dark patterns in indian products

Open any Indian travel booking app right now. Search for a flight. Pick the cheapest option. Proceed to checkout. Watch the price climb.

A “convenience fee” appears. Then a “secure trip” insurance box is pre-checked. A seat selection screen makes “no preference” the smallest, hardest-to-find option. By the time you reach payment, the ticket costs 18-25% more than what was advertised on the search results page. You know this. Every Indian consumer knows this. We have normalised it.

This is not a design oversight. It is a deliberate product decision. Someone — a PM, a growth lead, a revenue team — chose to hide costs from the user until the sunk cost of time and effort made them unlikely to abandon the cart. And if you are a PM in India, you need to understand that this is your problem. Not legal’s. Not design’s. Yours.

The specific dark patterns you will encounter

Dark patterns are not abstract UX theory. In the Indian product ecosystem, they follow specific, recurring shapes. I have tracked these across hundreds of products that our PMs at Pragmatic Leaders have audited over the years. Here are the ones you will see in almost every category.

Hidden charges at checkout

The most widespread pattern in Indian e-commerce and travel. The advertised price is a fiction. The real price includes platform fees, convenience fees, packaging charges, handling fees, and “service charges” that appear only after the user has invested time selecting items, entering addresses, and reaching the payment screen.

MakeMyTrip, Goibibo, EaseMyTrip, and most OTA platforms do this with flights. Swiggy and Zomato do it with food delivery — small order fees, rain surcharges, packaging charges that appear at checkout but not on the menu page. Some fintech apps charge “processing fees” that show up only on the final confirmation screen.

The psychology is simple: by the time a user sees the real price, they have already committed 3-5 minutes. The switching cost — going back, starting over on another app — feels higher than the hidden charge. So they pay.

Why it works short-term: Conversion rates on the checkout page look healthy because users are anchored.

Why it fails long-term: Users learn. They open two apps simultaneously. They screenshot prices at the start and compare at checkout. And they tell everyone about it. A 2023 LocalCircles survey found that 83% of Indian consumers reported encountering hidden charges during online purchases. That is not a niche complaint. That is an entire user base that does not trust your pricing.

Confusing subscription flows

Subscription dark patterns in India follow a specific playbook. The free trial is prominent. The auto-renewal is buried in terms of service. The cancellation flow requires more steps than the signup flow — sometimes involving customer support calls, waiting periods, or screens that guilt the user (“Are you sure? You’ll lose access to 10,000 songs!”).

This is especially aggressive in ed-tech and OTT. Several Indian ed-tech platforms were called out by consumer forums for making it near-impossible to cancel EMI-based subscriptions, with cancellation links that led to dead pages or chat support with multi-day response times. The CCPA’s 2023 dark pattern guidelines explicitly list “subscription traps” as a defined violation. But enforcement is slow, and many product teams treat regulatory risk as a cost of doing business rather than a design constraint.

Pre-checked add-ons

You are buying a phone on an e-commerce platform. At checkout, a screen protector and an extended warranty are pre-checked. You are booking a cab. The “tip for driver” is pre-selected at Rs 20. You are buying event tickets. “Ticket protection” is already added.

Pre-checked add-ons exploit inattention. The user’s mental model at checkout is “confirm and pay.” They are not expecting to audit every line item for options they never selected. The add-on revenue looks good in dashboards — until you measure the support tickets from users who did not realise they paid for something they did not want, and the trust erosion that follows.

Misleading urgency

“Only 2 left at this price!” “Offer ends in 03:42:11” — where the timer resets if you refresh the page. “7 people are looking at this right now” — a number that has no basis in reality.

Indian hotel booking and e-commerce platforms are heavy users of fabricated urgency. The ASCI (Advertising Standards Council of India) guidelines require that time-limited claims be genuine — the offer must actually expire when stated. But enforcement is complaint-driven, and most users do not file complaints. They just feel manipulated and lose trust incrementally.

Difficult cancellation and unsubscribe

The sign-up takes thirty seconds. The cancellation takes twelve steps, three confirmation screens, a feedback form, and a “special offer to stay” interstitial. Some Indian apps require you to email a support address to cancel, with no in-app option.

The regulatory landscape is closing in

Indian regulation on dark patterns has moved faster than most PMs realise.

Consumer Protection Act 2019: Replaced the 1986 Act with substantially stronger provisions. Section 2(47) defines unfair trade practices broadly enough to cover most dark patterns. The CCPA can impose penalties of up to Rs 10 lakh for false or misleading advertisements, and up to Rs 50 lakh for repeat offences.

CCPA Dark Patterns Guidelines (2023): The Department of Consumer Affairs published guidelines specifically identifying and defining 13 categories of dark patterns — including false urgency, basket sneaking (pre-checked add-ons), confirm-shaming, forced action, subscription traps, interface interference, bait and switch, drip pricing (hidden charges), disguised advertisements, and nagging. These are not suggestions. They carry the force of the Consumer Protection Act.

ASCI Guidelines: The Advertising Standards Council of India’s code applies to digital interfaces — not just traditional advertisements. Claims of urgency, scarcity, and limited-time offers must be genuine. Testimonials and social proof must be verifiable.

RBI Regulations on Digital Payments: The Reserve Bank of India mandates transparency in digital payment flows. Auto-debit mandates require explicit consent with clear disclosure of amount, frequency, and cancellation process. The 2021 RBI circular on recurring payments forced every subscription service in India to send pre-debit notifications and allow one-click cancellation through banks. This single regulation broke many subscription dark patterns overnight.

The direction is clear. Every dark pattern that works today is a regulatory liability tomorrow. The PM who builds a product reliant on hidden charges and subscription traps is building on sand.

Why ethical design is a competitive weapon

Here is where the argument gets interesting. Dark patterns are not just legally risky — they are bad product strategy. The companies that figured this out early are winning.

CRED’s fee transparency. When CRED launched bill payments, they made fees visible upfront — no surprises at checkout. This was a deliberate positioning choice against the convention of hidden fees. The result was not lower conversion. It was higher trust, which translated into higher repeat usage. Users who trust a platform spend more over time. CRED’s entire brand is built on the premise that their members deserve better treatment than the rest of the market gives them.

Razorpay’s checkout experience. Compare Razorpay’s payment checkout — where the total is the total, broken down clearly — with payment flows from older gateways that added processing fees at the last step. Razorpay did not win merchants by being the cheapest gateway. They won by being the checkout that did not make customers feel cheated. Merchant retention is directly correlated with checkout trust.

Zerodha’s pricing model. Zero brokerage on equity delivery. No hidden platform fees. No “premium” tier that gates basic features. Zerodha disrupted an entire industry of brokers who relied on obscure fee structures. They proved that transparency is not just ethical — it is a distribution advantage. Users recommend products they trust. Zerodha grew largely through word of mouth because there was nothing to be embarrassed about in the recommendation.

The pattern is consistent: products that respect users grow through trust, and trust compounds. Products that extract value through deception grow through acquisition spending, because their users do not come back voluntarily and do not refer others.

A taxonomy for Indian PMs

Not all dark patterns carry the same risk or damage. As a PM, you need to distinguish between three categories so you can triage effectively when you find them in your own product.

Category 1 — Clearly illegal under current regulation. Subscription traps with no cancellation option. False scarcity claims (fabricated countdown timers). Charges that appear after the user has committed to pay with no way to remove them. If you find these in your product, escalate immediately. Do not wait for a legal review. These are violations of the Consumer Protection Act and the CCPA guidelines.

Category 2 — Legal grey area, ethically indefensible. Pre-checked add-ons where the default is opt-in. Drip pricing where the final cost is 15-25% higher than the displayed price. Cancellation flows that require more effort than signup. Confirm-shaming (“Are you sure you don’t want to save money?”). These are explicitly named in the CCPA guidelines but enforcement is still evolving. A PM who builds these is betting on the gap between regulation and enforcement — a gap that closes unpredictably.

Category 3 — Legal but trust-eroding. Nagging (repeated prompts to enable notifications, rate the app, upgrade). Misdirection (making the premium option visually dominant while hiding the free tier). Toying with defaults (pre-selecting the most expensive plan). These will not get you fined. They will get you uninstalled.

You are the last line of defence

Here is the uncomfortable truth about dark patterns in Indian products: they are rarely introduced by a moustache-twirling villain. They are introduced by a well-intentioned growth team optimising for a metric. Someone runs an A/B test. The variant with a pre-checked add-on shows 12% revenue uplift. The data says ship it. Nobody in the room asks: “If the user understood what was happening, would they still make this choice?”

That question is the PM’s job. Not legal’s job — legal will tell you what is technically permissible, not what is right. Not design’s job — designers can flag the problem but they do not own the business decision. The PM sits at the intersection of user experience, business outcome, and technical implementation. If a dark pattern ships, it is because the PM allowed it.

This does not mean you block every growth experiment. It means you apply a simple test to every design decision that involves user choice:

The transparency test: If we made this choice completely visible and explicit to the user, would they still make the same decision? If the answer is no, you are not designing a feature. You are designing a trap.

The reversal test: Is it as easy to undo this action as it was to do it? Can the user unsubscribe as easily as they subscribed? Can they remove the add-on as easily as it was added? If undoing requires more effort than doing, the asymmetry is deliberate — and it is a dark pattern.

The screenshot test: If a user took a screenshot of this flow and posted it on Twitter with the caption “Look what [your company] does,” would you be embarrassed? If yes, do not ship it.

Test yourself

Building the alternative

If dark patterns are the wrong answer, what is the right one? The companies winning on trust in India share three design principles.

Price transparency from the first screen. Show the total cost — including all fees — on the search results page. Yes, this means your listed price is higher than the competitor who hides fees. It also means your checkout abandonment rate drops because there are no surprises. Cleartrip experimented with all-inclusive pricing display and found that while click-through rates from search dropped slightly, checkout completion rates improved enough to make the net conversion higher. The honest price converted better because it attracted users who could actually afford the product.

Opt-in by default, not opt-out. Every add-on, every subscription feature, every data-sharing permission should be unchecked by default. If the feature is genuinely valuable, users will opt in. If it only works when users fail to notice it, it is not a feature — it is a tax on inattention.

Symmetric effort for doing and undoing. If it takes one tap to subscribe, it should take one tap to unsubscribe. If it takes thirty seconds to add an item, it should take thirty seconds to return it. This is not just ethical design. The RBI already mandates this for recurring payment mandates. The principle should extend to every product decision.

The long game

Indian consumers are getting smarter faster than Indian products are getting more honest. Social media amplifies every dark pattern discovery. A single viral tweet about a hidden fee can do more brand damage than a year of positive advertising. The 2023 CCPA guidelines signal that the regulatory window for dark patterns is closing.

The PMs who will build the most valuable products in India over the next decade are not the ones who extract the most revenue per session. They are the ones who build products that users trust enough to recommend. Trust is the cheapest distribution channel in existence — and the hardest to rebuild once lost.

Your job as a PM is not to maximise the metric on this quarter’s dashboard. It is to build a product that users choose to come back to. Dark patterns are a shortcut that leads to a dead end. The longer path — transparent pricing, honest defaults, symmetric effort — is the one that compounds.

Where to go next

• The ethical framework behind these decisions: Ethical PM
• Designing products for India’s real constraints: Designing for India
• The principles that make products feel right: UX Principles
• Accessibility as a product decision, not a checkbox: Accessibility