The Algorithm Sees You
You open a booking site. Your digital footprint gets read.
Fed to the pricing algorithm
Your personalized price
Same flight, different price.
No asterisk, no disclosure, no warning. Just a number the site calculated specifically for you.
What this is
The price tag isn't fixed anymore.
It shifts around to match whoever's looking.
Algorithmic pricing (sometimes called dynamic or personalized pricing) is what happens when companies use your digital data to decide what you pay. Amazon changes its prices around the clock. Uber charges more when you need a ride fast. Airlines quietly raise fares when your search patterns suggest you're running out of options. Most people have no idea any of this is happening to them.
Prices move in real time
The price you see isn't locked in. Amazon changes prices on millions of products every day. An Uber fare can change between the moment you open the app and the moment you actually hit book. By the time you've thought through whether to buy, you might already be looking at a different number.
Same product, different price
The device you're on, the city you live in, the stuff you've searched for recently, whether you're a loyalty member: companies feed all of this into models that try to guess the highest price you'll actually say yes to. Someone sitting on the same couch as you could easily see a different number for the same thing.
Nobody tells you it's happening
There's no notice that the price was personalized. You don't get a receipt telling you what the markup was or why. The whole thing is legal in most cases, common across industries, and for the most part nobody's regulating it yet.
The six issues
It's not just a tech story.
It's a fairness story.
Six threads kept showing up across the cases we looked at. The vocabulary shifts when you go from airlines to rideshare to groceries to insurance, but the underlying pattern stays pretty consistent.
Case studies
Six industries.
One playbook.
Each case study walks through how a specific industry uses your data to set your price, and more importantly, what you can actually do about it.
How it works
From your click
to your price, in 40 ms.
It all happens faster than you can blink. Here's what's actually running in the background between your tap and the number that ends up on your screen.
About the project
A project for consumers.
Built by students who are ones too.
PricePoint is a student research and advocacy project built for MGIS 130 at RIT Saunders College of Business. Our goal is pretty simple: help everyday consumers understand algorithmic pricing and recognize when it's happening to them.
FAQ
Questions
worth asking.
Ten things worth knowing about how algorithms are pricing you, and what actually works when you want to push back.