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Is this legal under Payment for Services Not Rendered if only one user account is ever used?

I'm using an online service, Hubstaff, to keep track of my time and invoice clients for the time I work on their projects. This service has flexible per-user billing plans. However, they require you sign up for a minimum of two users, even if you will only ever use one user account.

Here's an Explanation of their Per-User Pricing and details about their Available Plans.

They have a free plan, but it doesn't have the features I need. They have three additional paid plans starting at $7/month/user plan, but, like I said, you have to pay for two users so it costs a minimum of $14/month even though you may only ever use one account.

The reason this bothers me is I was using their service since 2018 and it was $5/user and I was accurately billed $5/month because I only had one user account with them. Since around February of 2020 they made this change and my bill went to $14/month but they also screwed up their billing changes and I got some additional $7 charges and $14 charges for some reason.

I feel like it's legal, but just extremely slimy. Like some business executive said they want to make more money per user and their solution was to say the service still only costs $7/user but you MUST pay for a minimum two-user plan. I can almost guarantee the vast majority of the users of their software are single user accounts.

There's absolutely no technical reason they require customers to have a two-user plan.

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  • What is the jurisdiction here? what country and if a federal country, what province or state? If the jurisdiction sfor the service and the uiser are different, please give both.
    – David Siegel
    Jan 5, 2021 at 23:30
  • I'm sure you agree they have the right to offer a 1-user plan at $14 and a 2-5 user plan at $7 per user... just as certain stores have a right to sell granola bars at 95 cents each or five for $4.99.
    – Harper - Reinstate Monica
    Jan 9, 2021 at 0:15
  • @DavidSiegel, it's in the US. I had tagged it as such. Thanks for your answer.
    – Dean Poulin
    Jun 6, 2021 at 21:06

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A business is free to set its pricing model in whatever way it chooses, unless there is a specific law restring this. As no country or jurisdiction is mentioned in the question, there is no way to judge if some specific law applies. (In the US that would probably be a matter of state law.)

A business could set its prices at 10 per user, but with a Minimum charge of 100 if it chose to do it that way. It is up to a potential customer to decide if this is a fair price or not. As long as the price plan was disclosed in advance, the customer has no ground for a legal complaint. The customer could always ask the business to change its policy, but there would be no legal duty to make a change.

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