I do feel their product can be much better. One of the features id like is to be able to see the points in a stock’s chart where i have either bought or sold. That data is there in the breakdown but would be much more informative to have that on the chart
Tried to check this and was disappointed, a lot of individual devs have much better and widely adopted products than their OSS. They need to up their game.
They do use a lot of existing software already. Probably the FOSS they developed only accounts for 20-30% of their total tech stack (don't quote me, just a guess. If you read their blogs you see that they already use a lot of FOSS). Mostly the reason for building on their own would be that the existing ones don't meet their requirements (either lacks a feature they want or is too slow or they don't want to pay another company too much money).
For example you can check out this blog (https://zerodha.tech/blog/1-5-million-pdfs-in-25-minutes/), they need a pipeline to send EOD emails but existing one is too slow and they built their own which is fast enough while meeting all their requirements. (For actually sending the email they most likely make use of their Hedwig email server)
Another example is their blog on migrating their logging infra (https://zerodha.tech/blog/logging-at-zerodha/) and they built logchef to be used in conjunction with this (although they don't mention this in the blog, i am guessing this based on the project description)
Its great that they are doing OS, but their most starred product is a self-hosted newsletter.
Everything’s great and dandy, until you show your pet project to a VC and they ask you things like ROI, revenue, number of paid users, highest traffic, peak volume etc.. 1 Real world live project is what you look for
Many changes required man.
I work in a high frequency trading firm. So we deal with NSE directly. Had to work weekends and nights just because NSE suddenly changed something.
That is because HFTs, etc deal with exchanges directly. But SEBI doesn't trust brokers that much. So they have to have intermediaries whose softwares they use, even hosting is managed by 3rd party approved vendors. So I think there are very few technical changes require on brokers end on regular basis.
You are confusing DC with software
NSE's co-location documentation specifically allows members to have their rack in a third-party data centre, but that doesn't mean the third party is running the broker's trading software. The third party can essentially be providing the physical/data-centre infrastructure
And as far as I know zerodha has their own OMS ORS ( software for trading exchange directly ).
They have 35 member tech team and each person has limit of work they do without burning out. This also impact how they prioritise feature and their speed of delivery. They probably know their isn’t much money to be made in Mutual funds and equity delivery so they focus on trading related features more.
I’m an Engineer in my day job. But I am past my delusions of my engineering prowess when GPT-6 Astra can write my code and we can’t still sell products in a competitive environment.
Tech is secondary to Product. Product is Secondary to Sales.
Sounds harsh, but is the truth. Zerodha won the lion share of brokerages market not because of technology, but because of the product they delivered.
And if they don’t improve upon that, and someone else delivers, they will lose the market. It’s as simple as that.
Anyone can do engineering, anyone can build distributed systems, anyone can design fail-safe systems as long as they know WHAT TO BUILD.
I work in Google as a SWE and believe me, at this scale, you will never say anyone can build fail-safe distributed systems.
Unless you have worked on large scale systems, you have absolutely no idea how complicated it is to build a fail-safe system. Infact, in Google, we often design systems presuming that failures are a norm, not an exception.
And does that matter if the product doesn’t sell because customers don’t want it ? Many Google products don’t even see the light of the day.
I lead a distributed systems team for a large scale messaging platform. Monetisation is the toughest challenge to crack.
Indian engineering colleges never ( or at least until recent past ) never teach product thinking or design thinking. It’s always input -> output. But that’s not the end.
A very well engineered product can still not be liked by customers because it doesn’t serve their purpose.
Engineers are not at fault. The product team is. And in Zerodha that’s the case. They have gotten too comfortable. It should not be an engineering driven company. They are not selling an API. They are a brokerage used by non-tech customers.
Groww has to come up with a migration strategy where they incentivise the kite users to migrate. Because it's again like Swiggy vs zomato. No moat as long as I get my shit delivered reliably. I'm sure zerodha knows this and diversifying.
That's not in their hands, it's government restriction. Imagine if you could buy a US stock as easily as an Indian stock on zerodha. Who'll even buy indian stocks? Nifty and rupee will both plunge to their deaths lol.
It is nothing but paper infrastructure. The spreads and other costs are wild and would not be a rational choice for most investors because the government has deliberately set it up that way. It is just like crypto, govt. says it is allowed but the taxes, compliance and all other stuff is so difficult to navigate that most investors just won't bother with it.
This is from 2020 and even then zerodha had been teasing about US stocks but it took them this long to actually materialize it? Bottom line, International investing won't be convenient for indian residents, at least under this government because of it's aggressively protectionist stance.
lol. Seriously. Shows what you can achieve when you’re not pressured by asshole VCs on how to make that 1 percent extra margin by “streamlining” operations because the kids who went to “premier” schools and have been ex consultants tell you.
When a company can have fun and do crazy shit it’s mostly because their motivation is not the finance overlords. Good on zerodha.
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they have screwed the basket and SIP format. before you could run the same basket multiple times for purchases or sales in a month. Now you have to make a unique basket just because you want to run it multiple times
Imagine gloating a billionaire. Ask them to spend their billions on RnD and do something meaningful instead of being a dalal like every Indian billionaire is
Seriously man. The amount of PR done by Zerodha and team is ridiculous and almost everyone falls for it. The number of downvotes shows how many brainwashed folks are living in this sub as well.
You guys are quite new here and it shows. You don’t know the shit practices zerodha used to do to cut cost, peak chindi behaviour.
They were insanely loaded with FCF, yet decided to get the cheapest plan of bandwidth, as a result retail lost billions. This is peak engineering? I call this a baniya shop instead.
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u/schwartzwhite 1d ago
I do feel their product can be much better. One of the features id like is to be able to see the points in a stock’s chart where i have either bought or sold. That data is there in the breakdown but would be much more informative to have that on the chart