on your app.

Wunderbar! German stocks are here

German stocks have now arrived on your app as part of the European stocks rollout.

2021 - what a year for Freetrade

Freetrade's Head of People, Amy Gilman, reflects on a big 2021 and an even bigger 2022.

Monoliths & Microservices: a technical explanation for non-technical people

Product Manager Louis Sutton decouples monoliths and microservices.

Finnish stocks have arrived on your app

The first batch of European stocks is here.

Freetrade hits record-breaking £8m on day one of crowdfunding

Another record-breaking crowdfunding round.

Five tips for your first two weeks in a new job

Product Manager Louis Sutton gives his tips for your first two weeks in a new job.

Better than Black Friday: 300 new AIM stocks added

An early Black Friday surprise has arrived on your Freetrade app.

Freetrade hits £1bn in Assets under Administration

We’ve reached a new milestone of £1bn assets under administration (AUA).

Mobile architecture at Freetrade

Freetrade reaches one million users

An important milestone on our mission to get everyone investing.

Creative Fridays - how we play to solve quick problems

The changes you don’t always see

Freetrade hires Paul Brooking as CFO

Introducing Paul Brooker, Freetrade’s new Chief Financial Officer.

Live Pricing - how we built it

How we built live pricing.

Live pricing has arrived on your app

One of our most highly-requested features is here.

How we do on-call at Freetrade 

What goes on when you get involved in the on-call rota?

Migrating our Android app from Dagger to Hilt

How we’re continuously modernising our app.

Becoming an Engineer at Freetrade

Our step by step guide on how you can start building Freetrade.

A day in the life of a Freetrade QA engineer

Achchu Ganeshanathan gives an inside glimpse on what makes the Freetrade app run smoothly.

Q&A: How do we work on mobile?

What's it like working behind the scenes on the Freetrade app? Here are the most common questions our mobile-first developers get, and the answers to boot.

Why Freetrade’s Product team spends one day a month working in customer support

Product Manager Louis Sutton on his first months at Freetrade.

Announcing our senior leaders for European expansion

Introducing Karl, our managing director for Sweden.

The Freetrade SIPP is here

A new home for your pensions.

Margin accounts  -  what are they, and why we won’t be offering them

Recently, there’s been a fair bit of talk on our forum regarding margin accounts, so we've put together a post to explain a little more about margin accounts and why we’re not planning to implement them at Freetrade.

So long, friend!

We pay tribute to CTO Ian Fuller who is departing Freetrade for pastures new.

Why you should join a high-growth startup early in your career

Software engineer Seán Durban reflects on the high-impact development opportunities on offer in emerging companies.

Announcing our Series B

It’s time for the next phase of growth across Europe and beyond

Meet the team: Product at Freetrade

What's it like to work at Freetrade?

Typescript at Freetrade

Senior software engineer Rory Bain explains how Freetrade integrates Typescript.

Meet five female Freetraders

Introducing five female Freetraders who work across five different teams.

We smashed our crowdfunding round!

We’re on a mission to bring fee-free investing to Europe and beyond. 🔥

Meet Mathias, our new Backend Developer

Have you invested before? No, there wasn’t an app good enough yet, so I’m helping to build one 🔥

Pre-launch testing with CREST

We will be using CREST to settle all trades in UK equities, as well as the “source of truth” against which we reconcile stocks held by our customers.

We smashed our Crowdcube round (once more)

We’ve closed the round with £4m pledged, overfunding to 400%, with over 5000 investors participating in the round.

Why we use serverless architecture at Freetrade

If you’re technical and new to serverless, you might be thinking, “my life would be so much better if my stack worked this way.” You’re right.

Meet Jani, our new Product Manager

Meet Jani, our new Product Manager

Meet the Freetrader in charge of protecting our users’ money and shares

Meet the Freetrader in charge of protecting our users’ money and shares

Meet Gemma, our Head of Customer Ops!

Meet Gemma, our Head of Customer Ops!

Designing Freetrade for Android

Freetrade Android is coming to our first early testers today, and to everyone by mid-April. 💥

Meet the ex-Googler who leads our growth

Viktor Nebehaj is our Head of Growth, and he is the first hire at Freetrade.

Freetrade completes $15m funding

We’re excited to share that we’ve concluded $15m in fundraising in 2019.

You can now see your Gain/Loss on Portfolio 📈

Check your performance at a glance

Watchlist has arrived on your Freetrade app

Keeping an eye on stocks just got easier

How we profile Android bugs at Freetrade

Performance profiling is a tricky subject at the best of times, so I figured an example workflow and process might be useful to those who want to improve the performance of their own apps.

Dividends have arrived on your Activity feed 💸

We know that you love receiving dividends, but that it can be hard keeping track of them after you receive the notification.

Introducing your Customer Ops team 👋

Meet our Customer Operations (COps) team

Invest by Freetrade: the upgrade has begun

An update on the good things coming to your account

Invest by Freetrade, our brokerage platform, has arrived

The new system will bring instant deposits, fractional shares, thousands of new stocks, and more

Building a new infrastructure for investing

Only owning our platform end-to-end would enable us to not charge commissions AND become a sustainable business.

Celebrating International Women’s Day at Freetrade

What we're doing this week and why.

Introducing Freetrade for iPad

How we developed the app with a brand new UI.

Stream partitioned data from Firestore using Async Iterators in Node.js

Software Engineer Mathias Dewert talks about dealing with the issues that come with rapid growth.

How we use feature flagging in client apps

Software Engineer Alexander Broadbent shares what we do in the shadows, and why it helps us to carefully develop features.

Using lint rules to prevent bugs

Principal Software Engineer, Alex Curran, shares more about our process to prevent bugs as we build our mobile apps.

Data Infrastructure at Freetrade

Principal Data Engineer Benen Cahill shares our process for data here at Freetrade.

Nine books every product designer should read

Principal Product Designer Caitlin Rich shares her top reads to help inspire good design and keep user experience front of mind.

You are an investor already, and we are building Freetrade for you

I made my first investment when I was 14 years old.

A quick end-of-year update

2017 recap

How we’re accelerating the public rollout

In the past few weeks, you’ll have seen quite a few exciting stories on the blog about the team using and testing the app.

We are approved to provide ISAs

Freetrade has just been approved to be an ISA Manager

Platforming with the FCA

A bit about how we at Freetrade stack up against the regulator’s own best practices and how we differ from everyone else on the market. 🙏

The 2018 Christmas List

When we started Freetrade, we set out to build the best investing app on the planet. Something that makes our users grin with glee at every swipe and tap.

Freetrade’s Launch Date and How to Get Early Access

Launching the private beta

Freetrade just dropped in the App Store

Things are about to get real.

The timeline for public rollout

The timeline is here. We’ll begin the public rollout on the 18th September! 🎈

Insights are rolling out on your app

Insights, is our brand new app feature.

We’re launching our new brand design

Today’s pretty personal for me, as I designed our first logo and branding.

Our company stack

Here are some of the tools we rely on at Freetrade

Killing Kubernetes

Ian Fuller explains how we shipped faster by rethinking our whole stack

120 US real-estate investment trusts are here

Including some big name S&P 500 companies

The road to 500 serverless functions

Software Engineer Theo Gregory shares how we use serverless to speed up deployment.

Changing an industry with the help of a 250,000 person product team

Senior Product Manager, Jani Kiilunen, shares how we work with the Freetrade community to build the product

A stock-ing filler: massive market cap ADRs, biotechs, and ETFs

Including SAP, Credit Suisse, Ryanair, Trivago

Earn 3% interest on cash in Freetrade Plus

Brand new for Plus members, up to a max deposit of £4k.

Fractional shares for all

A major step on fractional shares.

Lessons learnt with Cloud Firestore

Freetrade Head of Engineering, Invest, Tim Drew, shares how we scale our platform using Cloud Firestore

Remote onboarding to a new job

Freetrade Software Engineering Manager Rokey Ge shares his virtual onboarding experience.

Referring friends and earning free shares just got even easier

A big improvement to Free Share is here.

Investment fees calculator

See how Freetrade compares to other brokers.

Building Reactive Applications at Freetrade

Senior Software Engineer Jimmy Thompson takes you through the three layers of the Freetrade app

600 brand new stocks, including David Beckham's Esports team

Gold miners, Twinkies, McDonald's and more.

Increasing the US order value limit

A new limit of £25,000 for US stocks.

Brand new ETFs on Plus

Including fixed income, investment-grade and government bonds.

How your product vision could put a human on Mars

Freetrade VP Product Duncan Leslie on vision, strategy and measuring success.

Stock fundamentals are now on your app

Market cap, dividend yield, and P/E ratio are here.

Introducing the time-weighted rate of return

Compare your performance against a global benchmark

It’s raining stocks: 500 new investment opportunities on your app now

The Freetrade Christmas List 2020

Everything we plan to add to your app before the holidays.

Optimising cold-starts with Google Cloud Functions

Freetrade engineer Simon Poole talks about overcoming some serverless infrastructure challenges.

Over 450 brand new stocks

From Papa John's to Zambian cattle farmers, we've added a wide array of new stocks to the Freetrade universe

Celebrating Black History Month at Freetrade

Freetrade Talent Sourcer, Isabelle Atunrase, shares why we should all celebrate Black History Month, and some of the ways we’re getting involved here at Freetrade.

100 new ETFs from iShares, Vanguard, VanEck, and more!

Our biggest addition of ETFs yet.

User Story Mapping - How we keep a focus on value

Freetrade Senior Product Managers Anant Sangar and Glenn Drawbridge have been busy working on limit orders and SIPPs. Here, they chat through how use User Story Mapping.

400 brand new stocks, including 200 exclusively for Plus

More of what you want.

Event sourcing on Freetrade

Freetrade Senior Software Engineer Luke Smith talks about the nuts and bolts of our brokerage platform