The increased availability of fractional shares made a huge difference for individual investors over the past decade. It removed the need to purchase whole shares of costly stocks. Instead, they can purchase fractions of a share and get in on owning great businesses with less consideration about the overall share price.

Unfortunately, there are still several brokerages that don't offer the option to buy fractional shares. Investors outside the U.S. also have limited access to this feature. For some of these retail investors, having to buy one share of a stock that is worth thousands of dollars can severely unbalance and overweight a portfolio toward a single company. It means these investors must look to lower-priced stocks to keep the weighting balanced.

Thankfully, there are some lower-priced stocks that can serve this purpose well. Two companies I'm excited about (that also trade for under $100 a share) are The Trade Desk (TTD -2.44%) and Twilio (TWLO -0.73%). While these companies currently have reasonably priced shares, I'd be just as willing to buy them if their prices were high enough to force me to buy in through fractional shares.

Let's find out why these two stocks are no-brainer buys.

1. The Trade Desk

In recessionary economic environments, advertising budgets for companies are usually the first thing to get reduced. That can have an adverse effect on the company that needs the ads to keep selling its products. So when the budgets get cut, the remaining ad money needs to be spent as wisely as possible to get the most bang for the buck. That's where The Trade Desk can help.

The Trade Desk's demand-side advertising platform helps ad buyers (the companies doing the advertising) decide which ad space will be most effective to buy from the sellers (the companies with advertisement space, like websites or streaming services). Using Trade Desk tools, advertisers can monitor how effective their campaign is in real-time and harvest data about which customers their ads are attracting, which helps better focus on how and who to sell to.

The Trade Desk's second-quarter revenue of $377 million grew 35% year over year at a time when many advertising-related companies struggled. The company was also profitable in the second quarter on an adjusted basis that doesn't include a one-time CEO performance bonus of $131 million.

The Trade Desk has a bright future ahead of it, as its fastest-growing segment, connected TV (CTV), is a massive market opportunity. However, this stock does come with an expensive price tag, at least when assessed from a price-to-sales (P/S) basis. At 22 times sales, the stock is very expensive and remains above its pre-pandemic valuation.

The stock for great companies doesn't come cheap, and that's what The Trade Desk is. Unless the company stumbles, its stock will rarely trade at a valuation that most would consider reasonable. But with the stock down nearly 45% from its high, I think it's a great buy at today's prices.

2. Twilio

Maintaining excellent communication with customers is key to any thriving business. This has taken many forms over the years, including the use of automated text messaging. Twilio's APIs (application program interfaces) likely power most of the automated text messaging consumers see from companies they have relationships with. APIs have all the code necessary to perform the task of sending texts, setting up video calls, or personalizing a marketing email embedded within an easily used interface. This technology allows non-software engineers to construct these programs easily.

Twilio has gone all in on this technology, becoming the best and broadest communication solution available. To do this, it has acquired multiple businesses to bulk up its offering. Because of these acquisitions, investors assessing Twilio's worth should focus on organic revenue growth (this revenue excludes any acquisitions made in the past 12 months) rather than overall revenue. Twilio's management recognizes this discrepancy and conveniently reports this metric. In the second quarter, Twilio's organic revenue rose 33% year over year to $910 million.

Twilio remains unprofitable, although CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson promised investors non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) operating profitability would start with full-year 2023 results. To further accelerate this goal, Twilio will lay off approximately 11% of the company's workers.

While this will cost the company about $80 million in restructuring costs, it's the right move to cut down on employee bloat. The market applauded this move, with share prices gaining 10% when management announced the restructuring.

Even with that move, Twilio's stock remains down more than 80% off its all-time high and trades for a bargain 3.9 times sales. While Twilio's gross margins aren't as strong as other technology companies due to the fees (like paying cellphone companies to send text messages) Twilio pays, that P/S ratio values Twilio about the same as legacy tech companies Oracle (4.3) and Cisco Systems (3.5). These two haven't grown revenue meaningfully over the past decade (although Oracle's Q2 was solid), and for Oracle to trade at the same valuation as Twilio seems wrong.

I'm a buyer of Twilio shares here, as the market for customer communication is extensive and constantly changing. This market opportunity gives Twilio a colossal runway and makes it an excellent investment if the company remains agile.