The interesting number is the multiplier, not the rate. A shelf fee set at 15% of revenue [3] is a levy on the expense ratio rather than on assets, so it lifts roughly a basis point and a half out of a fund charging ten basis points and seven and a half out of one charging fifty [1]. It's annoying, it's survivable, and it isn't the part that decides distribution.
That part is the ticket. A fund whose issuer declines to pay can end up on a list where the buyer is charged $100 per purchase [4], and $100 on a $10,000 buy is 100 basis points of the trade against ten basis points on a $100,000 buy [2]; on the small ticket, the cost of entry runs about ten times the fund's own annual fee [3]. An advisor rebalancing a book of modest accounts cannot use that fund at all, which is why the revenue share functions less as a fee and more as a turnstile.
Vanguard's answer, or rather the more interesting version of it, is to stop paying rent and buy the shelf. Altruist founder Jason Wenk says the platform takes no platform fee and no revenue share from any asset manager, and that open architecture matters to the firm [6], with the expectation that managers who dislike being gated will prefer it [7]. Michael Kitces supplies the binding constraint: Vanguard could hardly charge competitors ticket fees and revenue shares while exempting its own ETFs without risking antitrust and competitiveness questions [10], so the zero is structural rather than promotional. Kitces also names the flow that follows, which is other managers nudging advisors toward Altruist precisely to avoid Schwab and Fidelity revenue shares [11]. What this buys Vanguard, in plain terms, is placement it can grant itself, without having to acquire an advice business, buy assets, or keep paying incumbent custodians for shelf space. The source puts no price on the deal [14], so the payback period is uncomputable from here.
This can run a few different ways. Incumbents hold their pricing and lose share slowly, which is Jeff DeMaso's read, since switching custodians is a big ask and Fidelity and Schwab will not go down without a fight [12]. Or they pre-emptively roll back platform fees, in which case Vanguard gains no share and the industry's costs fall anyway, which is Neil Bathon's expectation of downward pressure [8]. Or Altruist quietly introduces manager charges after closing later this year [2], reinforcing the practice instead of breaking it [13].
This is probably wrong in its timing, but my view is the second path: the repricing shows up in Schwab's and Fidelity's fee schedules before it shows up in custody market share, because a fee that can be matched is cheaper to defend than a client base that has to be re-papered. What would falsify it is Schwab going ahead with its reinstituted ETF platform fees [5] at an unchanged rate a year from now, with no advisor migration to show for it.
