Show the price they accepted

A customer says the charge is not the price they were shown. Tonight, alone, three things. Open the price and the terms that were on the screen when that person accepted, or write that you cannot. Open the amount that was taken from that person, and only that person. If the two differ, reverse only the difference, or write that the tool you have cannot reverse one charge. If any of the three requires the person who built the product, you have not answered the email. You have forwarded it.

This is a price that was supposed to be visible before the charge. It is not a usage ceiling the account has already crossed. That proof — name the cap, stop that account, and show a different account still working — is cap one account, leave the rest up. It is not the invoice you send a client for a month of subcontracted work. What to verify before the next invoice is the agency's bill, not the card of a person using the product. It is not a record that someone agreed to a processing purpose. Show the consent they gave is the text, the act, and the time. A price is none of those three. And it is not a wrong fact on a profile. Correct one customer's wrong fact changes a field the product still shows. A charge has already left. None of this is legal advice. The directive quoted below defines which contracts it covers. A blog post does not decide that for your company, and it does not replace the lawyer who reads your terms.

People report being shown a price that was not the price, and the number is a feeling about the last year, not a count of your receipts. The European Commission's Consumer Conditions Survey, executive summary of the 2024 wave, was conducted by telephone with residents aged 18 and older. The sample is 1,000 per country except in Luxembourg, Malta, Cyprus, and Iceland, where it is 500. It covers the EU27 and also Iceland and Norway. Fieldwork ran from 4 November to 30 November 2024. The summary does not print a single integer for the EU27 base, so do not invent one by multiplying countries. In the section on unfair commercial practices, 27% of EU consumers said they had been offered a product advertised as free of charge which actually entailed charges. 18% experienced that from domestic traders (European Commission, Consumer Conditions Survey 2024, executive summary).

Read the question that was asked. Advertised as free, and then charges, is one practice. It is not "the amount on my card differs from the amount on the screen I accepted," and it is not a subscription that renewed. A different cut, asked only of people who made an online purchase in the past 12 months, finds that 61% have experienced price discounts that seem too large to be genuine, at least sometimes. The same paragraph prints 66% for consumer reviews that do not appear genuine, 47% for social-media promoters who appear to have been paid and do not say so, 40% for a display of information that influenced or distorted the decision, and 40% for prices that differ from those a friend or relative gets when searching for the same thing at the same time. The summary does not print the size of that online-purchaser base, so do not back-calculate it. The two 40% figures are two questions. They are not the same people, and the summary does not say they are. A different 61%, earlier in the same summary, is confidence in public authorities to protect consumer rights. That 61% is not the discount figure. Education on the discount question: 55% of those with a low level of education report discounts that seem too large, against 61% to 62% of those with higher levels. The summary's other problem cut, of all consumers, is that 24% experienced a problem with a good or service in the previous 12 months for which they felt there was a legitimate reason to complain. Of that experience, 17% took action and 6% did not. 17 plus 6 is 23, not 24. Do not force them to 100. Among those who took action, 85% complained to the retailer or service provider. That 85 is not a share of all consumers, and it is not a share of the 27. Online shoppers were more likely to report a problem (26%) than people who had not purchased online (16%). None of these is your chargeback rate. None of them is a probability that the next email this week is a pricing dispute.

The duty the slogan compresses, where the directive applies, is to show the total price before the person is bound. Directive 2011/83/EU, as consolidated, Article 6(1)(e), requires the trader, before the consumer is bound by a distance or off-premises contract, to provide "the total price of the goods or services inclusive of taxes, or where the nature of the goods or services is such that the price cannot reasonably be calculated in advance, the manner in which the price is to be calculated, as well as, where applicable, all additional freight, delivery or postal charges and any other costs or, where those charges cannot reasonably be calculated in advance, the fact that such additional charges may be payable." The same point continues: "In the case of a contract of indeterminate duration or a contract containing a subscription, the total price shall include the total costs per billing period. Where such contracts are charged at a fixed rate, the total price shall also mean the total monthly costs. Where the total costs cannot be reasonably calculated in advance, the manner in which the price is to be calculated shall be provided" (EUR-Lex, Directive 2011/83/EU, consolidated). A monthly number with a setup fee that could have been stated, and was not, is not that sentence. A usage price whose manner of calculation was never written down is not that sentence either. "We'll charge what the model uses" is a mood.

Article 6(1)(ea) is a different fact, and it is easy to skip because the number on the screen already looks like a price. Where applicable, the trader provides "that the price was personalised on the basis of automated decision-making." The point is the disclosure that a machine set this person's price, not a second copy of the arithmetic. If your product does that, the screen they accepted has to be able to say so. If you cannot tell whether this charge was personalised, the honest line is that you cannot tell. A model that "explains" the price after the complaint is not the screen. It is a new sentence, written when you were already in a dispute.

Where the contract is concluded by electronic means and places the consumer under an obligation to pay, Article 8(2) says the trader shall make the consumer aware, "in a clear and prominent manner, and directly before the consumer places his order," of the information in points (a), (e), (o), and (p) of Article 6(1). Point (a) is the main characteristics. Point (e) is the total price. Point (o) is the duration, or, if the contract is of indeterminate duration or extends automatically, the conditions for terminating it. Point (p) is, where applicable, the minimum duration of the consumer's obligations. Directly before the order. A pricing page three clicks back, a footnote, or a number that appears only in the receipt email is not that moment. Article 8(7) then requires confirmation of the concluded contract on a durable medium, within a reasonable time and at the latest when the goods are delivered or before the service begins, including the Article 6(1) information unless it was already provided on a durable medium before the contract. The durable medium is the thing you can still open. A price you remember is not a medium.

Two clocks in the same directive are not this proof, and they are easy to grab because they are numbers. Article 9 gives a withdrawal period of 14 days for a distance or off-premises contract, save where Article 16's exceptions apply, and a Member State may extend that to 30 days for certain unsolicited visits and excursions. Article 13 says the trader reimburses all payments received, including delivery costs where applicable, without undue delay and in any event not later than 14 days from being informed of the withdrawal. Those are withdrawal clocks. A customer who says "that is not the price I was shown" may also be withdrawing, or they may be asking you to fix a charge on a contract they want to keep. Do not answer the second email with the first clock. Article 16 lists contracts where withdrawal is not provided. Digital content, in circumstances the article states, can be one of them. This page does not decide whether an exception applies to your product. If you need that decision, it is the lawyer's, against your actual terms and the Member State law that implemented the directive. The directive also does not decide that it covers you. A US company selling only to US customers may be outside it entirely. Quoting Article 6 and then ignoring a state automatic-renewal statute because Europe felt more specific is the same mistake in the other direction.

A United States blog from late 2024 is a particularly bad thing to paste into the reply. On 15 November 2024 the Federal Trade Commission published amendments to its Negative Option Rule that, among other things, would have required important information before billing information was taken, unambiguously affirmative consent to the negative-option feature, and a simple cancellation mechanism. Courts vacated that amended rule. Effective 12 February 2026, the Commission recodified the text of the Negative Option Rule as it existed before those amendments (Federal Trade Commission, Federal Register, 12 February 2026). The recodification is not a finding that no US rule applies to your renewal. State statutes may. It is a finding that the 2024 amendment is not the text in the Code of Federal Regulations. Do not cite a "click to cancel" explainer as the rule you complied with.

Do the three proofs in one sitting, in accounts you administer, before you tell them the charge was correct. First, the screen. You can point at the price that person was shown, the taxes or the statement that taxes were included, the billing period if it is a subscription, the minimum commitment if there was one, and whether the screen said the price was personalised. The date on that screen is the date they accepted, not today's pricing page. If the page has changed and you did not keep a copy, the first proof is a sentence that says so. Second, the charge. In the processor, the amount taken, the currency, the date, and the identifier that ties it to that person and not the person next to them in the table. A day's revenue is not a charge. Third, the difference. If they match, say they match and name both figures. If they do not, reverse only the difference on that charge, and load the processor again until that charge shows the reversal and the next customer's charge does not. If the only button refunds the whole customer, or the whole day, write that down. A refund you cannot aim is not the third proof. It is a new outage.

Three moves that feel like an answer and are a second problem. Pasting the receipt and the customer's complaint into a chatbot so it can draft the apology, which puts the card details into a vendor you did not have this morning. Asking the model inside the product to "remember the price they should have paid," which edits a prompt and leaves the processor. Changing the public pricing page so that it now matches the charge, which rewrites the offer for everyone who has not bought yet and still does not show what this person saw. The first is a new disclosure. The second is a fiction. The third is a different contract.

The path you wanted was built when the product learned to keep a price next to an account, and to take money from one account without taking it from the others. Gigbase is a multi-tenant workspace with subscription plans, role-based access for agencies, admins, and team members, a dedicated admin dashboard with subscription monitoring, and a services module with per-service pricing, digital contracts, and invoice management. The shape that matters here is an admin, in an account you administer, who can see what a plan costs and what an account was billed. That case is not a record of the screen at the moment of acceptance, and it is not a one-charge reversal. Nothing in the description is a headcount, a duration, or a result figure. If the only control on the billing screen changes every plan, or the only receipt is a number a model composed, you do not have this proof. You have a price list and a paragraph.

There is a version of this email where hiring someone to build the path is the wrong purchase. No customer has been charged, and no customer can yet, because nobody is using the product. You have no product, so there is no screen to keep and no processor to open. You are still choosing who will build, and the document in front of you is a term sheet. The criteria for that choice sit on the page written for a top SaaS development company. That page is criteria. It does not rank anyone, including us. A customer has already seen another customer's invoice. Fixing one price does not close a leak. Or you wanted a lawyer to tell you whether the directive, or a state renewal statute, covers you. Hire the lawyer. A repository does not answer that, and neither does this page.

When the complaint is real and the screen was never kept, the missing object is specific. A copy of the price and terms that person was shown, tied to that acceptance, and a charge record you can reverse one row at a time. A startup software development company that expects this will have put that copy next to the rest of the account admin, before a stranger could be billed an amount you might later have to defend. One that needs a call in order for you to see what someone paid is telling you who holds the receipt. Naming the commit that produced the page they saw is a different proof, name the commit they are running, and it does not reconstruct the price. Two different sentences from the same question are a different failure, when one question gets two answers. If the first slice is a fixed capability, an AI integration sprint is the shape where the acceptance sentence can include one disputed charge you can open yourself. If you do not yet have customers, and the question is whether the systems you have could keep the screen, a two-week AI readiness assessment hands you the findings either way. The findings are yours. They are not a promise that a directive applies, and they are not a rate.

Before you answer the customer, do the three proofs and write the date. Open the price they were shown, including the period and any personalisation the screen had to state. Open the amount that was taken from them. Reverse only the difference, or write that you cannot aim the reversal. Do not ask a model to remember a price. Do not edit today's pricing page and call it the screen. The copy you kept is the page you can defend.

The exception one customer hit, on one release, is a different record from the price: which error did that customer hit. A charge is not a stack. Do not file either proof on the other page. The status stored on the subscription is a different field from the amount: which status is that subscription in?. A price is not a status. A status is not the screen they accepted.

The card that charge used is a different field from the amount: which card did that charge use?. A price is not a last four. A last four is not the screen they accepted.