Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

It happened to me on a Tuesday afternoon. I was scrolling through my bank statement, coffee in hand, when I noticed a charge I didn't recognize. $14.99. From some service I'd forgotten I even had. I immediately thought, "Easy—I'll just cancel." Famous last words.

Thirty minutes later, I was still clicking through a maze of buttons, dropdown menus, and deliberately confusing screens. No "Cancel" button on the main account page. No option in settings. Just a helpful suggestion to "pause" my subscription instead. When I finally found the cancellation page buried three levels deep in account management, it asked me why I was leaving, offered me a discount, and then—get this—made me select from a list of reasons before it would actually let me cancel.

I'm not alone. According to a 2023 AARP survey, nearly 56% of Americans struggle to cancel unwanted subscriptions, with one-third reporting they've given up trying. We're not dealing with incompetence here. We're dealing with deliberate design.

The Art of Making Cancellation Invisible

Here's what companies have figured out: making something hard to find isn't illegal. There's no law saying the cancellation button needs to be easy to locate. So they've turned obstacle placement into an art form.

Take streaming services. Netflix actually made headlines for being relatively straightforward about cancellation, but they're the exception that proves the rule. Most services bury the cancel option in account settings, then make you navigate through multiple confirmation screens. Some require you to contact customer service via phone or email—no online option available. Others, like certain fitness app subscriptions, make you wait through automated call systems or send you to email addresses that take days to respond.

The psychology here is simple: friction creates abandonment. If someone has to spend 45 minutes trying to cancel, many will just give up. That abandoned cancellation attempt? That's a win for the company. You stay subscribed. The charges keep coming.

Peloton learned this lesson the hard way in 2022 when they faced criticism for making cancellations difficult during a period when people were cutting expenses. But by then, they'd already collected millions in unwanted charges from frustrated customers. Even when regulators finally stepped in, the damage was done.

The Dark Patterns We Don't Even Notice

Web designers have a term for this stuff: "dark patterns." It's deceptive design intentionally created to trick users into doing something they didn't mean to do. In the world of subscriptions, dark patterns are everywhere.

The most common? Auto-renewal clauses buried in terms and conditions that are longer than most novels. I'm talking about 47-page documents written in language that makes legalese look like poetry. Amazon Prime's terms, for instance, take the average person roughly 15 minutes just to read—and that's if they're skimming aggressively. Most people don't bother. They just click "I agree" and hope for the best.

Then there's the classic bait-and-switch: "Sign up for a free trial!" What they don't mention until you're buried in the fine print is that the trial converts to a paid subscription automatically, and you need to cancel before a specific date—often just three days before your first charge—to avoid being billed. That date isn't sent to you as a reminder. It's just there, waiting for you to forget.

Adobe pulled something particularly slippery a few years back. They started charging early termination fees—basically a penalty for canceling before your contract was up—on their monthly subscription plans. A $20-per-month subscription suddenly cost you $50 to cancel. The backlash was intense, but they'd already collected thousands in these fees before backing down.

What Regulators Are (Finally) Starting to Do About It

The good news? Authorities are waking up to this. In 2023, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) implemented the ROSCA rule update, requiring that cancellation be just as easy as signup. California's laws have also gotten stricter, and the EU has been hammering companies for years over subscription abuses.

The problem is enforcement. For every company that gets fined, dozens more keep doing it because the potential fines are just a cost of doing business. When you're collecting $500 million annually from ghost subscriptions, a $5 million fine is basically just a rounding error.

Some states are getting creative. New York started requiring retailers to show you the cancellation mechanism before you complete signup. It's a small thing, but it actually works. When customers see upfront that cancellation will be a nightmare, some don't sign up at all—which means companies that want subscribers have to make cancellation easier.

How to Actually Cancel (And Not Lose Your Mind)

So what do you do if you're stuck in subscription purgatory? First, document everything. Screenshot the charges, note dates, capture any communication about the service. This matters if you need to dispute the charges later.

Second, go nuclear if necessary. If the company won't cancel through their website or customer service, call your bank or credit card company and report it as unauthorized charges. That usually gets their attention faster than anything else. Yes, you might get contacted by customer service begging you to stay. Stay firm.

Third, read that fine print before you sign up—I know, I know, nobody wants to. But at least search for "cancel," "auto-renew," and "termination fee." If it's impossible to find these terms, that's a red flag.

And honestly? Vote with your wallet. There are now subscription managers like Trim and Billshark that literally monitor your subscriptions and flag forgotten charges. Their existence is itself an indictment of how bad this problem has become. Companies have gotten so good at making subscriptions sticky that we literally need software to save us from ourselves.

The real issue is that we've normalized this behavior. We accept that canceling something should be harder than buying it. We expect dark patterns. We treat it like an unavoidable tax on modern life rather than what it is: companies deliberately making it hard for you to stop paying them.

If you're curious about other ways companies are making things unnecessarily difficult for consumers, you might also want to read about how self-checkout systems deliberately shift blame onto customers.

Until there's real enforcement with real consequences, companies will keep playing this game. Your job is to stop letting them win by making cancellation requests impossible to ignore.