I am currently at $1.50 with no ticket charge. I will be making a request for $1.25 shortly as others have told me it is possible with my volume. We'll see. My recollection is that in paper money, the commission rates are higher.
Would you like to PM me your volume? If you have the assets for a customer portfolio margin account, I can do much better.
IB charges .70 per option contract, .005 per share of stock, and no ticket charges, but you need at least $10k to open an account. Having said that, commissions should never be the focus, the quality of the fill is the most important part of any trade.
You can ask them to use the same fee schedule for paper money as your real trading account. Even 1.25 is high. Breakeven with Schwab (8.95+.75/contract IIRC) would be 12 contracts at 1.50 and 18 for 1.25 for singles. Plus I think they only charge the ticket fee per order so a vertical spread would only be charged once to open and once to close. Not pushing Schwab, but pretty much every other broker is much cheaper. Some of them have comparison charts to get you to sign up with them.