Something unusual is happening at the edges of India’s broking industry. Most of the largest platforms have struggled to add active users this year. A cluster of smaller, product-led brokers has been growing at a pace the incumbents cannot match. The obvious explanation, cheaper brokerage, is also the wrong one. Discount pricing has been the industry default for the better part of a decade.
Why active traders keep a second account
The real shift is about consolidation. Ask an active trader how many broking apps sit on their phone, and the honest answer is usually two or three. One for equity and F&O. Another for commodities. Sometimes a third for a chart or tool they cannot live without. Each account is a separate login, a separate ledger and a separate funding decision at nine in the morning.
For years that friction was simply the cost of trading everything. It is now the thing traders are actively trying to remove. Sahi describes the pattern among its own users plainly: many came for options trading, stayed for the single-screen experience, and were waiting on commodities before they could close their other accounts. That wait ended in August, when commodities went live inside the Sahi app.
“The last decade was really about accessibility and low cost, which we believe is now a solved problem,” Dale Vaz, Sahi’s co-founder and CEO, told The Economic Times this month. “As users become more familiar with the markets, they are looking for products and tools that help them make more informed decisions rather than just a buy-sell button.”
That framing explains the growth better than price does. When access is solved, competition moves up the stack: how fast an order fills, how much the screen tells you before you act, and how many markets you can reach without switching apps. On that measure the platform that wins is not the cheapest. It is the one that removes the most friction.
Sahi as a case study
Sahi is useful here precisely because it is young. The platform, operated by Aaritya Broking, launched publicly in December 2024. Its active client base rose 243% in 2026 to 2.53 lakh from 0.74 lakh at the start of the year, according to NSE data reported by The Economic Times, in a year when most of the biggest brokers were flat. It climbed from 20th to 17th by active clients between end-July and end-August, the fastest-growing broker among India’s 20 largest for a second month running.
The last gap was commodities
For a large group of those traders, the remaining barrier to consolidation was commodities. A trader running crude oil and natural gas positions on MCX alongside index options could not commit fully to an equity-first platform while their commodities lived somewhere else.
On 24 August 2026, Sahi closed that gap. Crude oil, gold, silver and natural gas, with their Mini and Micro variants, now trade inside the same app, on the same screen, with the same one-tap execution and the same set of chart tools traders already used on equities. Crude Oil and Gold options trade directly from the option chain, with full Greeks. Commodity sessions run late into the evening, so the trading day no longer ends when equities close at 3:30 PM.
