If a customer has to uncheck a box to avoid paying your "optional" fee, regulators no longer consider that fee optional. That is the practical takeaway from the Federal Trade Commission's July 2026 order requiring the companies behind a popular travel booking app to pay $35 million over pre-selected "Tip" and VIP Support fees — and it applies well beyond travel. If you sell add-ons, upsells, protection plans, priority support, or service fees anywhere in an online checkout, your fee presentation is now a compliance question, not just a conversion question.
This guide explains what the order actually requires, the three layers of law behind it, and a concrete checklist to bring your own checkout into line.
What the Order Requires
The FTC alleged that the travel app displayed a "total price" with a prominent pay button while quietly adding pre-selected fees for tips and premium support — fees shown only on a part of the screen shoppers had to scroll to see. The company marketed "no hidden fees" while, according to the complaint, its own testing showed most customers would decline the charges if they were clearly disclosed and unticked by default. The order also targeted inflated promises about the add-ons themselves: support that was advertised as nearly instant but often unreachable, and a price-freeze feature whose key limits were never clearly disclosed.
Two holdings matter for your business:
- A pre-selected "optional" fee charged without express informed consent is an unfair practice. The customer's failure to notice and remove a charge is not consent.
- Total price means total price. Showing a headline price that omits charges the buyer will actually pay — and burying the real total below the fold — is deceptive, whether or not a line-item breakdown exists somewhere on the page.
The company settled without admitting or denying the allegations, but the $35 million in consumer redress and the forward-looking ban on misrepresenting fees set the enforcement template every other seller will be measured against.
The Three Legal Layers Behind the Order
The Hopper matter drew on overlapping authorities that reach far more businesses than travel apps. Understand all three, because at least one of them almost certainly covers you.
1. The FTC Act's Ban on Unfair or Deceptive Acts (Everyone)
Section 5 of the FTC Act prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices in commerce, and the agency has made clear that hidden-fee and drip-pricing enforcement is a priority across industries. You do not need to be in travel, ticketing, or lodging to face a Section 5 action over pre-ticked add-ons or a misleading total. State attorneys general enforce parallel state consumer-protection statutes with the same theories — and private class actions increasingly ride alongside.
2. The FTC's Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees (Tickets and Short-Term Lodging)
Effective May 12, 2025, and codified at 16 C.F.R. Part 464, the FTC's junk-fees rule requires sellers of live-event tickets and short-term lodging to clearly, conspicuously, and prominently disclose the total price — including all mandatory fees — whenever any price is advertised or displayed. The total must be the most prominent price figure, and businesses may not mischaracterize any fee or charge.
Even if you sell neither tickets nor lodging, treat this rule as the drafting template for your own disclosures. Regulators and plaintiffs' lawyers now point to "total price up front, most prominent figure on the screen" as the standard of care everywhere.
3. State Honest-Pricing Laws (Everyone Selling to Those States' Residents)
California's Hidden Fees Statute (SB 478, effective July 1, 2024) bans drip pricing economy-wide: any advertised, displayed, or offered price must include all mandatory fees and charges, other than taxes, government fees, and reasonable shipping. Minnesota followed with a similar law effective January 1, 2025. If you sell online to customers in these states — and most online sellers do — your checkout must already meet this standard regardless of what federal law requires.
The Consent Standard: What "Optional" Actually Requires
For charges that are genuinely optional, the governing federal standard comes from the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act (ROSCA). Note that the FTC's 2024 click-to-cancel rule (the amended Negative Option Rule) was vacated in full by the Eighth Circuit in July 2025 on procedural grounds — but ROSCA, Section 5, and state automatic-renewal laws still require the same core trio: clear and conspicuous disclosure of material terms before collecting billing information, the customer's express informed consent, and a simple cancellation mechanism.
Translated into checkout design, that means:
- Opt-in, never opt-out. Add-ons and upsells must start unselected. The customer takes an affirmative step to add each charge.
- Disclosure at the decision point. The fee amount, what it buys, and key limits must appear next to the control the customer clicks — not on a screen below, not behind a tooltip, not in terms and conditions.
- Consent to the charge, not just the purchase. Tapping "pay" for a booking consent to the booking total as displayed. It is not consent to a separate fee the display never fairly presented.
- Benefit claims must be true as experienced. If your priority-support upsell promises fast response times, measure actual response times for upsell buyers. If your protection plan has caps, exclusions, or availability conditions, those are part of the offer and must be disclosed before purchase.
Checkout Audit: A 10-Point Checklist
Walk through your own purchase flow on a phone — small screens are where buried-fee cases are born — and verify each of the following:
- Every add-on starts unchecked. Search your checkout code for pre-selected checkboxes, toggles defaulted to on, and "recommended" bundles that silently include paid extras.
- The first price shown equals the last price paid. Add mandatory service fees, processing fees, and surcharges into the headline figure. Only taxes, government fees, and actual shipping may sit outside it.
- The total is the most prominent number. No larger, bolder, or more colorful "base price" competing with the true total anywhere in the flow.
- Each fee is labeled for what it is. "Service fee," "processing fee," and "support plan" must reflect reality. A gratuity labeled as a fee — or a fee labeled as a gratuity — invites both regulator and card-network scrutiny.
- Optional fees say "optional" in plain words. "Add VIP support for $9.99 (optional)" next to an unchecked box. Never rely on the customer inferring optionality from layout.
- Nothing material lives below the fold. On the smallest phone you support, the total, all fees, and all add-on controls must be visible or reachable without scrolling past the pay button. If the pay button is visible while a fee disclosure is not, redesign the screen.
- Upsell benefit claims match fine print — and reality. Pull the three most aggressive claims on your upsells ("instant," "guaranteed," "covers everything") and confirm each against the actual terms and actual performance data.
- Removing an add-on is as easy as adding it. One tap to add means one tap to remove, available until the moment of payment.
- Receipts itemize every fee. The confirmation page and emailed receipt should list each charge on its own line with the same labels used at checkout. Receipts are exhibit A in every fee dispute.
- Internal concerns get a paper trail to a fix. In the travel-app case, the complaint quoted employees warning that the fee tactics were "tricking users." If anyone on your team has raised a similar flag, treat it as an early-warning system: log it, investigate, and either change the design or document why the concern was unfounded.
Common Mistakes That Trigger Enforcement
Mistake 1: "But our fees are disclosed in the order summary." An order summary the customer must scroll past the pay button to see is not a disclosure. Regulators evaluate what the customer actually encounters on the path to purchase, in order, on a real device.
Mistake 2: "The fee is only a few dollars, so it doesn't matter." Small per-transaction amounts multiplied across thousands of transactions are exactly what produce eight-figure redress funds. Materiality is judged per consumer decision, not per your revenue line.
Mistake 3: "Our A/B test shows opt-out converts better." Of course it does — and the uplift is the measure of the deception. Internal testing showing customers decline a fee when it is fairly presented is evidence the opt-out design was doing the selling, not the product. The FTC cited exactly this kind of testing in its complaint.
Mistake 4: "We call it a tip, so it's not a fee." Labels do not control; function does. A pre-selected, hard-to-find "tip" that flows to the house looks like a fee to enforcers, and mislabeling adds a deception count on top of the consent violation.
Mistake 5: "We're too small for the FTC to notice." State attorneys general, district attorneys, and private class-action firms all enforce the same theories with lower thresholds for action. California's statute provides for actual damages, punitive damages, and civil penalties per violation. Small sellers are regular defendants in state drip-pricing cases.
Keep Consent-Ready Books, Not Just a Compliant Checkout
Compliance does not end at the checkout screen — it has to survive in your ledger. When a customer disputes a fee, your records need to answer three questions: what was charged, what was disclosed, and what was consented to.
Start by tracking add-on and fee revenue in separate accounts from your core product revenue. If you ever need to refund a fee line across thousands of orders — voluntarily or under an order like the one described above — a commingled revenue account turns a straightforward reversal into a forensic reconstruction. Record each fee charge with a reference back to the order and, where your platform supports it, the version of the checkout the customer saw.
Second, keep a reserve mindset. Businesses whose model depends on high-margin add-ons should treat a portion of fee revenue as contingent until refund windows and chargeback periods expire, and reconcile fee refunds and chargebacks against the same accounts monthly. A rising refund rate on one specific upsell is often the earliest quantitative signal that its disclosure is failing — the same signal the travel app's internal testing allegedly showed and the company ignored.
Tools that make this practical include dashboards that break revenue down by fee type — the kind of view Fava's financial reports provide over a plain-text ledger — and documented workflows for recording refunds, which the Beancount.io documentation covers step by step. The goal is simple: any fee you charge should be traceable from the checkout screen to the ledger entry to the refund, if one comes.
Keep Your Fee Revenue Clean and Auditable
Pre-selected add-ons are a tempting conversion lever, but after a $35 million lesson, they are a liability no small business needs. Audit your checkout against the ten points above, default every upsell to unchecked, and keep fee revenue in accounts you can explain — and reverse — on demand. Beancount.io provides plain-text accounting that gives you complete transparency and control over your financial data, so every fee, refund, and chargeback stays traceable. Get started for free and see why developers and finance professionals are switching to plain-text accounting.
