If I don't see your fees until step 5, I wonder what else you're hiding

Let me be candid about my standards. I run a bank that promises its clients discretion and reliability — and that manages four billion euros because people believe us on precisely those two things. Anyone in my position who sells trust develops a fine sense for the moment it starts being withdrawn — usually over small things. One typo on an asset manager’s homepage, and I catch myself wondering how carefully their risk management works. And nothing withdraws trust faster than the impression that someone is not showing me the full price.

It struck me again recently with a wealth-management app. A lot of it was done with real maturity: little distraction, no screaming upsell banners, focus on the core task. And then I could not find the management fees anywhere in the onboarding. If I have to add up the costs myself at step 5, I don’t distrust that one number. I distrust the entire flow.

The real cost of a fee revealed late

The reflex in many product teams goes like this: push the price back a little — people are already in the funnel and will drop off less often. That observation isn’t wrong. It’s just not thought through to the end. There is, in fact, evidence that the technique works in the short term. A large-scale field experiment on the ticket platform StubHub.com, with several million participants, showed that drip pricing — revealing costs step by step — led consumers to spend 21% more and made them 14% more likely to complete a purchase than those who saw the all-inclusive price from the start (per the OECD in its report Dark Commercial Patterns, drawing on Blake et al. 2021).

I cite these numbers with deliberate reservation: it is a single experiment on a single platform — a secondary ticket market. It does not prove the effect is the same size in every industry; the OECD itself notes that the magnitude depends heavily on study design. But as evidence that the technique works, it is plenty. And that is exactly the trap. Because the more interesting question is not whether more people buy. It is: who exactly is buying — and in what state?

You win the click and lose the relationship

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, the CMA, has pulled the research together. Its finding is sober and uncomfortable at once: drip pricing leads consumers to buy more, spend more, underestimate the total price, make mistakes while searching — and end up less satisfied with their purchase. That is the part the conversion curve doesn’t show. The sale lands in your statistics. The resentment lands in the customer’s head.

And it doesn’t vanish just because the purchase went through. The CMA points out that many consumers stay with the drip-priced offer even when they have long known the full price and could change their selection — despite being dissatisfied. Translated into my language: you have the revenue, but you have bound someone to you who feels deceived. In my business, that is not an asset — it is a liability. An affluent, control-minded client who once felt taken advantage of does not come back. And she recommends you to no one in her network, which in my world is the actual sales engine.

It isn’t just unwise — it’s often illegal

This is about more than style. European fair-trading law is unusually explicit on this point: a commercial practice counts as misleading if it makes false statements about, among other things, the price or how it is calculated (Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, Art. 6) — and likewise if material information is concealed or provided too late (Art. 7), with the total price expressly part of that information whenever there is an invitation to purchase. Revealing mandatory fees late is not a gray area. It is precisely the conduct this rule was written for.

Then there is the Digital Services Act, the EU’s first explicit rule against dark patterns (Art. 25). I dislike overstatement, so here is the honest caveat: its ban is subsidiary — it does not apply where fair-trading law is already responsible, and hidden prices in a sales flow usually fall exactly there. Enforcement happens nationally, in Austria as in Germany through unfair-competition law. Several bodies of law interlock, and none of them plays into your hands if you deliberately hold back the full price.

The most expensive moment in the funnel

You do not need a regulator or a court to see the damage, though. It is measurable in your own funnel. The Baymard Institute, which has studied online checkout for years, puts the average documented abandonment rate across numerous studies at 70.22%. That is an order of magnitude, not a precise single value — it includes people who were only browsing. But it says something clear: every additional bit of friction at the moment someone is ready to pay is expensive.

And the most common addressable reason people with genuine purchase intent abandon a checkout is, of all things, extra costs that are too high — shipping, taxes, fees: 39% cite that as their reason for abandoning, per Baymard, once pure browsers are filtered out. I will not transfer that one-to-one to the premium or wealth segment — Baymard studies the e-commerce checkout, not my world, and this is an analogy, not proof. But with my clientele, the mechanism is likely sharper, not milder. People who are used to reading contracts do not react less sensitively to a fee slipped in late. They react more sensitively.

My advice to you

Show the full price first. Not out of virtue — out of calculation. The provider who names the costs early and in full buys something no amount of funnel polish can replace: my assumption that the rest is in order, too. The provider who shows the fees at step 5 gets the opposite — my suspicion that more is hidden. And a suspicion, with me, costs more than any fee, because it extends to everything else.

I know I am strict, and I know my own weakness: I tend to give a provider my network recommends an advance of trust I would deny a stranger. That is not fair, and I am aware of it. But on one point I am incorruptible: a hidden price breaks even that advance. If I only find the fees after several steps, I ask myself what else is being hidden — and on that question, more than one business relationship has failed before it ever began.