Revenue-Share RA Software Pricing: The Real 3-Year Cost
A revenue-share fee taxes your success. The better your practice does, the more the software costs you. Here is the math, worked with real Aktai pricing and typical category rates.
Note: Aktai figures are current list prices from our pricing page, not a promotional rate. Revenue-share figures are illustrative modelling against typical category rates and upfront fees published in RA software pricing pages, not a claim about any specific vendor's current contract terms. Confirm exact terms with any vendor before signing.
Two pricing structures exist for RA software in India. One is flat: a fixed monthly fee, the same whether your practice has 5 clients or 500. The other combines an upfront onboarding fee with a recurring share of your revenue, commonly quoted around 7 to 12 percent in the premium end of the category. The second structure is not inherently worse, some RAs value the vendor being aligned with their growth, but it changes shape as a practice succeeds in a way a flat fee never does. This post works the actual numbers so the tradeoff is visible before you sign a contract, not after.
The two structures
A typical premium platform in this category structures pricing as an upfront fee around ₹1.8 lakh (commonly split into 4 instalments) plus a recurring revenue share in the 7 to 12 percent range on your client subscription revenue. Aktai's Professional plan is a flat ₹6,999 a month, list price, with no revenue share. Over 3 years that flat fee totals ₹2,51,964 regardless of how much your practice earns.
Where the revenue-share model crosses over
The break-even point, where a 7 percent revenue share over 3 years plus the ₹1.8 lakh upfront fee equals the flat 3-year Professional cost, works out to roughly ₹3.4 lakh a year in client subscription revenue. That is not a large practice. Below it, revenue share can look cheaper on paper. Above it, and every rupee of growth after, the revenue-share model gets progressively more expensive relative to a flat fee.
Revenue-share figures include the roughly ₹1.8 lakh upfront fee plus the recurring share compounding over 3 years on flat annual revenue for simplicity. A growing practice, the whole point of buying software to help you scale, makes the gap wider each year, not narrower.
What the upfront fee is actually buying
The instalment structure and the revenue share are not arbitrary, they typically fund a fuller feature set: multi-broker trade execution, a native white-label mobile app, auto-rebalancing across client accounts. If your practice genuinely needs broker execution and a native app on day one, the comparison changes, you are paying for category-different functionality, not just a different pricing model for the same product. Aktai's wedge is different: AI-drafted research notes from live filings and a Regulation 25 audit trail, not broker execution. See the four platform categories in this space to place both models in context, and the broader pricing survey across the category for price bands beyond this one comparison.
The question to ask before signing
Not "what does it cost this year," but "what does it cost at the revenue I am targeting in year 3." Model your own numbers against whatever quote you are given, the same way this post modelled ₹3 lakh to ₹20 lakh. A revenue-share contract that looks reasonable at your current client book can look very different once the practice you are trying to build actually exists.