Australian Court Finds eHarmony Misled Australian Consumers Over Subscription Pricing & Renewals

Key Takeaways

• Automatic Renewals Misled Consumers: eHarmony gave consumers the impression that premium memberships would run for the selected six, 12 or 24 months, when they automatically renewed for another 12 months at prices that could be up to five times higher.
• Pricing Left Out the Full Commitment: The Court found eHarmony failed to clearly display the minimum total subscription cost alongside its advertised monthly pricing, as required under Australian Consumer Law.
• Monthly Pricing Came With an Extra Fee: Advertising plans as “from $xx/month” was found to be misleading because consumers choosing monthly payments faced an additional mandatory fee. The Court found that disclosures introduced from July 2024 corrected this issue on the relevant pages.
• Other Membership Claims Were Misleading: The findings also covered eHarmony’s representations about free dating, one-month memberships and consumers’ ability to cancel subscriptions early.
• Penalties Are Still to Come: The Federal Court will determine penalties, consumer redress and other orders sought by the ACCC at a later date.

Deep Dive

The subscription eHarmony sold could last longer than the one its customers thought they were buying. Australians who signed up for premium memberships of six, 12 or 24 months were given the impression that those were the boundaries of the deal, the Federal Court has found. They were not. The memberships automatically renewed for another 12 months, and the price of that second stretch could be as much as five times the price of the first. By the time a customer discovered what had happened, another year of payments could already be theirs to make.

That gap between the subscription as it appeared and the subscription as it actually worked sits at the center of a Federal Court ruling against eHarmony, handed down in proceedings brought by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. The Court found that the dating platform breached the Australian Consumer Law through misleading representations about the pricing, renewal and duration of its memberships, as well as what consumers could do without paying.

The automatic renewal was disclosed, but not in a way the Court considered sufficient. Its terms appeared in small font late in the purchasing process and in eHarmony’s terms and conditions, while the more immediate impression given to consumers was that they were choosing a membership for a defined period. Once that period expired, the premium subscription could renew for another 12 months at a substantially higher price. The difference could amount to hundreds of dollars.

There was another sting in the arrangement. Consumers whose memberships renewed could be required to keep paying for the full additional year even when they complained to eHarmony immediately afterward.

The ACCC said it brought the case after receiving hundreds of complaints from consumers about eHarmony charges. For Commissioner Luke Woodward, the ruling turned on something more basic than the mechanics of a subscription contract. Customers needed to be able to understand what they were agreeing to when they agreed to it.

“Consumers were not adequately informed about their membership’s duration or that the membership would automatically renew, including, for many, at a much higher price,” Woodward said.

The Court’s findings reached across much of the way eHarmony presented its memberships. The platform offered what it described as free dating, although a consumer could not continue communicating with other people for free. It referred to one-month memberships when the shortest period available to consumers was six months. It also represented that consumers could cancel their subscriptions early when they could not.

Then there was the price itself. eHarmony displayed membership costs using figures such as “from $xx/month.” It was a simple number attached to a commitment that was considerably less simple. The figure was not accompanied by the minimum total amount the consumer would have to pay during the initial subscription period. Someone considering a 12-month membership, for example, could see the monthly price without seeing alongside it the single figure representing what the full commitment would cost. That total appeared only in small font later in the purchase process.

Australian consumer law requires businesses to display the minimum total price as a single figure in these circumstances. The Court found eHarmony had failed to do so. The monthly figure was misleading in another respect. By advertising memberships as costing “from $xx/month,” eHarmony gave consumers the impression that they could pay the stated amount each month. In fact, choosing to pay monthly brought with it an additional mandatory fee.

That particular finding has a limit. The Court determined that from July 2024, after eHarmony added further disclosures, the relevant pages no longer represented that subscription plans could be bought through monthly payments at the stated amount.

“The Court’s ruling underscores that when businesses advertise a price for a subscription divided into instalments, such as a price per month, the minimum total cost must also be clearly and prominently displayed,” Woodward said.

The decision lands squarely within the ACCC’s broader concern about subscription traps and the use of so-called dark patterns in digital services. The phrase can make the problem sound more exotic than it is. Much of what the Court found in the eHarmony case came down to the placement and prominence of ordinary information: how long the contract lasted, what happened when it ended, whether it could be canceled and what it would actually cost.

Those details were available in one form or another. The problem was what consumers were led to believe before they reached them.

“The ACCC is concerned about subscription traps in digital services, and this decision highlights the need for clarity in ongoing consumer subscriptions,” Woodward said. “Obscuring the reality of purchases with confusing statements, hidden disclosures in small text and complex terms and conditions can mislead consumers.”

For eHarmony, the consequences of the ruling have yet to be settled. The Federal Court will decide penalties, consumer redress and the other orders sought by the ACCC at a later date. What has already been decided is the conduct itself, and the fine print cannot be left to correct an impression the rest of the sales process has already created.

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