Schwab prices AI at $240 a seat

Schwab's exclusive Claude integration is live across its 16,000-RIA platform at $240 per advisor per year, a bill small enough to ignore and large enough to force a decision. For a 20-person RIA that works out to $4,800 a year, a line item that will land in the custody budget rather than the technology budget—and artificial intelligence has now arrived as a per-seat custody fee for a market being asked to price it.

The coverage does not say whether Schwab will bill the $240 as a separate line or absorb it into the custody package, and that distinction determines whether RIAs treat the tool as infrastructure or an optional upgrade. The fee is low enough that large firms will pay it without a meeting and small enough that a two-advisor shop may ignore it, leaving the middle of the RIA market to make a strategic call with an expense that does not look strategic.

The price sits at one end of a market whose other end is Mariner Wealth's $175 million bot budget, which works out to $250,000 per bot over five years, roughly $50,000 per bot per year. Mariner is building a capability; Schwab's RIAs are buying a seat at someone else's capability, and the $240 license is the toll.

The real expense shows up in the process work. Anthropic's advisor suite bundles nine integrations into a single install, which reduces the switching cost but concentrates the permission decisions; the first hour of value depends on an access audit: which of those nine integrations can read client data, write to the CRM, or move assets. None of that is in the $240.

Anthropic is not selling a neutral assistant; the suite arrives with model-portfolio distribution built in, and BlackRock's $300 billion book is accessible through the same interface. That turns the per-seat license into a distribution toll: the advisor pays $240 to have a product lineup placed inside the tool, and the lineup is not accidental.

Salesforce's Agentic Advisor pushes in the same direction, turning meeting output into prioritized action, which means the assistant does not end the meeting; it assigns the follow-up. The output of AI is work for a human, which is why 73% of surveyed RIA firms want to hire junior advisors to run AI.

The junior seats are the expensive part: Kitces Research puts new-graduate turnover at two to five times the career-changer rate, so the firms hiring junior advisors to operate these tools are hiring the cohort most likely to leave. The $240 per advisor license becomes a recurring cost on top of a recruitment and retention cost the industry is already paying, and the firms that can absorb that churn are the ones that will get the capacity gain.

For the 16,000 RIAs on Schwab's platform, saving time is not the question; the decision is whether to pay the toll now or wait until the license is folded into a custody negotiation that includes more than $240 per seat. The larger firms will pay now because they can amortize the process work across more advisors and clients; the smaller firms may wait, and by waiting they cede the compounding efficiency to the firms that did not.

The integration makes Schwab the distributor of an AI layer, and the $240 per seat is the first installment of a relationship in which the custodian controls access to the model lineup. For an RIA owner, $4,800 is affordable; the real question is whether the firm wants to be a customer of that lineup or a competitor to it.

The first test is the custody contract renewal cycle. If the $240 appears as a separate line item, the market will know Schwab is charging for the model lineup rather than the plumbing; if it disappears into the bundle, the price is the starting position for a larger negotiation. The difference will show up before any efficiency study does, and the firms that treat the fee as a technology decision will debate it while the firms that treat it as a custody pricing decision are already staffing the operation.