If you told me my subscription would be changing from $15 USD per month to $159 per month, youâd get my attention. In Australian dollars, thatâs moving from around $22 to $250+ a month.
But thatâs not how SendOwl, a digital products platform, chose to inform me or the rest of its existing customers.
No, instead they used what we call âdark patternsâ in behavioural science. They obfuscated and used friction to reduce the odds customers would pay attention.
How it all went down
Iâd been a satisfied customer of SendOwl since 2017, using it to sell digital versions of my books or allow people to download copies of my slides.
In March, they sent an email with the subject line âImportant updates about your SendOwl accountâ.
And buried in the copy of the email was this:
âFor most of our customers, this means the price of your monthly subscription will increase. We will automatically assign you the lowest cost new plan for your volume and features. Once plans are "live" on April 24, you can go to your account settings and adjust your plan.
Click here to learn more about our new pricing tiers.â
Did I read this email?
No.
Like you, I get a deluge of emails every day and a subject line about âImportant updatesâ is so overused that itâs not enough to get my attention.
So, imagine my surprise in July when I was doing my quarterly accounts and saw Iâd been charged $750 for 3 months rather than around the $70 Iâd been expecting.
Cue a pointed and panicked email from me to SendOwl customer service.
I wonât bore you with the to and fro, but the bottom line is I managed to get a refund and am no longer a customer of theirs.
And this is the core of the problem for SendOwl.
Because a quick search of TrustPilot has revealed I am not the only aggrieved party to this pricing âstrategyâ.
In fact, prior to April 2025, SendOwl had a rating of 4.5 out of 5.
Since the price change, ratings have plummeted to 1.7.
When defence causes offence
In response to complaints, both mine and those on TrustPilot, SendOwl have pointed to the email âadvisingâ us of the increase.
Comments from SendOwl HQ are along the lines of: âThis was a one-time pricing update after 15 years of no changes, and we did our best to notify affected users.â
And in their initial email response to me, âWe gave a full 30-day notice as per our Terms of Service: https://www.sendowl.com/terms.â
And this is the interesting part.
While legally SendOwl may have been in their rights, they certainly have not acted transparently or ethically.
What they could have done differently
If the SendOwl team were serious about acting with their customers in mind, hereâs what they could have done:
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Been transparent in the subject line: Something like âYour SendOwl plan is increasing from $15 to $159/monthâ or even âYour price is changingâ would have done the trick.
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Included the actual new price in the email body rather than forcing customers to click through to a web page.
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Required explicit consent before migrating customers to a plan thatâs 900% more expensive.
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Grandfathered existing customers on their current rate, or introduced gradual increases over 6â12 months.
Letâs be clear: price increases are a normal part of doing business.
As your product evolves, your costs and positioning should too. But how you communicate those changes matters, and it matters a lot.
Handled well, price increases can strengthen customer trust. Done poorly, you donât just lose customers, you trash your brand.
BTW: If you want to know how to communicate price rises effectively (and handle complaints), it's all in my Just Do This program.
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