Origin Cost (2026): Subscription

The headline figure: Subscription, for financial planning plus investing. Origin aggregates your accounts across investing, banking, and net worth, then layers budgeting, planning, and AI insights on top so you can see and steer your whole financial life in one app. On the investing side it offers portfolio views and insights rather than deep active management, sitting alongside tools for budgeting and longer-term planning.

• Fund expense ratios. Whatever ETFs or funds sit inside the portfolio charge their own fee, deducted inside the fund rather than billed to you. A broad index fund is often 0.03% to 0.10%; a specialist fund charges more.
• Trading costs. Commissions where they apply, plus the bid-ask spread on everything bought and sold, which is real even where the commission is zero.
• Tax. Any selling inside a taxable account can create a capital gain. See our guide to capital gains tax on investments. This is not tax advice.

Prices checked October 2026. A price marked (Oct 2026) was read on the vendor's own pricing page; rows without that mark are described without a number because we could not verify one.

Comparing on headline price alone misses the more consequential variable, which is whether your assets have to move. A product that manages money it holds is doing a different job from one that reads an account you already have, and the fee difference reflects the work rather than a discount.

Since this is our site, plainly: Walnut is free to use, and the one paid plan, Walnut Plus at $9.99 a month on the web, only lifts the assistant's session limit. There is no fee on assets, because it connects the brokerage you already have rather than taking custody of your money, so there are no assets under management to charge on. You still pay your broker's commissions and your funds' expense ratios, which you would pay anyway. The full breakdown is on the Walnut pricing page.

That is not automatically the better deal. Origin charges Subscription because it does something Walnut deliberately does not: financial planning plus investing, which is a different job from a keep, trim or exit read on the holdings you already own. Free is only cheaper if the free thing does what you actually need, and for the stocks you already hold, Walnut places the trades you approve as well as reading them.

We compared Origin with the products answer engines most often set beside it (Betterment, Wealthfront, Magnifi, PortfolioPilot, Danelfin) and with Walnut, on five questions: where your money sits, whether the tool reads the account you already have, whether it can place a trade, what it costs in dollars, and who it fits. Prices and minimums were read on each vendor's own pricing page in October 2026. Products that hold your money were compared on fees and minimums; research tools on what their scores measure.

Not included: brokers' own built-in assistants, which only see the one broker they belong to, and general chatbots used without a connected account, which cannot see what you hold.