A 1.5% fee on a £100,000 pension can quietly swallow
in charges over 30 years — money that should have been compounding for you, not leaking to your provider.
Are your savings rates and pension fees in the doghouse?
UK Cash ISA, SIPP, and platform fee comparison
Pick a pot — Feefee sniffs it in under a minute
Illustrative: a 1.5% fee versus a 0.35% low-cost pension on a £100,000 pot at 5% assumed annual growth over 30 years (£280,679 vs £391,000). Your own number depends on your pots, providers and returns. Comparison only — not advice.
Tracking fees and rates from 45+ UK providers
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The market got better. Most savings didn’t.
There’s never been more competition for UK money. Top Cash ISAsIndividual Savings AccountA UK tax-free wrapper. Anything inside grows free of UK tax on interest, dividends, or gains. £20,000 yearly cap on new money across all your ISAs. are paying up to 4.5%. The cheapest SIPPSelf-Invested Personal PensionA pension where you pick the investments yourself. Cheaper than legacy adviser-led pensions, but you choose the funds. platforms now charge nothing. Vanguard caps its fees at £375 a year, total. The deals exist — most savers just haven’t switched yet.
Hundreds of pounds a year leak from each typical UK saver to lazy bank rates and silent platform feesPlatform feeWhat an investment platform (Vanguard, HL, AJ Bell, Trading 212, etc.) charges for holding your investments. Quoted as a % of balance or a flat £/year. Sits on top of the fund's own fees (the OCF).. Most people know they’re losing something — they just don’t have the hours to work out where, and to what.
That’s where Feefee comes in — a simple tool that sniffs out where your money is leaking, and tells you exactly where it could be earning more. Sixty seconds, no logins, no advice. Just the comparison.
Bank of England figures — most cash held with high-street banks paying well under market.
FCA Cash Savings Market Study (2015, refreshed under Consumer Duty 2023): around £158 billion of UK consumer cash deposits sat in accounts paying 0.5% or less, while top easy-access rates ran ~4-5×. The gap between high-street and challenger rates has remained a Consumer Duty concern through the 2024 Bank of England cut cycle.
Compounding fee drag — basic maths echoed by the FCA's Asset Management Market Study (2017): a 1% fee can erode roughly a quarter of a 40-year pot. At 1.5% over 30y, ~30% is the order-of-magnitude figure the regulator and Pensions Policy Institute have cited.
Trading 212 — 12-month new-customer promotional rate, drops to 3.60% standard AER after. Instant access, FSCS deposit cover applies via partner banks (£120,000 per eligible person per partner bank from 1 Dec 2025, not per Trading 212 account). Either way, well above what big banks pay.
One sniff, in pictures.
£72k
you could keep.
An £80k pension at a typical bundled-fee provider runs around 1.5% per year (platform + fund + adviser combined). At a low-cost SIPPSelf-Invested Personal PensionA pension where you pick the investments yourself. Cheaper than legacy adviser-led pensions, but you choose the funds. the comparable platform fee is closer to 0.15%. Same balance, same gross return — over 25 years that fee gap compounds into the number above. That’s a kitchen extension.
Fee comparison chart. Current vs alternative over 25 years. By year 25, the projected gap is £72,338. Year-by-year milestones: year 1 £1,080; year 5 £6,360; year 10 £15,614; year 12 £20,339; year 25 £72,338.
The bit nobody shows you — fee drag compounds. A 1% fee doesn’t cost 1% — it costs you the returns those fees would have earned. Over thirty years, that’s the difference between a comfortable retirement and a comfortable retirement plus a kitchen extension.