A price is useful only if it is the price you can actually pay.
Drip pricing breaks that basic idea into stages.
The customer sees an attractive number first, starts the purchase, chooses dates or seats or options, creates an account, enters details, and only later discovers mandatory service charges, processing fees, resort fees, or other unavoidable additions.
The Federal Trade Commission has long described this pattern as drip pricing: advertising only part of the total price and revealing mandatory charges later in the buying process.
See the FTC’s dark-pattern report.
The first price wins the comparison
Suppose two services advertise the same basic product.
One shows the full mandatory price immediately. The other advertises a lower number and adds compulsory charges at checkout.
The second service can appear cheaper during the moment when the shopper is comparing alternatives even if it is ultimately more expensive.
By the time the real total appears, the customer may already have spent several minutes choosing the product and entering information. Starting over has a cost, even if that cost is only annoyance and lost time.
The FTC’s current fee rule for live-event tickets and short-term lodging requires covered businesses that display prices to show the total price upfront, including mandatory fees that can be calculated in advance. The agency says the total price must be displayed more prominently than other pricing information.
See the FTC’s Unfair or Deceptive Fees FAQ.
The useful number is the payable number
European consumer authorities found the same problem in a 2026 sweep of online sellers. Ten percent of the sites checked used drip pricing, adding fees later in the transaction.
See the European Commission’s 2026 online sales sweep.
Not every charge can always be known at the first screen. Taxes, shipping, and genuinely optional additions may depend on information the buyer has not supplied yet.
But an unavoidable fee known from the beginning is different.
If every customer must pay it, then hiding it until the customer is deep in the transaction does not make the product cheaper.
It only makes the comparison worse.
A price should help someone decide whether to begin a purchase, not explain at the end why the number that attracted them was never available in the first place.