Wealthfront invests your money.
Formation organizes all of it.
Wealthfront is an excellent automated investing service — low-cost index portfolios, a high-yield cash account, in-house tax-loss harvesting. But it manages the money inside Wealthfront. Formation takes no custody and never trades; it's the independent, cited layer across every custodian you already use, built for entities and complexity Wealthfront's robo isn't.
No charge today · Cancel in two clicks · Founding price $199/yr, locked for as long as you stay
What Wealthfront does well
Automated, low-fee index investing with a polished experience, a competitive cash account, direct indexing at higher balances, and tax-loss harvesting inside its own managed accounts. If you want a robo-advisor to run a portfolio for you, Wealthfront is one of the best — and we'll say so.
Feature by feature
Wealthfront
robo-advisor
Formation
one plan · $199/yr founding
Wealthfront's 0.25% advisory fee per wealthfront.com as of June 2026. Its tax-loss harvesting operates within Wealthfront-managed accounts only.
Custody vs. clarity
Wealthfront's TLH stops at its own walls.
Wealthfront harvests losses inside the accounts it manages — but the wash-sale rule spans every account you own, including the IRA at another broker and your spouse's accounts. A robo can't see those, so it can't protect a harvest from a disallowing buy it doesn't know about. Formation scans the unified feed across every custodian, takes no custody, and charges a flat fee instead of a slice of your assets.
Common questions
Is Formation a good Wealthfront alternative?
Formation is built for households whose finances have outgrown a single-login tool: money spread across many custodians, more than one legal entity (trusts, LLCs, S-Corps), equity compensation, K-1s, and multi-state tax — unified in one view, organized by the entity that owns each account, with every number traced back to its source. The feature-by-feature table above lays out where Formation differs from Wealthfront so you can judge the fit for your own situation.
How much does Formation cost compared to Wealthfront?
Formation is one plan with full access — $29.99/month or $349/year list, and founding members lock $17.99/month or $199/year for as long as they stay subscribed. Every subscription starts with a 7-day free trial; there is no free tier and no percentage-of-assets (AUM) fee. The pricing row in the comparison table above shows how that lines up against Wealthfront.
Can Formation handle trusts, LLCs, equity compensation, and K-1s?
Yes. Formation models every account by the legal entity that owns it (personal, joint, trust, LLC, S-Corp), tracks RSUs, ISOs, NSOs, and ESPP with alternative-minimum-tax awareness, ingests Schedule K-1s from PDF, and runs cross-custodian, wash-sale-aware tax-loss harvesting across all your brokers at once. AURA, Formation's education-only AI, explains and analyzes these numbers but never gives personalized advice, places trades, or moves money.
Keep your investments where they are.
Get one cited, cross-custodian view — entity-aware, wash-sale-aware, and flat-fee — over the accounts you already hold.
No charge today · Cancel in two clicks · Founding price $199/yr, locked for as long as you stay
Full pricing details