It’s happened to all of us.

You are all set to pay for a good or a service or a rental, you’ve got your money ready, you have an idea of how much it will cost — because you’ve seen the number written out on a website or in an advertisement — and boom, your bill comes in higher than you ever expected. You check the taxes, but it’s not the government’s fault. You reread the price you saw earlier, but you were right about that. What you soon realize is that you got hit with a hidden fee.

Hidden fees are those pesky additions that landlords and retailers and service providers add to a bill without properly informing their customers. These fees can take many shapes, but they tend to appear most often in housing rentals: credit card processing fees, “valet trash” charges, community amenity fees, pest control fees — the list goes on.

What defines these fees, though, is that they do not appear in the list price and often only show up once the final bill is ready and a customer has their money in hand.

House Bill 1090, the Protections Against Deceptive Pricing Practices Act, aims to put an end to these sorts of fees in Colorado — and rightly so. The bill, which is part of a set of affordability bills, aims to require transparency for hidden fees and ban so-called “junk fees.” It is a common sense piece of legislation that will help empower consumers and renters to make more informed choices.

The “junk fees” that House Bill 1090 targets truly are junk. In a Denver Post investigation from last year, renters reported paying fees for nonexistent or nonfunctional security cameras and storage lockers. And, most egregiously, one renter reported paying a fee charged to calculate all his other fees. It should go without saying that landlords should be barred from charging these sorts of fees.

However, it is important to clarify the distinction between bogus fees and actually necessary fees that are improperly concealed from renters and consumers. Rather than being curtailed, these fees simply need to be transparently advertised. For instance, there is nothing wrong with a “valet trash” fee, so long as a “valet trash” service is provided, and the renter who is paying for it knows about it up front and has the time and ability to make an informed choice about whether they want to pay for such a service.

Transparency is the key here. House Bill 1090 will help provide it.

The other housing affordability measure winding its way through the Legislature at the moment is House Bill 1004, the No Pricing Coordination Between Landlords Act. HB 1004 is an effort to prohibit certain rent-setting algorithms that have been shown to raise prices for renters.

This is a tricky piece of legislation that needs to be carefully threaded.

The reality is that price-setting algorithms are everywhere — and they do have the potential to create positive outcomes for both the businesses that use them and the consumers buying their products. In other words, we should be cautious to not unduly inhibit burgeoning technology.

On the other hand, a study conducted by the Biden administration (which has since been scrubbed from the White House’s website) found that in Denver those who rented from landlords using price-setting algorithms paid an additional $1,600 in annual rent.

Of course, it is not wrong for a given landlord to charge more for a property than a landlord across the street; if renters are open to paying more, that is their prerogative.

What is potentially troubling is what critics allege some of these landlords are doing: coordinating prices.

One provider of a rent-setting algorithm, RealPage, is being sued by the U.S. Department of Justice for alleged price fixing (a charge the company denies). This sort of behavior has no place in our rental market.

House Bill 1004 is clearly a complicated measure — a similar bill failed in last year’s session — but if it can carefully target services that unfairly increase costs for renters without excessively impeding technological progress, legislators should see that it passes.

The same is true of House Bill 1090, the hidden fees bill.

Regulation for the sake of regulation should not be encouraged. But Colorado is facing an affordability crisis and these two bills seem set to provide renters with more tools to make informed choices, while ensuring landlords play fair. That should increase competition and, hopefully, help keep costs from spiraling any further.

Gary Garrison for the Editorial Board