A $1 U.S. stock purchase on Groww would carry a $1 minimum brokerage charge, putting the fee on par with the smallest advertised order as Indian investors weigh dollar access costs.
Groww's pricing page sets brokerage at 0.1% per order, subject to a $1 minimum, and says foreign-exchange conversion follows bank rates. The minimum brokerage alone would equal the value of a $1 order, before additional costs. The company says its offering includes more than 10,000 U.S. stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), with fractional shares available from $1.
Groww's Oct. 22 announcement described the service as open to all users. A separate support page says new account activation is paused, so current availability remains unclear.
Zerodha's support material describes its U.S. investing service on Kite web as a beta. The platform lists up to 2,000 U.S.-listed companies and about 1,000 ETFs, with fractional units available; intraday and margin trading and U.S. IPO applications are not supported. Zerodha lists brokerage at 0.1% per order, with a $0.01 minimum and $10 maximum, and a currency-conversion markup of 0.4% to 1.4% above the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) reference rate. EconoTimes previously covered Zerodha's U.S. investing costs and tax rules.
Both services involve converting rupees to dollars to fund investments. As an inference, exchange-rate changes can affect rupee returns apart from share-price movements: all else equal, rupee appreciation lowers the rupee value of dollar holdings, while rupee depreciation raises it.
The RBI's Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS) allows resident individuals to remit up to $250,000 per financial year for permitted transactions across current and capital accounts. The cap applies across permitted uses, not only purchases of U.S. stocks.
The RBI's October bulletin reported $321.53 million in resident-individual remittances for overseas equity and debt investment in August 2026, up 111% from a year earlier and about 7% below July. The figure covers investments in multiple countries and both equity and debt, and does not identify transfers through either platform.
