Why your bridge bill should not scale with your best months.

The most common pricing model in bridge technology is a fee per million of notional traded. It sounds fair on the surface: pay for what you use. In practice it means one thing — your best month is your vendor's best month, at your expense.

The tax on growth

Run the numbers on a volume-billed bridge and a strange picture emerges. A record month — more clients, more flow, more revenue — arrives together with a record invoice. The desk celebrates; the CFO winces. The costs the vendor actually incurs to carry your extra volume are close to zero: the FIX sessions were already up, the servers were already provisioned, the support team was already on shift.

What scales with your volume is not their cost. It's their extraction.

Over a year, a mid-size MT5 brokerage can pay its bridge vendor several times what it would cost to run the same infrastructure with a dedicated engineer on staff. The difference is pure pricing model.

What actually costs money

Running a bridge has real costs, and it's worth being precise about what they are:

• Sessions and connectivity — each LP session is set up once, certified once, and maintained. This scales with the number of counterparties, not with the flow through them.
• Compute — bridge workloads are small. An order message is a few hundred bytes. Even heavy retail flow is trivial next to what modern hardware processes.
• People — the real cost. Engineers who understand FIX, dealing-desk operations, and what 14:03:07 in the journal means when something looks wrong. This scales with the number of clients served, not lots traded.

None of these costs move when your volume doubles. A pricing model that charges you per million is charging you for something that costs the vendor nothing to provide.

How we price instead

ModernMarkets charges a fixed monthly fee, set by the shape of your deployment — how many platforms, how many LP sessions, how much hands-on operation you want — and not by how much you trade through it.

The consequences are simple:

• Your best month costs the same as your worst month.
• Growth is yours. Adding volume adds nothing to your bill.
• The incentives point the right way: we win by keeping you running, not by clipping your flow.

What to ask your current vendor

Two questions expose the model. What happens to my bill if my volume doubles next quarter? If the answer is "it doubles," you're financing their margin with your growth. What did I pay you last year, per incident actually handled? Divide the annual bill by the number of times the vendor did something a fixed-fee operator wouldn't have done. The quotient is usually uncomfortable.

Infrastructure should be a cost you can plan. If your bridge bill is a function of your success, it isn't infrastructure pricing — it's a revenue share you never agreed to think of that way.