An Australian court has found eHarmony misled users over what its memberships cost

Australia’s Federal Court has found that eHarmony misled consumers about the cost and terms of its dating memberships, in a case the competition regulator brought after receiving hundreds of complaints.

The findings read as a catalogue of the design choices regulators now call dark patterns, applied to a subscription that renewed automatically at a much higher price.

The renewal terms are the most striking part of the judgment. Memberships rolled over automatically for a further 12 months at up to five times what the user had originally paid, and the court found eHarmony failed to disclose this prominently enough.

The word “free” also did work it should not have. eHarmony advertised free dating while users could not actually communicate with anyone without paying, which the court found to be misleading or deceptive.

The site advertised one-month options when six months was in fact the minimum term available, and it stated that early cancellation was possible when it was not.

Then there was the pricing display itself. eHarmony listed monthly prices without disclosing mandatory additional charges for paying monthly, and failed to show the total minimum cost alongside the monthly figure, which Australian Consumer Law requires.

That last point is a specific statutory obligation rather than a judgment call about tone. The single-price rule exists precisely so that a headline monthly figure cannot obscure what a consumer is actually committing to spend.

Dating services have a structural incentive that most subscription businesses lack, since a satisfied customer is one who leaves. That pushes the commercial pressure onto retention mechanics rather than product quality, which is roughly where the conduct in this case sits.

The conduct ran from 2019 through to at least mid-2024, with some practices continuing until July of that year. A five-year window means a substantial number of Australian consumers passed through the funnel while it operated this way.

“The ACCC took this action after receiving hundreds of complaints from consumers relating to charges from eHarmony,” said commissioner Luke Woodward. Complaint volume of that order is usually what moves a regulator from monitoring a sector to litigating against a company in it.

Penalties have not been set. The court will determine financial penalties, consumer redress, and any other orders in a separate proceeding, which means the commercially significant number is still to come.

Australia’s regime is also stricter than it looks from outside. The single-price provision and the prohibition on misleading conduct do not require proof that anyone was actually deceived, only that the representation was liable to mislead, which is a lower bar than many operators assume.

The ACCC has been unusually active against subscription practices, having also taken Microsoft to court over allegedly misleading Microsoft 365 pricing. Australia has become one of the more aggressive jurisdictions on this particular category of conduct, alongside the FTC, which has pursued a $250mn subscription operation and opened an investigation into Shein’s use of dark patterns.

What links these cases is not deception in the old-fashioned sense but interface design. Nobody at eHarmony had to write a false sentence to produce this outcome, since the same effect is achieved by where a term is placed, how small it is rendered, and how many clicks stand between a user and a cancellation.

Whether a penalty changes behaviour depends entirely on its size relative to the revenue the conduct generated. Five years of renewals at up to five times the original price is a large number, and a fine set below it is simply a cost of doing business.

eHarmony has not publicly commented on the findings. The penalty hearing will establish what the conduct costs the company, and whether the figure is large enough to change how dating apps present their pricing to anyone else.