Looking to change investment platforms

Motley Fool is cheap but they don't have the range of services that is available at HL. I use Interactive Investor that have the full range and I am pretty sure they are cheaper than HL.

So, does anybody use iweb?

Their charges seem crazily cheap - no ongoing admin fee (just a £25 setup fee) and a £5 per deal dealing charge.

Compared to someone like Hargreaves Lansdown - 0.45% of held funds charged annually plus dealing charges of £11.95 if you place less than 20 trades a year.

So if you have a £100k portfolio and make 15 trades a year the annual costs are:

iweb                - £75 (+£25 in first year)

Hargreaves Lansdown - £629

I have been looking into this a bit further – online reviews of iweb aren’t great which has put me off a bit.

I am now looking at interactive investor which seems to have a good combination of fees/products for me. There are some poor reviews for them as well but most of these seem to relate to them introducing a quarterly fee on ordinary share accounts which is irrelevant for me.

So – does anybody on here have experience/opinions of Interactive investor?

On the (admittedly very small) off-chance that anybody is actually interested in this subject, the following link was a good resource of information for comparing various sites:
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http://monevator.com/compare-uk-cheapest-online-brokers/

Used II and their customer service was shocking.

Had set up a regular saver to run alongside trading account and the amount of buys they missed was appalling.

That doesn’t sound too good. How did you find the platform for general share/ETF/fund buying and selling?

It worked well and they had some decent deals just the human sidecletvthem down.

When I set it up you got a welcome letter with your details.

I ended up with two and could not log on with either

When I called the very helpful advice was to join again!!!

I thought I would come back to this again to point out that I have now found out Hargreaves Lansdown charges of 0.45% aren’t as simple as it first seemed.

There is a full 0.45% charge annually on any money held in traditional funds, however, if you hold shares,ETF’s, investment trusts etc. the 0.45% annual fee still applies BUT ONLY up to a maximum of £45 per year (£3.75 max per year).

In the example of my earlier post (£100k portfolio – 15 trades per year), the platform cost would be £224 (£179 trading fees, £45 AMC).

That’s still a lot more than Interactive Investor but not as prohibitive as I had originally thought.

Because of this I am going to stay with HL for a while to see how the fees landscape lies in a year or two (I suspect there will be changes to all firms fees whilst things settle down).

One other reason for staying with HL is that I have been researching a few obscure “smart beta” ETF’s and more of these seem to be available through HL than other platforms.

Just to be clear, my new example cost is based on a £100k portfolio of ETF's.