[elmuchoprez]

This looks really cool but I couldn't shake that feeling of, "If you're not paying for it, you're the product."

I didn't feel any better about that when I saw that Google was one of their major investors.

Still hoping for the best though.

[minimax]

Retail traders are, generally speaking, uninformed traders (relative to the rest of the market). As a result, retail order flow is extremely lucrative for market makers. There is little risk they'll get run over by a large informed trader if they know they are only trading against retail orders. For that reason market makers are willing to pay retail brokerages for their order flow. That's what happens at many of the retail shops (ameritrade, etrade, etc).

I guess what I'm saying is that if you are a retail trader you are the product regardless of commissions.

[loceng]

You're the product even if you are paying for it. You don't think for-pay services won't try to make more money or gain more value from the data you're providing them?

[elmuchoprez]

For-pay services have an incentive not to do something with my data that upsets me enough to leave. Let's say an advertising company offers eTrade 50-cents for info on every trade I make. That's free money for eTrade right up until I, as the client, decide that's intrusive and take my business elsewhere. Now eTrade is out my $10/trade, let alone the 50-cents.

But you don't have that leverage with a free service. To them, (in the long run) making some money at the cost of pissing off their customers is better than making no money at all.

[thrill]

Pissing off customers is more of a short-term approach to making money.