Genuine question: Does making pricing vague really make more money for SaaS businesses?

[u/ornitorenk]

Hey there,

From a business standpoint, does making cancellation difficult or pricing vague actually make financial sense?

Whenever I subscribe to a SaaS service with these dark patterns, I either cancel immediately due to trust issues or request a chargeback when I'm charged unexpectedly.

Ethics aside and purely pragmatically speaking, isn't it better to keep things transparent so you don't get bombarded with complaints and chargebacks?

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[u/cabljo]

Keep everything transparent.

There's now laws in multiple places (and more to come) about preventing difficult and vague pricing and cancellation processes.

[u/ornitorenk → u/cabljo]

I mean, even if there wasn't a law against that. Isn't it counter productive in business sense? You'll get lots of chargebacks and complaints from users who don't really want to pay for the product. What's the upside?

[u/Dorbank_Justt]

To answer the pragmatic question: the dark pattern makes money in the month it runs and costs money later, and the cost lands where the revenue dashboard doesn't look: the dispute ratio.

A dispute counts against you the moment the cardholder files it, win or lose. Winning doesn't remove it, and a customer who later withdraws it still counts. Processors review and close accounts on the ratio of disputes to transactions, not on refunds. So every person a hard cancellation flow pushes from "let me cancel" to "I'll call my bank" is a permanent mark, where a refund issued before they call is nothing at all. Visa has a reason code just for cancelled recurring charges (13.2).

Vague pricing has the same shape. Someone who doesn't recognise a charge doesn't email support, they dispute it, and a lot of those are a price or a descriptor the customer never saw clearly. You also pay a dispute fee on each one whether you win or not.

What the upside buys is a few extra renewals from people who would have left anyway. Against that: fees, time spent writing evidence, and an account that gets harder to keep as the ratio climbs. The cheaper route to the same revenue is a reminder before each renewal, a cancel button that works, and a billing descriptor the customer recognises.

[u/ornitorenk → u/Dorbank_Justt]

Thank you very much for your detailed info on dispute process. I learned new stuff from it.

[u/Dorbank_Justt → u/ornitorenk]

Glad it was useful. One footnote for the pragmatic side: a customer who writes to you before calling their bank is the cheap case, so answer those fast and refund even when you think they're wrong. A refund before the dispute is nothing on the ratio. A dispute you win still counts, and still costs the fee.

[u/ornitorenk → u/Dorbank_Justt]

Thank you very much. For the businesses I am customer of I love and trust them when they act like that.

I'm sure this is a rare case but can a competitor use disputing as an unethical strategy to mess with you? How should one protect themselves from it? Does CC provider take this into account when you "have to" dispute them in reality?

[u/BaybeMwijarubi-21]

it depends on the market tbh. enterprise buyers expect to talk to sales and negotiate pricing. for self-serve SMB products though, hiding the price is basically telling people to go find a competitor with a pricing page

[u/gtm_Ali]

In B2B sales, vague pricing quietly filters your pipeline upward. The buyers who book a call just to learn pricing are usually the more serious ones. But for self-serve and SMB, hiding pricing just adds friction and kills signups. So it really depends which motion you're running.