I can't be the only one who has noticed this. The Vanguard website is atrocious. I understand that they aren't trying to be the snappy, gamified aesthetic of Robinhood and that that is a feature, not a bug. But it goes beyond that. It just flat out doesn't work. I tried to pull up cost basis information to show my son how it works and it just said temporarily unavailable for no reason and then reappeared much later. This happens more than half of the time I try to anything besides check my overall balance. There are bugs and friction points everywhere.
Here's the math. Vanguard has almost $12T under management. If they increased their expense ratios by 1/100th of a basis point across the board, that would give them $1M per month to maintain the website.
So the question that Vanguard needs to be asking now is whether somebody with $1M worth of Vanguard funds would balk at paying an extra 10 cents per year for a website that actually works. Let me be the first to raise my hand and say yes I'm willing to part with that money. Get your act together, Vanguard!
There. Rant over.