Germany's online brokers have cut the cost of the country's new state-subsidized retirement depot to zero or close to it. The first contracts can start on January 1, and a survey found few savers want the version that drops the capital guarantee.The Altersvorsorgedepot, or AVD, succeeds the Riester scheme, which held 14.7 million contracts and about €240 billion at the end of 2025, according to Börsen-Zeitung.Trade Republic has promised a fee-free account with no fund costs on several dozen ETFs, and rivals have answered with discounts of their own.London's trading industry is coming home!The law caps costs for the standard product at 1% a year and pays a subsidy of up to €540 a year, plus up to €300 per child. Unlike Riester, it lets subsidized money go into equity ETFs with no capital guarantee.Consulting firm Sirius Campus puts the number of eligible people at about 44 million. That compares with 14.1 million Germans who owned shares, equity funds or ETFs in 2025, according to FM Intelligence.Few Savers Want the Version Without a GuaranteeMaksymilian Bączkowski, senior quantitative analyst at AI Investments Ltd and a specialist in the German market and the DAX, does not expect the price war to settle the race."I doubt headline fees alone will decide who wins Germany's Altersvorsorgedepot," he told FinanceMagnates.com.Sirius Campus polled 1,081 eligible people in early September. Only 11% said they were interested in a version without a capital guarantee, up from 9% in April. Of those who knew the product, 29% were willing to sign up, down from 34%.Bączkowski noted that the survey measures stated preference rather than demand. Still, he said, it "may challenge neobrokers' low-cost, self-directed pitch."The discounts differ mainly in how long they last. Scalable Capital charges no fund costs in the first year and up to 0.15% after that, Börsen-Zeitung reported. flatexDEGIRO covers ETF product costs for at least five years, then caps them at 0.07%, according to consumer group Stiftung Warentest.Branch banks sit higher. Deka, the fund house of the savings banks, plans 0.1% a year, while Deutsche Bank will charge 0.10% for two years and 0.28% after that.Christian Görgen handles growth marketing and partnerships at The Trading Pit, a prop trading firm that raised €10 million in 2022, and has worked in FX for more than 10 years. He expects the established players to gain most.Neobrokers with a German entity are already preparing "big promotions," he wrote on LinkedIn."They will probably benefit most and add millions of new accounts in Q1," Görgen wrote.Trade Republic, which turned a €34.8 million profit after securing a full banking license, has not said how long its fund-cost waiver will run.Free Depots Built to Keep Clients TradingMost banks say they are not chasing market share on price. In a survey of 88 institutions by securities processor dwpbank and fintech lemon.markets, 84% named customer retention as the standard depot's main value and 58% cited cross-selling. Only 28% pointed to winning new customers.Just 7% planned to lead on price, and 51% had not yet set a pricing strategy, IT-Finanzmagazin reported. Two-thirds said customers aged 50 to 64 dominate their depot base, while families and career starters top their target lists.Smartbroker+ shows how the depot can feed the main account. It refunds ETF fund costs in the standard depot for three years on up to €25,000 of assets, the company said on September 8. From year four, the refund requires at least 15 trades a year in the client's main Smartbroker+ account.Bączkowski called the condition "a cross-selling incentive." For multi-asset brokers, he said, "the AVD may acquire clients, but trading still needs to generate revenue."That trading income is changing shape as well, with Trade Republic rebuilding trade execution as the EU ban on payment for order flow takes hold.Foreign Brokers Need More Than a PassportBrokers from outside Germany face a separate test. Under the Retirement Provision Contracts Certification Act (AltZertG), investment firms from the European Economic Area need at least €730,000 in initial capital to act as providers."MiFID passporting alone does not confer AVD-provider status," Bączkowski said.Each contract must also be certified by the Federal Central Tax Office (BZSt), which published its application form in September.Görgen reads the law less strictly and expects the entry bar to tighten only after the launch. "The AltZertG does not seem to categorically exclude foreign multi-asset brokers," he wrote.Trading 212 has opened a waitlist on its German site, months after it won UK approval to offer private pensions.Trading 212 put £21.1 million into its German unit in 2025, the former FXFlat Bank now called Trading 212 EU.XTB, whose chief executive pledged to spend more on marketing in Germany than in Poland this year, is preparing its systems for the depot. Jens Chrzanowski, branch director at XTB, told German site broker-test.de that XTB wants to offer "a cost- and tax-optimized solution."He called the AVD "one of the most important financial reforms in decades" for German retail investors. XTB did not respond to questions sent by FinanceMagnates.com before publication.No AVD had been certified by mid-October, according to comparison site finanzfacts.de. Deka expects its approval in November.This article was written by Damian Chmiel at www.financemagnates.com.