Yes, it’s totally feee including $0 commissions on options. But features are limited, like no shorting stocks and no portfolio margin, so they’ll close your options automatically when you’re at risk of being assigned. Also no options on indexes. But they support trading crypto that some people are into as well.
My wife uses Robinhood and sometimes I tell her what options/spreads/combos to buy so we enter the same orders. Quite often she actually gets better fills than I can get at Interactive Brokers. Sometimes I yell “how did you get that order through when I’m still waiting?!”
“Better” means faster or she gets filled at all, while I don’t. Other times she doesn’t get fills while I do, but not that often.
All the negative hype is form people who never used Robinhood and make assumptions.
Yes, Robinhood does sell order flow to market makers, but so do most brokers nowadays. Market makers cannot give you totally invalid price, especially on limit orders. They may delay your fills till the underlying moves in unfavorable direction, but I haven’t noticed much of that. I’m not sure if some orders are filled internally at Robinhood against other users, but MM’s could do that just as well on their end. Robinhood’s order flow may also help MMs achieve better efficiency, which can go back to customers.
Generally it’s difficult to experience problems with Robinhood in terms of getting orders filled, but they do have other, technical issues, and no customer service to get in touch with.