Betterment is a robo-advisor and financial planning platform offering automated investment management, tax-loss harvesting, retirement planning, and goal-based portfolio rebalancing. Founded in 2010, Betterment manages billions in assets for individual investors through its Digital and Premium Advisory plans, and for employers through Betterment at Work — a 401(k) plan administration product.
Betterment does not offer a public developer API. Third-party developers access Betterment account data through open banking aggregators:
- Plaid — Primary aggregator; provides access to Betterment account balances, holdings, transactions, and account metadata.
- BankSync — Secondary aggregator supporting Betterment connectivity.
The Betterment at Work Payroll Integration API is a private partner API used by payroll providers (ADP, Gusto, Rippling, Paychex, and 350+ others) to automate 401(k) contribution management and employee eligibility tracking. Access requires a formal onboarding agreement.
| Plan | Fee |
|---|---|
| Digital (under $24K, no recurring deposit) | $5/month flat |
| Digital ($24K–$1M or $200+/month deposit) | 0.25% AUM/year |
| Premium Advisory (min. $100K) | 0.65% AUM/year |
| Betterment at Work (401k) | Negotiated per employer |
Progressive discounts apply above $1M AUM (0.15% on $1M–$2M; 0.10% above $2M).
See plans/plans.yml for full plan details.
Betterment Engineering maintains an active open-source presence at github.com/Betterment, including:
- alchemist — Flutter golden testing tool
- delayed — SQL-backed ActiveJob backend processing millions of jobs/day
- test_track — Multi-platform split-testing and feature-gating system
- webvalve — Service-oriented app development with fake HTTP services