Plenty of pages answer this question with a confident single number. They should not, because the honest answer depends on decisions you have not made yet — and the largest cost driver, licensing, varies by more than an order of magnitude between jurisdictions.
What is useful instead is knowing which buckets exist, which are fixed, which are variable, and which we can actually quote.
The bucket we can quote
Technology is the one with a published price, because it is the one where the scope is genuinely definable in advance.
That covers the branded website, CRM, client panel, admin panel, MT5 Manager access, WebTrader and IB commission system at every tier, with copy trading from Growth and MAM, PAMM and branded mobile apps at Pro.
The bucket that dominates everything
Licensing is almost always the largest and least predictable cost. Capital requirements alone range from modest to substantial depending on jurisdiction, and that is before legal fees, application costs and the ongoing compliance function a licence obliges you to maintain.
It is also the longest lead time. If you are budgeting, budget this first and fit everything else around it.
The bucket people forget
Payments. Not the setup cost, which is usually modest, but the ongoing economics — per-transaction fees, rolling reserves held against your volume, and the cost of maintaining more than one provider because single-provider dependency is a genuine business risk.
Brokerages that model payments as a small fixed cost are usually surprised.
How to think about the total
Rather than looking for one number, establish your licensing cost first, since it is the constraint. Then add your liquidity and platform arrangement, which is largely determined by that decision. Technology is a known quantity you can plan against. Payments and operations scale with activity, and marketing scales with ambition.
Get the technology number precisely
Tell us which capabilities you need and we will confirm the exact plan and cost.