Your pricing tool might be talking to your competitors
A lawsuit filed this month claims an AI "pricing engine" quietly lined up menu prices across thousands of independently owned restaurants. Whatever the courts decide, the question it raises lands on every small business that lets software suggest its prices.
Earlier this month a federal antitrust lawsuit was filed in Chicago against one of the world’s largest fast-food chains.
The claim is not that the chain set its own prices too high. Most of its US restaurants — around 95% — are owned by independent franchisees, which is to say small business owners. The claim is that those owners were pressed to use the chain’s AI “pricing engine”, on pain of losing the franchise, and that the engine drew on store-level data competing restaurants would never normally share with each other — with the effect, the suit alleges, of quietly lining up prices across thousands of supposedly competing businesses.
The company’s answer is just as clear: its technology does “not automate, coordinate or fix pricing in any way,” and franchisees make their own decisions.
Those are allegations and a denial. Nothing has been decided, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. But the question underneath this case applies to far more businesses than one burger chain.
The question
Fixing prices with your competitors is one of the oldest offences in commercial law. Everyone knows you can’t ring the café across the road and agree to both charge £4 for a flat white.
But what if you never ring them? What if you both feed your sales figures into the same piece of software, and you both take its suggested price, and the software — which can see both your numbers — suggests roughly the same thing to each of you?
Nobody spoke. Nobody agreed anything. And the prices still move together.
A law professor who studies this put the direction of travel bluntly: “As more companies outsource pricing to an algorithm, you can expect them to have more instances of collusion.”
The courts have not made up their minds
It would be easy to write this up as either a scare story or a non-story. It is neither, because the judges themselves disagree.
- A US appeals court revived a case this year against Atlantic City casino hotels, saying an algorithm can “bridge any gaps” in communication between competitors.
- A different appeals court threw out a similar case against Las Vegas hotels in 2025.
- The best-known rental-pricing software company settled with the US Department of Justice over claims its tools pushed up rents — while winning a separate case that blocked a state’s attempt to restrict algorithmic pricing.
The settled point is narrow: an algorithm is not illegal in itself. Using one so that competitors end up coordinating their prices can be.
That is not a comfortable place to be for a business that bought a pricing recommendation tool because the salesperson said everyone was using it.
Why this is a small-business story
Large chains have competition lawyers. A small hotel, a holiday let, a garage, a salon or a café increasingly has a booking system or till software with a helpful little feature that suggests what to charge this weekend.
Two questions almost nobody asks about that feature:
- Where does its data come from? Only your own sales — or a pool of every similar business in your area that uses the same software?
- Who else is it advising? If it is telling the three other guesthouses on your street what to charge, using information that includes yours, you are in the exact shape the lawsuits are about.
You may be doing nothing wrong. But “the software suggested it” is not a sentence you want to be relying on in front of a regulator.
The quieter cost
Leave the law aside for a moment. There is a commercial side, too.
Prices that drift every few days for reasons you cannot explain are a slow leak of trust. A regular notices that a coffee cost something different on Tuesday. They ask why. If the honest answer is “the software decided”, you have handed the relationship to a system that has never met them.
A price you chose, wrote down and can explain is a small thing. Customers notice it anyway.
The fair question
devkoi has nothing to do with setting prices and no pricing tool to sell you. It builds the page your prices appear on.
That page turns out to be useful here. A price written plainly on your own website is visibly your decision. And because every version of a devkoi site is kept, there is a dated record of what you charged and when — dull, until the day somebody asks.
(General information, not legal advice. Competition law differs between countries, and the cases above are unresolved. If you use a pricing tool and are unsure, ask someone qualified.)
What to do this week
1. Find out whether anything you use suggests prices. Booking systems, channel managers, till software, delivery platforms. Many have a pricing feature switched on that nobody remembers enabling.
2. Ask the vendor two questions, in writing. Does the recommendation use data from other businesses? Does it advise competitors in my area? Keep the reply. If they will not answer, that is an answer.
3. Treat a suggested price as an input, never as the decision. Look at it, then set your own — for your own reasons — and write those reasons down. A short note (“raised the Saturday rate because our costs went up”) is worth having.
4. Do not share your sales data with a tool unless you know where it goes. Your figures feeding a competitor’s suggestions is the uncomfortable half of this.
5. Publish your prices plainly on your own site. Numbers, not “from” and not “contact us”. A price on a page you control is a price you chose.
“Put our current price list on the prices page — these are the numbers.”
6. Change prices on purpose, and keep the record. When you change them, change them deliberately and let the page show the new figure. Every version of a devkoi site is kept, so the history of what you charged exists without you having to remember it.
“Update the prices page: haircut £28, beard trim £12, from 1 November.”
7. If you are a franchisee or part of a buying group, take advice before following a central pricing engine. That is precisely the arrangement now in front of a court.
For most of history, a price was something a shopkeeper decided, chalked on a board, and could explain to anyone who asked.
Software has made it easy to stop doing that. This month’s lawsuit, whatever comes of it, is a reminder that the old way had a quiet virtue: when the price is yours, nobody can argue it was really someone else’s.