M1 launches AI advisor with no minimum and no advisory fee through 2027

M1 launched M1 Advisor on Oct. 6, 2026, offering fiduciary advice through its SEC-registered affiliate M1 Advisory Services LLC, with no account minimum and no advisory fee through Dec. 31, 2027. Clients must hold an M1 brokerage account and opt in through a separate advisory agreement.

The Chicago-based platform still charges its $3 monthly platform fee, waived for clients who hold $10,000 or more with M1 for at least one day in a 30-day billing cycle. Zero advisory fee is not zero cost.

M1 Advisory Services reported $1.48 billion in non-discretionary regulatory assets across 11,400 accounts in a Form ADV filed Oct. 1, according to InvestmentNews. Divided out, those regulatory assets work out to roughly $130,000 per account. The same filing lists 14 employees, none of whom perform investment advisory functions.

Barnes told InvestmentNews that AI removes the reason minimums exist. "Minimums exist because human time is expensive," he said. "A wealth manager can't profitably serve a family with $100,000, so the industry draws a line, often at $1 million or more. AI lowers the cost to the point that the line no longer needs to exist." Roughly $130,000 an account is well below the line Barnes attributes to the wealth management industry, and comfortably above the $10,000 balance that waives the platform fee.

His second argument is about integration, not price. "Because M1 Advisor is built into M1, it works from the live accounts—the actual positions, cost basis and cash—and when a client decides to act, they can do it in the same place," Barnes said. "That's what lets it answer a question like 'which shares should I sell to cover this tax bill?' with the real tax cost of each choice, and then let the client carry it out."

M1 reports more than 300,000 clients and more than $14 billion in assets platform-wide as of September 2026, according to a company fact sheet. Those are platform figures rather than advisory accounts, which makes the advisory arm's 11,400 accounts a thin slice of the base M1 Advisor is meant to reach. Barnes described the target as people in their 30s and 40s earning a good income, with real savings but below where a private wealth manager would take them on, and said M1 Advisor is meant to be their primary source of financial advice rather than a supplement to a human relationship.

M1 joins a field of RIA startups selling AI instead of human advisors, including Y Combinator-backed Astor and San Francisco-based Era, while other venture-backed RIAs such as Range have detailed plans to replace their human advisors with AI, InvestmentNews reported.

The zero advisory fee expires Dec. 31, 2027, and the schedule that follows is the part worth watching. If accounts in the low six figures can be served at or near no advisory fee, the $1 million minimum reads less like a capacity limit than a price set by the cost of the humans delivering the advice — the cost Barnes says AI removes. If they can't, the free window is customer acquisition, and the $130,000 account is the unit that has to pay for it.