Who: Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and Team RH Fitness Ltd
Where: United Kingdom
When: 27 August 2025
Law stated as at: 29 September 2025
What happened:
A “Pricing” webpage for a health and fitness app, Team RH Fitness, featured text stating, “Pay monthly £7.99” and “Pay once £79.99 (Annual)”. A button, “Buy now”, under each option linked through to a checkout page. Complainants challenged whether the ad made it clear that the monthly subscription was for a minimum term of 12 months.
The ASA considered that consumers would understand that they had the option to pay either £7.99 on a rolling monthly basis, or a one-off annual payment of £79.99. Without any further information, consumers were likely to interpret the monthly option as something they could cancel at any time.
The reality was, however, that the £7.99 price was subject to a minimum commitment of twelve months. Further, to download the app, consumers had to waive their right to a 14-day cooling off period. Consumers who selected the monthly plan were therefore committed to a minimum total payment of £95.88. The ASA considered this to be significant information that consumers needed upfront to make an informed decision about whether or not to proceed with the subscription.
The pricing page did not, however, make any reference to the 12-month minimum commitment. That information only appeared later in the purchasing process, on the checkout page, where it was presented in small subtext beneath the payment button.
The ASA considered that the existence of a minimum term was significant and should have been clearly stated on the pricing page itself, rather than just at the checkout during the consumer purchasing journey. Because the ad failed to make this information prominent from the outset, the ASA found that the ad was misleading.
Why this matters:
Compliance with the new regime for communicating subscriptions to consumers should be high on the agenda for any consumer-facing businesses using this model. This new regime for paid business-to-consumer subscription contracts is found under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCCA) and is due to come into effect next year.
The regime will oblige traders to provide consumers with subscription-specific “key pre-contract information” (set out in part 1 of schedule 23 of the DMCCA) which must follow strict presentation requirements. For example, the pre-contract information must all be provided together, but it must be separate from the full pre-contract information and any other information about the subscription. The DMCCA also includes various other requirements relating to cooling-off cancellation rights and information notices etc. The government consulted on implementing the regime at the end of last year. Its response and the draft secondary legislation necessary to bring the regime into effect are awaited. The government has also indicated that it will publish guidance on the new regime. Affected businesses should already be thinking about what changes they might need to make to their subscription practices to ensure readiness to comply when the new laws become applicable.
In addition, marketers need to be aware that the new prohibition on “drip pricing” under the DMCCA’s unfair commercial practices regime (already in effect) imposes a duty on traders to include the total price of the product in any invitation to purchase. The Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) draft guidance on price transparency includes information on how the total price should be displayed for minimum or fixed-term contracts under which the consumer makes periodic payments (for example, monthly) but commits to a minimum term (for example, 12 months), for instance, subscription or gym membership contracts. The trader may advertise the “total price” as either: the total price for each period of the contract (for example, a total monthly price) alongside a prominent statement of the number of months the consumer is committed to pay that price for; or the cumulative price that the consumer will necessarily incur over the entire minimum period of the contract. Therefore, if a subscription or membership contract is subject to a mandatory fixed term, such as three months or a year, the trader must let consumers know about this at the start of their purchasing journey.
As the advertising codes and consumer protection laws go hand in hand, non-compliant marketers risk breaching both and facing scrutiny from two directions: the ASA and the CMA (which now has direct powers to enforce breaches of consumer protection law).
