Ask me what my brokerage is and I can answer in one breath. ₹20. Ask me what a single trade actually costs, every charge added up, and for the first three years I traded I could not have told you. I had never seen a brokerage calculator that added up the whole stack before the trade. Every trade I placed in those years carried a price tag I did not see until after I had paid it.
This is the part of Indian trading that everyone knows exists and almost nobody calculates. The brokerage is the number your broker advertises. The cost of the trade is a different number, assembled from six smaller ones scattered across six different documents. STT. GST on the brokerage. Stamp duty. Exchange transaction charges. The SEBI turnover fee. DP charges if you hold delivery. Discount brokers advertise zero brokerage and it is true, and it is also true that the other five charges still apply to every single trade you place with them. Zero brokerage has never meant zero cost.
Here is what happens in practice. You buy 100 shares at ₹1,250. The stock moves to ₹1,300. Your broker's app shows a profit of ₹5,000, which is a real number and also not the number that lands in your bank account. In between sits a stack of charges nobody itemises before the trade, because the app assumes you already know them, and nobody does.
On a trade where the stock moves 2%, the charges are an annoyance. On a trade where it moves 0.2%, the charges are the entire profit. A ₹1,00,000 position carrying ₹150 of all-in charges needs the stock to move 0.15% before you break even. Scalp a drift of 0.1% and the trade is a loss before you click sell. The size of your win is decided before the market opens, by a number you never saw.
In India, the true cost of a trade is the sum of brokerage, STT, GST on the brokerage, stamp duty, exchange transaction charges and the SEBI turnover fee, with DP charges on delivery, and a brokerage calculator is simply the tool that adds these up before you trade. That is the whole argument for the app you are about to read about.
I sat down one evening with a spreadsheet and one real trade. I entered the brokerage, then STT, then GST on the brokerage, then stamp duty, then the exchange charge, then the SEBI fee, then the DP charge. Line by line the total climbed past the number I had been quoting from memory and kept going. The figure I used to decide whether a trade was worth taking was less than half of the real one.
That was the moment it clicked. The cost of a trade is not a number your broker hands you. It is a number you assemble yourself, from six sources, in the seconds before you decide to trade. Nobody does that in their head, so almost nobody does it at all. We decided to build the thing that does it for you, on your phone, before you trade. That is TradeRaft.
The cheapest broker is not the one with the lowest brokerage. It is the one with the lowest total charges on your specific trade, and if you cannot see that total before you trade, you are choosing on a guess.
What TradeRaft does today
TradeRaft is a brokerage calculator for Indian traders. You enter the trade you are about to place, the segment, the exchange and the broker, and it returns the complete itemised cost in under a second. Equity delivery, intraday, F&O, currency and commodity are all covered, on both NSE and BSE. Every charge gets its own line, STT, GST, stamp duty, exchange transaction charges, SEBI fees, DP charges and IPFT, so nothing hides inside a total.
You can create custom broker profiles with your own fee structure and compare two or three brokers on the same trade to see who is actually cheaper. The app shows the net P&L of a buy and sell pair, keeps a local calculation history, and exports results as text, email or PDF. It works in airplane mode, because there is nothing on the phone that needs a connection.
Then there is the decision that shaped everything else. TradeRaft has no account, no signup, no tracking and no internet requirement. All calculations run on the device. There is no analytics SDK quietly reporting back what you typed, and no server that could even receive it. A brokerage calculator does not need to know who you are, and we decided it never will. It costs ₹249 once, after five free calculations, and that single payment covers every future update. No subscription. No ads. No data leaving your phone.
TradeRaft is live on the App Store and Google Play, and the full feature breakdown is at traderaft.kappal.in.
What comes next
The roadmap follows one rule: a feature has to be worth having without an account, and ideally without the internet. Here is what that rule does to the three features we get asked about most.
Tradebook. Fully feasible, fully offline. You log each trade as you place it and the app keeps a running record of realised P&L per stock, per segment, per month and per year. A year-end statement you can hand to your CA for capital gains filing falls out of the same data. It is the easiest and most useful thing on the list, and it is the foundation for everything after it.
Portfolio manager. Feasible, with one honest caveat. Tracking your holdings and cost basis on your device, with unrealised P&L, works completely offline because the data is yours. Live prices are the only piece that needs the internet, and that is a market data feed, not your data. If we add it, it will be an anonymous feed. Your holdings never leave the device either way.
Paper trading. This is the one that tests the offline rule. A paper trading arena only means something when the prices are real, and real prices mean a market feed, which means the internet. A fully offline simulator is a toy. So this is where we are flexible: paper trading will need an online feed, but it will still not need an account or your identity. A practice arena with realistic fills, and your data stays anonymous.
Beyond those three, the same rule keeps surfacing the same shortlist. An F&O lot size and contract value reference, because every option trader looks up lot sizes a hundred times a month. An options payoff and breakeven calculator. A position sizing tool that tells you how many shares a stop loss allows. A margin requirement check. A break-even price for every trade, and a tax estimate on every trade. All of these are calculator-shaped, which means all of them can run on your device without knowing anything about you.
Ask me what my brokerage is and I can still answer in one breath. ₹20. What changed is that I can now answer the other question too, the one that actually matters, before I place the trade. Every charge, to the rupee. That is the whole difference.
About TradeRaft and Kappal Software
TradeRaft is a product of Kappal Software Private Limited (kappal.in), the company behind enterprise AI, FinTech and cloud systems. TradeRaft was built on the same principle the company applies to client work, "Engineered for Efficiency": remove the friction, keep the data where it belongs, and let the numbers speak for themselves. Download TradeRaft on the App Store or Google Play, or see the calculator in action at traderaft.kappal.in.
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