I mean, $12/yr is not a lot, but if the platform is geared for long term investing and not trading, I'd imagine that in any given month 95%+ of accounts are doing nothing but sitting static and handing over $1.
But that will not pay a modest developer salary. The corporate side of FICA is 7.62%. Also add in health insurance, a retirement plan, office space, a computer for the developer ... and that's just the human side. There's all the corporate costs (e.g., servers) and regulatory filings.
The only play I can see with something like this is to ride it out and hope some established player buys you out for the tech.
Sure, we can quibble. If they are intending on paying competitive bay area salaries they'll be paying much more. Or maybe they can build the bulk of their engineering team in Warsaw or whatever and pay less.
I picked a number on the lower side to be generous. Whether this pays for one developer, half a developer, or a quarter of a developer doesn't fundamentally change the big problem: you need a lot of users to cover even a small team and the total addressable market here is small.
