Hello Dhan Community,
When we launched Gold Vault by Dhan in April, we wanted to fix the oldest problem in Indian gold investing. Buying physical gold still meant trusting someone else on price, purity and storage.
Gold Vault lets you buy real, exchange-grade Gold and Silver at live MCX prices, with no markup and no spread. Your bullion is stored safely in a vault in your name, and you can get it home delivered whenever you want.
The response has been far beyond what we expected. Around 400 kgs of Gold and Silver has already been bought on Gold Vault, and the number keeps growing. With so many of you using it, we often get questions about how the process works, what you are charged, and how to get the most value out of it. This post brings all of that together in one place.
Gold Vault - How does it work?
When you buy on Gold Vault, you are buying an MCX Gold or Silver futures contract, placed with the intent to take physical delivery of the contract on expiry day. This is not leverage. The full contract value is blocked from day one, along with all applicable charges (brokerage, exchange and physical settlement charges, and taxes). You can see the full breakdown in the Gold Vault Order Estimator by tapping the arrow beside “To Pay”.
The charges are only blocked at this stage. They are actually deducted when the contract expires and goes through physical settlement. Once that happens, your bullion is delivered and is stored in an MCX - recognised safe vault; these are the same institutional vaults used by large market participants like Banks and Financial Institutions to store their Gold or Silver in the highest form of security that is available to such large institutions.
Storage here costs ₹75 per gram of Gold per year and is charged annually. See the pricing page here. You can track every stage in the Vault section of the app: In Trades → In Vault → At Home.
Taking Home Delivery from Gold Vault: Check the Charges before you buy
Gold and Silver are high-value commodities and their transfers or logistics don’t happen via courier services or delivery services that we see for ecommerce or food or grocery delivery apps that we use in everyday lives.
Note that as your Gold and Silver is stored in Institutional Vaults, access to these are restricted to only a select group of shipping partners who can transfer them securely and safely from one location to another whenever requested for it.
Such transfers don’t travel in a courier bag. Every consignment goes in a secured, and insured manner, in armoured vehicles, with armed guards and strict security protocols. Usually the ones you may have seen used to transfer cash from Banks to ATMs. Even while the Gold or Silver coins are delivered to you, the handover happens only after ID verification and OTP.
In such cases, the farther the delivery address is from major hubs, the longer the vehicle is on the road, and the higher the risk and cost of moving bullion. That’s why delivery charges depend on the pincode you deliver to.
Before you place an order, check what delivery to your pincode will cost on the Shipping Charge Calculator. Enter your pincode and quantity, and you’ll see the exact charge upfront.
Every shipment has a fixed cost for security, insurance and liability, however little metal is inside. The more grams that share one shipment, the less you pay per gram. This is why we launched Group Delivery: you can club multiple coins or bars of the same metal from the same vault into one request and pay shipping only once.
The Smart Way: Is to Buy, Accumulate, request for a Group Delivery together
Here is how gold delivery charges move with quantity for a Mumbai pincode (400001), assuming gold at ₹15,000 / gm:
Two takeaways:
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Accumulate first, Deliver later. Taking 30 separate 1g deliveries would cost ₹19,500. Taking all 30 gm in one delivery costs ₹3,300. Same gold, about 83% less in delivery charges.
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Delivery charges step up every 3 grams, so quantities in multiples of 3 give you the most gold per rupee of shipping.
Please note:
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Dhan simply charges you plain brokerage of ₹20 per order. That’s it., irrespective of your order which can be 1 gm or 1 Kg of Gold
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And most of the charges you see, including storage, delivery and others are pass through charges that Dhan gives away to partners who are involved in the process.
In short, Buy at live exchange prices, let your bullion settle into the vault, keep adding over time, and call for home delivery only when you actually need it in hand.
Check your pincode on the calculator before you buy, and group your holdings into one request when you do. Gold Vault was built to make owning real gold as simple and transparent as owning a stock, and planning your delivery well is how you get the most out of it.
Happy Diwali
From everyone at Dhan