Signing up for a subscription often takes less than a minute. Enter your email, add a payment method, click a button, and you’re done.
Cancelling that same subscription can be a completely different experience.
Suddenly, the process involves multiple pages, confirmation screens, special offers, and questions about why you’re leaving. Some companies even require customers to contact support to complete a cancellation that originally required no human interaction.
This isn’t always an accident.
Subscription businesses depend on recurring revenue, and customer retention is one of their most important performance indicators. Every customer who continues paying contributes to predictable income, even if they barely use the service.
Making cancellation inconvenient can therefore become a profitable strategy.
The practice is often associated with dark patterns, interface designs that manipulate or obstruct users rather than helping them make informed decisions. A cancellation button might be difficult to find, while the option to keep subscribing is prominently displayed.
Companies frequently justify these obstacles as opportunities to improve customer retention. But there’s an important difference between convincing someone to stay by offering genuine value and making it unnecessarily difficult for them to leave.
The irony is that these tactics can damage the very customer relationships businesses claim to protect. Someone who struggles to cancel a subscription is unlikely to remember the company positively.
A business shouldn’t measure loyalty by how many customers fail to escape its cancellation process.
If joining is simple, leaving should be simple too.