Our simple and transparent pricing structure continues unchanged: We do not charge fees on the first $10,000 we manage on your behalf and then only charge 0.25% annually on your assets in excess of $10,000. As always, Wealthfront has no trading commissions, no account maintenance fees and no additional monthly fees. In other words, none of the fee gimmicks or gotchas that give banks and brokerages such a bad name.

We lowered our minimum in response to numerous requests from young investors. A year ago, 60% of our clients were under age 35. Lately, the rate at which we attract young investors has increased dramatically, which has increased the frequency of requests for a lower minimum.

At first, we were surprised to see this surge in demand for a lower minimum. After all, there are a number of investment services from startups that have lower minimums. However, as we evaluated these services, we noticed that they have fallen prey to the excessive monthly fees that plague the traditional investment industry.

At Wealthfront, we believe everyone deserves sophisticated financial advice - regardless of your account size or your net worth. So we were disappointed that other services were taking advantage of younger investors — many of whom were just starting out with their first investment account.

Today, that changes.

Now anyone can get a low-cost diversified portfolio whether she has $500 or $5,000. More importantly, we’re a great place to begin building your nest egg because we don’t charge an advisory fee on the first $10,000 we manage on your behalf. You no longer have to worry about how much of your hard earned money is being taken in fees.

An Optimal Portfolio at Any Size

In order to lower the minimum to $500, we borrowed some of the innovative technology we pioneered with our Direct Indexing platform. Our state of the art portfolio optimizer, designed by our world class investment research team, chooses the ideal combination of ETFs for your portfolio based on the size of your account and risk score. We do this while minimizing your cash balance and keeping you fully invested regardless of moves in market prices.

The result is an optimal portfolio for any account level composed of Wealthfront-selected ETF investments. Although $500 can’t even purchase one share of Google (Ticker: GOOGL), now with just $500 you can get exposure to a globally diversified portfolio across multiple asset classes representing thousands of securities, all in a simple, convenient and automated Wealthfront account.

Leading the Next Generation of Investors

At Wealthfront, we’re proud that the features we bring to market have come to define our category. Our mission isn’t just to provide increasing value to our own clients, but also to force the entire industry to do the same. Providing free investment management to investors with less than $10,000 is just one more example of Wealthfront blazing a trail for industry.

There has never been a better time to open a Wealthfront account , whether you’ve been thinking about referring your friends and colleagues to the service or even opening an account yourself.