Takeaways
- The Acorns app is a micro-investing platform that invests your spare change.
- Acorns has no minimum opening balance, but you need $5 to start investing.
- Average Acorns users invested over $150 within the first four months.
- Investors can automate investing in stocks, bonds, and Bitcoin-linked ETFs.
- Acorns has investing, retirement, and savings products to help grow your money.
Overall App Rating
Best for: The Acorns app is the perfect tool for beginner investors who want to start investing today without doing any heavy lifting.
Favorite feature: The Acorns Round Ups feature is a game changer. Our team thinks this innovative approach to micro-investing and saving makes Acorns a standout in the field.
Why we like it: The Acorns app is super user-friendly and intuitive to use right from the jump. Built to easily sync to your bank account, credit card, or debit card, you will immediately feel immersed in Acorns' streamlined app. It is well designed to streamline the investing process so you can get back to living your life. Our team digs the Round-Up feature, which automatically adds money to your investing funds.
The Acorns app makes our Best of Investing Apps awards for its easy-to-set-up interface that gets you started investing immediately. Our team loves the Round-Up feature (discussed below), which lets you round up purchases to the next dollar, allowing you to invest your forgotten-about spare change into stocks and ETFs. While Acorns does have priced membership levels, we think it's easily worth the price of admission for developing smart investing habits.
Take the Next Step:
On Acorns Website
Acorns Investing App
Smart Money Rating: 4.9/5
Intro Offer: $20 Bonus Investment
Best For: Beginner Investors
It is easy to let saving and investing often fall to the bottom of the priority list, especially if you feel intimidated by the stock market or unsure how to start investing. The Acorns app is a game-changing app that offers you a micro-investing platform right on your phone. It helps you grow your money effortlessly through small, everyday contributions.
The Acorns app is also one of the most popular investing apps on the market, so our team chose to review it. Users who have already rated the app appreciate its features, giving it a 4.7 on the App Store and 4.7 on Google Play (with over 10 million downloads).[1][2] To conduct our review, we downloaded the Acorns app to see how it works and how you could benefit from it. Here's what we found.
What Is the Acorns App?
Acorns is a financial app designed to simplify investing by rounding up your everyday purchases and investing the spare change into a diversified portfolio. Since its launch in 2014, Acorns has gained popularity among beginner investors, students, and young professionals for its automated and hands-off approach. Acorns has over 15 million users worldwide.[3]
The app includes features like recurring contributions, retirement accounts, checking accounts, and educational content. Its goal is to make investing accessible and less intimidating for people who might not otherwise get started. We think it does just that.
Pros of Acorns
- Beginner-Friendly
- Automated Saving
- Diversified Portfolios
- Retirement and Checking Options
- Automatic Portfolio Rebalancing
Cons of Acorns
- Fees Can Be High for Small Balances
- Limited Investment Options
- No Tax-Loss Harvesting
- Lack of Direct Investment in Crypto
How Acorns Works
The core feature of Acorns is “Round-Ups.” When you link your debit or credit card to the app, Acorns rounds each purchase to the nearest dollar and invests the spare change.
Here's how it works. If you buy a cup of coffee for $2.45, Acorns rounds up the transaction to $3.00 and invests the $0.55 difference. This strategy seems to really work because the average Acorns user invests $150 in the first four months of use.[4]
Over time, you can stack up some serious savings without having to think about it. Acorns removes decision fatigue and automatically gets you invested. This investing strategy allows you to take advantage of compound interest.
Beyond Round-Ups, Acorns offers a variety of ways to grow your investments, including:
1. Recurring Contributions—You can schedule automatic transfers to your Acorns account, starting at as little as $5 per day, week, or month.
2. Found Money—Acorns partners with big-name brands to offer cash-back rewards when you shop through the app. These rewards are added directly to your investment account, adding saved cash to your investing funds.
3. Retirement and Banking—Acorns offers Acorns Later (for IRAs) and Acorns Checking, a full-featured checking account with a debit card, direct deposit, and no overdraft fees.
4. Education with Grow—The app includes financial literacy content through its Grow magazine, which teaches users about saving, investing, and long-term financial planning.
Once your funds are invested, they are placed into one of several portfolios built using modern theory, managed by experts, and diversified across asset classes like stocks and bonds.
How to Sign Up for Acorns
Getting started with Acorns is a streamlined and straightforward process, which is why millions of users have already downloaded the app. Here's how you can get started:
- Download the Acorns App (available on iOS and Android) or sign up on the Acorns website.
- Link Your Bank and Spending Accounts to enable Round-Ups and automatic transfers.
- Answer a Short Questionnaire about your financial goals, risk tolerance, and time horizon.
- Choose a Portfolio preference that ranges from conservative to aggressive. Your choice is based on your risk tolerance and investing goals.
- Set Up Recurring Investments and enable Round-Ups to begin passively investing.
Once everything is in place, Acorns starts investing on your behalf, allowing you to grow your portfolio over time with minimal effort.
How Much Does Acorns Cost?
Acorns offers three main subscription tiers:
Acorns Bronze ($3/month)
Includes:
- Investment account with an expert-built, diversified portfolio
- Save and invest spare change every day with Round-Ups
- Acorns Later retirement account
- Checking account
- Educational courses
Acorns Silver ($6/month)
Includes:
- All the benefits of Bronze
- 1% IRA match
- 05% APY on Emergency Fund
- 57% APY on Checking
- 25% match on your bonus investments
- Premium education
Acorns Gold ($12/month)
Includes:
- All the benefits of Silver
- 3% IRA match
- Kids’ accounts and debit cards
- 50% match on your bonus investments
- $10,000 life insurance policy for eligible customers
Although the monthly fees are low, they can represent a high percentage of assets if you only have a small balance. For example, a $3 monthly payment on a $300 balance equals a 12% annual cost. For context, most robo-advisors charge 0.25% - 0.5%.
Where the Acorns App Shines
The Acorns app offers many advantages over the competition. Here’s where we think it
- Round Ups: One of the standout features of Acorns is that you can elect to link your credit and debit cards to your account and have your change placed in an investment portfolio.
- IRA Matching: A gold membership gets you access to up to a 3% IRA match on new contributions during your first year. These contributions can help accelerate your investing goals.
- Saving with Cash Back Rewards: The Acorns Earn feature lets you link your account to browser extensions like Chrome and Safari, letting you earn cash back rewards. You can deposit these funds into your investing account. Acorns has over 12,000 offers from partners brands.
Where Acorns Can Improve
There are always ways to improve products. Here are some of the things we think Acorns could change to elevate the overall user experience:
- No Tax Loss Harvesting: Tax-loss harvesting is a strategy that allows you to sell a performing asset to strategically offset gains. Acorns does not offer this, unlike other competitors.
- High Management Fees: While the Acorns Bronze ($3), Silver ($6), and Gold ($12) seem like low fees at first glance, they are relatively high if you keep a small investment balance. For example, on a $1,000 investment portfolio, the Bronze annual fee structure of $36 is an annualized 3.6%.
- Lower Brokerage Transfers: Keeping customers is important, but life happens, and investors might outgrow Acorns. The platform needs to either expand its offerings to include a full suite of offerings or reduce transfer costs. Right now, they charge $35 per ETF transfer (which is expensive).
Is Acorns Worth It?
Acorns is a smart choice for beginners, hands-off savers, and people who struggle to budget or invest independently. Its automation tools make it easy to save and grow money over time. The platform especially appeals to users who want to build good savings habits gradually without needing to learn the ins and outs of investing.
However, more experienced investors or those with larger balances, such as those with over $10,000 to invest, may prefer a more robust platform with more features and lower costs. Read about the Best Stock Brokerage Accounts.
Smart Summary
Acorns is an automated investment app that helps users grow wealth through spare change, recurring contributions, and cash-back rewards. With beginner-friendly tools, retirement accounts, and integrated checking, it is designed to make saving and investing accessible to everyone. If you want an easy way to invest your spare change and accrue cash-back rewards in your investing portfolio, there is no better place than Acorns.
Smart Money requires our expert writers to rely on trusted primary sources—academic research, government reports, expert interviews, original reporting, and peer-reviewed data—to deliver precise and up-to-date content. All of our content is thoroughly fact-checked. We also incorporate relevant research from reputable publishers when it aligns with our editorial focus. For a closer look at our rigorous journalistic standards, explore our editorial guidelines.
(1) App Store. Acorns. Last Accessed May 21, 2025.
(2) Google Play. Acorns. Last Accessed May 21, 2025.
(3) Acorns. Acorns Doubles Down on Financial Wellness for the Whole Family. Last Accessed May 21, 2025.
(4) Acorns. Round-ups by Acorns. Last Accessed May 21, 2025.
