If anything could serve as a greater catalyst for change than Schwab’s robo-advisor, then it might be Moore and Kitces’s AdvicePay. Subscription-based planning was previously difficult to bill for and scale.

Most payment processors avoid the financial services industry because of the strict regulatory burdens surrounding custody and compliance. In fact, until the advent of AdvicePay, many subscription advisors were billing directly, accepting personal checks or payments through online applications.

“We’re finding that there were a lot of advisors who hadn’t even thought about launching a monthly subscription service before because it was so burdensome,” says Kitces. “There were a good number of advisors who were doing something similar with retainers or quarterly subscription payments, or just periodically charging their clients a stand-alone planning fee, but there wasn’t a lot of monthly subscription model happening, it was just too administratively burdensome.”

Being able to bill clients monthly may really be a game-changer—billing quarterly or annually can lead to payments large enough to trigger custody regulations, something that many subscription advisors would like to avoid. Now organizations like Cetera are signing on to the AdvicePay platform to make it easier for their advisors to offer subscription-based planning services.

According to Kitces, Schwab isn’t “even close” to being the largest adoptee of the subscription model. “We’ve discovered in rolling out and building out AdvicePay that a lot of large firms had a segment of advisors who were doing some sort of subscription or retainer already,” says Kitces. “Maybe 10% to 20% of the advisors out there. That was creating a lot of pain for the large firms who were trying to charge fees at scale with no technology.”

XY Planning Network advisors don’t require clients to have minimums to invest, and they offer some sort of subscription or blended fee service for these low-asset clients.

Some advisors are using subscriptions and flat-fee models to serve the ultra-wealthy. For example, Carolyn McClanahan’s Life Planning Partners charges clients a recurring flat fee, doing away with AUM fees altogether, but requires a minimum fee of $10,000, whose components vary according to their complexity. If a prospective client’s assets and financial situation are not well-suited to the minimum fee, they are referred out.

Moore notes that high-net-worth clients may have a sizable portion of their assets in investments where charging an AUM fee would be difficult or impossible—for example, clients with heavy allocations to precious metals. Real estate developers may also have a sizable portion of their net worth tied up in their projects yet still need high-quality, personalized financial advice.

“To some degree, even my clients with significant assets appreciate the subscription fee model,” says Ian Bloom, founder of Raleigh, N.C.-based Open World Financial Life Planning. “I have a $1 million client who pays me $3,000 a year for financial planning and advice. The reason he does that is that I help him to manage his money, which he now does on his own. I do have a side convenience AUM service for investment management, but he specifically doesn’t want to use something like that, and he doesn’t want someone to bill directly from his investment accounts.”

Bloom’s subscription services start at $2,400 per year. He applies a flat start-up fee of $1,200 to create a client’s initial plan, then charges $100 per month through the first year. In a client’s second year of service, the monthly fee increases to $200.