White label, grey label or turnkey

In return the partner sets the pricing and the instruments, holds the client relationship and the data, and often takes a share of your spread or volume for as long as you stay.

On Pelris you can own a white label from the first day for a flat monthly price. Your brand runs through the trading terminal, the CRM and every client email, on your own domain and your own database. You set spreads per account type and per client, and you choose for each client whether trades stay in-house or are covered with your liquidity provider. Plans start at $1,250 a month with no setup fee and no revenue share, and your first month is free.

The one real difference is the licence. A grey label usually runs under the partner's licence; a white label runs under yours, or under a licensed partner you choose. If you are still arranging one, our comparison of licence jurisdictions sets out the options, and your branded platform can be ready within a week while the application runs.

It runs under another firm's MetaTrader licence and on that firm's server. Your brand is on the terminal, but the licence and the server belong to the firm above you, and so does control over upgrades and settings.

In late 2022 the trade press reported that MetaQuotes had stopped issuing new white labels directly. Since then a new broker is usually set up as a sub-licensee of an existing licence holder, and a full licence of your own is a far larger commitment. Ask who holds the licence and the server, and what happens to your clients if that firm changes its terms.

An MT4 white label, a MetaTrader 4 white label, works the same way on the older platform. MetaQuotes has steered brokers toward MetaTrader 5 for years, so an MT4 white label today is a sub-licence on a server another firm already runs, and the questions are the same with one more: how long that firm expects to keep its MetaTrader 4 server running. Either way, the CRM, the client portal and the payments are separate products you buy and join to it.

On a MetaTrader setup the MT5 server, or the MT4 server, runs the trading; the MT5 Manager or MT4 Manager terminal is where dealing and back office staff work on accounts and trades; and MT4 plugins or MT5 plugins add what the server does not do, from bonuses to copy trading. Each is licensed or bought on its own, often from a different vendor, and the CRM is another product again.

On Pelris the staff CRM takes the manager's role. From a client's record your team opens any trading account in an account window with its balance, credit, equity, margin, open positions and full history. Staff with the right role change an account's leverage, disable or enable it and close a trade. Spreads are set per account type, with overrides for a single client or account, instruments are switched on or off for your platform, the reports show your clients' net exposure on each instrument, and every sensitive action is written to the activity log.

The server's job is part of the platform. Orders, the margin engine, the stop out and overnight swaps run on your own deployment, which we host and maintain, so there is no trading server to rent, patch or upgrade. What plugins usually add is built in on the plans that include each module: introducing broker commissions, deposit bonuses, copy trading, PAMM and MAM accounts and prop firm challenges. Moving from MetaTrader, the CRM imports your clients, balances and trade history, so your clients keep their accounts.

We call it the One-Database Question, and the answer tells you most of what you need to know.

In a shared system, every broker is a row in somebody else's tables, separated by an identifier in a column. It works and is cheaper to run, but your book and another broker's book live in the same place, kept apart only by application logic being correct on every query.

The alternative is a separate deployment and a separate database per brokerage. With no shared tenant table, no query can return another broker's data, correct or otherwise. A business that will be supervised and audited should understand this before it signs.

They are rarely the number that matters. The monthly platform fee, per account charges, market data, payment processing and the cost of anything the base package leaves out will dominate your first year.

If the platform is a fork of a shared codebase, every fix and every new feature has to be applied to your instance separately, and in practice that means waiting. When every broker runs on one well tested codebase, improvements reach you automatically.

Ask what happens when you want to leave, too. Whether your client data and configuration come with you is a question with very different answers depending on which of the three models you signed up for.

On the client side that means instrument modelling across forex, metals, oil, indices, crypto and stocks, proper charting, full order types and a margin engine. On the staff side it means a leads pipeline, client profiles, call logging, document review and role based access for each member of staff.

Anything a vendor offers beyond that is worth having. Anything missing from it is something you will be building or buying separately in month two, which is the surprise a turnkey package is supposed to prevent.

The trading terminal, the staff CRM, the client portal and the back office are one product at one monthly price, on your own deployment with your own database.

It is not a turnkey brokerage: the licence and your payment provider contracts are yours to arrange. You choose per client whether trades are kept in-house or covered with your liquidity provider, and you can bring your own provider or let us introduce you to one; you contract with them directly.