Every vendor will quote you a cost. The number is always shaped by what they sell — a platform cost from a platform company, a licensing cost from a licensing firm. None of them is lying, exactly; they’re just each showing you one slice.
Here’s the whole picture, independently. The honest headline: there is no single number, because cost is an output of your decisions, not an input. Two brokerages can differ by an order of magnitude and both be “right” for their plans.
The cost buckets
A realistic first-year budget has five moving parts:
- Licensing & legal — the biggest variable. Offshore can be low five figures; CySEC runs into the low-to-mid hundreds of thousands; FCA higher still — much of it regulatory capital you must hold, not spend.
- Technology — platform, CRM, back office. A white label can start at a few thousand a month; a fuller turnkey stack costs more upfront but gives you ownership.
- Liquidity & payments — liquidity provider arrangements and PSP/banking setup, with ongoing costs tied to volume.
- Compliance & operations — your compliance function (people and processes), plus the everyday cost of running the business: staff, office where required, hosting, support.
- Marketing & client acquisition — the one founders consistently under-budget. A working brokerage with no clients is just an expense.
Rough scale (directional only)
These are commonly-cited 2026 ranges to set expectations, not a quote:
| Setup type | Indicative first-year total |
|---|---|
| Offshore + white-label-led | ~$50k–$150k |
| Mid-tier (e.g. Mauritius) + turnkey | mid six figures, broadly |
| Tier-1 regulated (CySEC) | ~€150k–€300k+ |
| Tier-1 regulated (FCA) | ~£200k–£500k+ (to £1m+) |
Remember a large part of the higher figures is capital you hold, not money you burn — but it’s capital you can’t deploy elsewhere, so it’s a real cost of the choice.
Where the money actually leaks
This is the part vendors won’t tell you, because some of the waste is their revenue:
- Buying enterprise capacity on day one. Paying for volume tiers, seats and modules you won’t touch for years. Right-size to your actual launch, not your ambition.
- The “platform-only” trap. A cheap headline platform that quietly requires you to bolt on CRM, liquidity, payments and compliance separately — often tens of thousands more and months of integration.
- Over-licensing too early. Chasing a Tier-1 license before you’ve proven the model, when a credible offshore or mid-tier entity would have let you learn first and upgrade later.
- Under-funding acquisition. Spending everything on infrastructure and nothing on getting clients. The build is not the business.
- Long contracts signed before you know your volumes. Lock-ins negotiated from a position of ignorance almost always favour the vendor.
How to budget sanely
Work in this order: settle your model, pick the license that matches your target clients, then size technology to your launch reality rather than your five-year plan. Hold back a meaningful share of budget for client acquisition. And get current quotes — the ranges here are for orientation, not planning.
A genuinely independent review will often reduce your spend, by catching the capacity, licensing and contract decisions where founders routinely overpay. That’s the opposite of what a vendor is incentivised to do — and exactly what Broker Origin is for.
Part of our independent guide to launching a brokerage. See also: How to start a forex or multi-asset brokerage · What a forex license really costs · White label vs turnkey vs building your own.
Broker Origin provides commercial and strategic advisory. It is not a law firm and does not provide legal or regulated financial advice. All figures are directional and change over time — obtain current quotes and verify capital requirements with the relevant regulator before budgeting.