Pricing pages are product surfaces, not just marketing pages with a payment form attached.
That sounds obvious until you look at how many digital products still handle price, fees, add-ons, discounts and urgency messages as separate bits of copy scattered across the journey. A headline price appears on the landing page. A platform fee turns up later. A useful add-on is pre-selected. A discount clock creates pressure. A review badge makes the product look better than the evidence behind it. Each decision may feel small in isolation. Together, they shape whether the buyer can make a fair choice.
The UK has made that much harder to ignore. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 changed the consumer protection regime, and the Competition and Markets Authority’s unfair commercial practices guidance says the relevant provisions apply to commercial practices from 6 April 2025. The guidance also highlights newer or more detailed prohibitions around fake consumer reviews and drip pricing.
This is not only a retail problem. Self-serve SaaS products, product-led onboarding flows, paid add-ons, usage bundles, training packages, implementation fees, AI credits, data exports, support tiers and marketplace-style services can all create pricing moments where the user thinks they understand the deal, then discovers the real shape of it later.
For UK SaaS teams, the useful response is not to wait for legal review at the end of a launch. Fair pricing needs to be designed into the journey from the start.
The enforcement signal is now real
The CMA’s new consumer enforcement powers are no longer theoretical. In June 2026 it ordered StubHub UK to refund more than 50,000 customers and fined the company £889,200 after finding that mandatory delivery and service fees were added late in the checkout rather than included in the price shown at the beginning of the sales process.
The same month, the CMA ordered Marks Electrical to refund nearly 40,000 customers and fined it £720,000 after finding that customers had been automatically opted into paid extra services without express agreement.
Those are not SaaS cases, but product teams should not dismiss them as someone else’s sector. The pattern is the important bit. The regulator is looking at complete digital journeys: what the customer sees first, when unavoidable costs appear, whether extras are genuinely chosen, and whether the interface helps people compare options clearly.
The CMA has also said its work on online pricing practices includes investigations into fees, misleading time-limited offers and automatic opt-ins. In parallel, the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum has described how member regulators are using generative AI and agentic AI to audit consumer experiences at scale, including detecting issues such as drip pricing.
That changes the practical risk model. A poor pricing flow no longer has to wait for a single angry customer or a journalist’s screenshot before it becomes visible. Regulators are building ways to inspect journeys systematically.
Fair pricing starts earlier than checkout
Many product teams treat checkout as the compliance moment. That is too late.
The CMA’s price transparency guidance explains that businesses must provide total prices up front when they tell customers about a product and its price. It also says it is illegal to hide unavoidable fees, taxes or other charges until later in the purchase process.
In SaaS, that means the work starts wherever a buyer first meets a meaningful price. It could be a pricing table, an upgrade modal, an in-app usage warning, a plan comparison, an email campaign, a sales-assisted quote builder or a public marketplace listing. If that surface gives the user enough information to consider buying, upgrading or renewing, it should not rely on later screens to reveal charges the user cannot avoid.
A fair pricing flow should answer a few questions immediately:
- What will this cost before optional extras?
- What charges are mandatory?
- Which costs vary by usage, seats, storage, transactions or support needs?
- When will the customer pay?
- What happens if they downgrade, cancel or exceed the allowance?
- Which features are included, limited or excluded?
That is not glamorous product work. It is the difference between a customer choosing a product and being manoeuvred through one.
Optional extras need active choice
SaaS teams hit this problem in subtler forms than a pre-ticked delivery service. A setup package may be added by default. A support upgrade may be bundled into the first invoice. A paid data migration may appear as a required step without being described clearly. A “recommended” AI credit bundle may be visually framed as the normal option. An annual plan may be selected by default while the monthly price gets the headline.
Some defaults are helpful. Good defaults reduce effort and support better decisions. But when the default takes more money, commits the customer to a different obligation, or makes one choice feel artificially mandatory, the design needs more discipline.
The safer pattern is straightforward:
- Leave paid extras off by default.
- Explain the extra in plain language near the choice.
- Show the price impact before the customer commits.
- Keep the “no thanks” route visually available.
- Record the choice in a way support and billing teams can understand later.
This is better for the business too. Customers who knowingly choose an add-on are less likely to complain, churn or arrive in support asking why an invoice changed.
Reviews and proof are product content
Fake reviews are often discussed as a marketplace or e-commerce issue, but SaaS products increasingly rely on proof inside the product journey: testimonials, case studies, ratings, customer logos, app store snippets, “most popular” labels, usage counters and comparison claims.
The problem is not proof itself. Buyers need confidence. The problem is proof that cannot be substantiated, is out of date, is selectively presented in a misleading way, or looks independent when it is not.
Product teams should treat trust signals as managed product content rather than decorative marketing furniture. That means knowing where proof appears, who owns it, when it was last checked, what claim it supports and whether the user could reasonably misunderstand it.
For a small SaaS team, a lightweight proof register can be enough. Keep a list of testimonials, logos, metrics, awards, review snippets and comparison claims. Attach the source, permission status, date, context and owner. Then make release review ask a boring but useful question: did this product change make any of our trust claims stale?
It is dull in precisely the way good operations often are.
Pressure tactics create brittle growth
The easiest way to spot a weak growth experiment is to ask whether it would still look reasonable if a customer support transcript, regulator screenshot or board paper showed it in full.
Countdown timers, “only two left” labels, expiring discounts, nag screens and cancellation friction can lift conversion in the short term. They can also teach users that the product is more interested in extracting a decision than helping them make one.
For SaaS teams, the line is not always obvious. A real trial ending soon is useful information. A real limited implementation slot might be relevant for service capacity. A genuine annual discount can help buyers compare costs. The design failure is pretending scarcity exists when it does not, hiding the conditions, or making the quieter choice hard to find.
The product standard should be simple: urgency must be true, useful and proportionate.
If the message would need three footnotes to explain why it is technically accurate, it probably belongs back in design review.
Build an evidence trail while you build the flow
Fair pricing is not only a matter of what appears on screen. Teams also need to prove what was shown, chosen and accepted.
That does not mean turning every checkout into an enterprise compliance system. It means keeping enough product evidence to answer practical questions later:
- Which version of the pricing page did this customer see?
- Were mandatory charges included in the first displayed total?
- Which optional extras were available and which were selected?
- Was a discount or promotion active at the time?
- What billing terms were shown before confirmation?
- Which consent or order confirmation event was recorded?
Small product teams often underestimate this part. The website, payment system, CRM and support inbox each hold part of the story, but nobody can reconstruct the journey when a dispute arrives. That is how a design issue becomes an operations issue, then a trust issue.
The fix is not necessarily complex. Version pricing copy. Log plan selections and add-on choices. Keep screenshots or structured snapshots for major pricing changes. Link billing events back to the terms and plan metadata that generated them. Give support staff a plain view of what the customer chose.
If the business cannot explain the journey after the fact, it probably has not designed the journey clearly enough in the first place.
What to change in the product backlog
This is where the legal update becomes ordinary product work.
Start with a journey review. Walk through acquisition, pricing, account creation, upgrade, add-ons, renewal, cancellation and reactivation. Capture every place where price, value, proof, urgency or consent affects a customer’s decision.
Then turn the review into backlog items:
- Replace headline-only prices with totals that include unavoidable charges.
- Separate mandatory costs from optional extras in the interface and data model.
- Remove pre-selected paid add-ons.
- Make plan limits, usage charges and support boundaries visible before payment.
- Audit testimonials, logos, review snippets and “popular” labels.
- Add ownership and review dates to pricing and trust content.
- Log customer choices with enough context for support and dispute handling.
- Test the flow with someone outside the team and ask what they think they are buying.
None of this requires a huge transformation programme. It does require product, design, engineering, marketing, finance and support to stop treating pricing as someone else’s page.
Fairness is a product quality signal
The best SaaS pricing flows do not merely avoid enforcement risk. They make the product easier to buy.
Clear prices reduce support questions. Honest add-on choices improve expansion quality. Trustworthy proof helps serious buyers move faster. Transparent plan limits stop customers feeling trapped by surprises. Better records make billing issues less painful to resolve.
That is why this topic fits product-led software companies. Fairness is not a legal wrapper around the product. It is part of the product experience itself.
The CMA’s enforcement work is a useful prompt, but the underlying lesson is broader: if a customer would feel differently about buying after seeing the full price, the real add-ons, the genuine proof and the actual terms, the journey is not finished.
Design it until the choice is clear.