Flat Fee Advisory for Mass Affluent
Range
The flat fee changes wealth management from a product for people with large portfolios into a service for people with complicated financial lives. For households making $125,000 to $200,000, the pain is usually not picking ETFs. It is handling equity comp, taxes, 401(k)s, estate basics, and cash planning. AUM pricing under serves that group because fees stay too low until balances get large, while Range can charge $2,400 to $4,800 a year from day one and deliver advice through software plus centralized advisors.
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Traditional digital advisors still anchor pricing to assets. Vanguard charges 0.30% with a $50,000 minimum, Betterment Premium charges 0.65% with a $100,000 minimum, and Wealthfront charges 0.25% on automated investing. That works best when the main job is managing an investment account, not year round planning across taxes and workplace equity.
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Range is closer to Facet than to robo advisors. Range sells memberships from $2,400 to $4,800 a year with tax review or filing and 0% AUM advisory pricing, while Facet charges roughly $2,000 to $6,000 annually and serves more than 24,000 members with $5 billion in AUM. The winning model is broad planning sold like software, not just portfolio management sold as a percent of assets.
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This segment can be profitable because the same dashboard can pull in account balances, 401(k)s, and stock compensation data once, then advisors step in on the highest value decisions instead of manually building every plan from scratch. That lowers the labor needed per household and makes employer distribution especially powerful, because a benefits partner can feed in the financial data that normally makes onboarding expensive.
The next phase is a land grab for mass affluent professionals before incumbents repackage planning into simpler subscriptions. If Range keeps using workplace integrations to pre load employee data and turn onboarding into a live financial dashboard, flat fee advice can become the default entry point for households that are rich in income, but not yet rich enough in assets for classic AUM advisors.