Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images
In the past year alone, I’ve accidentally gotten subscriptions to the following items: new filters for a humidifier, peanut snacks for my toddler, a boatload of toilet paper that arrived on our doorstep without warning, and surely others that I can’t remember (and might still be paying for). In most cases, I’d subscribed unintentionally when I thought I was making a onetime purchase; most were easy enough to cancel but some were not. In November, I spent several days dealing with various customer-service representatives to discontinue iron supplements that kept showing up even though I’m sure I never ordered them. Or not on purpose, anyway.
Of course, this is a drop in the bucket compared to the torrent of other subscriptions that I happily receive — for dishwasher detergent, diapers, coffee, toothpaste, a million Substacks. We’re living in the golden age of the subscription economy, which has quadrupled over the past decade. Subscription models have been around for centuries (the first emerged in the early 1600s as a way for newspapers to cover printing costs before publication), and they’re popular for a reason: They help you get things you want or need on a regular basis, without the hassle of actively buying them, and they help businesses meet demand for their product with consistent cash flow.
Getting everything automatically has created a new problem, though: We wind up getting a lot of stuff we don’t want and spending more than we ever intended. “Convenience is a good reason to use subscriptions, but financially, they’re a real loser,” says Lindsay Owens, the executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, an economic-policy think tank, and the author of the forthcoming book Gouged: The End of a Fair Price — and What That Means for Your Wallet. “Sometimes there are small discounts for ordering something as a recurring subscription instead of as a one-off, but typically that savings is subsumed by the likelihood that you will end up with a few extra months or years of a subscription that you didn’t actually need.”
Not only do people sign up for subscriptions and then forget about them, sometimes they don’t mean to sign up for them at all — a bill simply materializes every month. Extricating yourself from aggressive, deceptive, and downright illegal subscription practices has become just as much (if not more) of a nuisance as remembering to buy toilet paper used to be. And in some cases, it’s much worse.
Samantha, a photographer based in New York, tells me she spent weeks battling a monthly $9.99 charge for DashPass, a loyalty program offered by DoorDash. The program — which she is sure she never signed up for (“I couldn’t find any confirmation anywhere, even in my DoorDash account”) — had originally been charged to an expired credit card, which she had cut up and thrown away. The charges had carried over to her new card, but because she couldn’t remember her old card number, the customer service agents she spoke to said that they couldn’t help her cancel it. Deleting her DoorDash account didn’t help, either. She then disputed each transaction — about $50 total — through her credit-card company. “But the disputes were overturned because they said I had subscribed,” she says. Finally, she contacted her credit card’s fraud department and got an agent to block DoorDash from ever billing her again.
Even if you intentionally sign up for a subscription, the fine print can make it laughably hard to discontinue. One woman I spoke to signed up for a software service that cost $1,300 a year and required six-months’ notice to unsubscribe before the annual renewal date. Not realizing that she needed to cancel so far in advance, she gave only two months’ notice and was told that it was too late — she already owed the full amount for the following year. “They didn’t care if I wanted the software or not,” she said. “I tried to get out of it in so many different ways, and they didn’t budge.”
Plenty of people in this situation resort to canceling their credit cards. But that doesn’t always work: Another person I spoke to, who tried unsuccessfully to cancel a subscription to a dating website he no longer used, closed his credit card only to receive a notice from a collections agency for the amount he still owed.
The practice of roping people into subscriptions they don’t actually want is known as “dark design,” and it’s all over the internet, says Dr. Harry Brignull, the author of Deceptive Patterns: Exposing the Tricks Tech Companies Use to Control You. Examples include preselected boxes for recurring payments that you have to opt out of to avoid signing up, or sneaking a subscription into the fine print of “terms” that you have to agree to in order to complete what you think is a one-off purchase. Alternatively, companies can make it very difficult to cancel their services after you’ve signed up. “This typically involves hiding the cancellation option, requiring users to call customer services to cancel, and making the cancellation process overly complex and time-consuming,” writes Brignull. Researchers at Stanford found that making cancellation more difficult boosted corporate revenues by 14 to 200 percent, depending on the product.
Social media has exacerbated these designs, adds Owens. “Instagram in particular has taken this to the next level. The classic Instagram offering is, ‘Here, take this quiz, learn a little bit about your sleep style or your parenting style,’ and then when it’s time to get your quiz results, the only way you can access them is by signing up for a one-week trial,” she says. “Then, the next thing you know, you pay for two years of a subscription that you never used because you forgot you ever signed up for it in the first place.”
Many of these practices fall into a legal gray area. Under the Biden administration, the Federal Trade Commission introduced the “click-to-cancel” rule, which required sellers to make it just as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment in a subscription as it was to sign up. But before it could go into effect earlier this year, the rule was blocked by a judge who cited a procedural error in the proposal. The current administration hasn’t indicated that it will pursue its reintroduction, although certain states (Massachusetts, California, Minnesota, Oregon, Colorado) have introduced their own click-to-cancel laws.
In the meantime, most of us have to fend for ourselves. Owens recommends doing a quarterly sweep through your finances to catch any unwanted subscriptions that may have cropped up. Then, if you can’t cancel a subscription directly from the source, take it up with your credit-card company. She also recommends purchasing another subscription (“I know,” she says) for the personal-finance app Rocket Money, which will root around through your accounts, flag all your subscriptions, and try to cancel them on your behalf. Meanwhile, make sure to set calendar alerts for when subscriptions are set to auto-renew. “The auto-renewals are always hidden — that’s the whole point of them,” she says.
Finally, speak up. I know someone who couldn’t get her MoviePass subscription canceled until she posted publicly about it and shamed the company into helping her. Pressure your legislators to pursue tighter regulations, and complain when you’ve been deceived. “It’s important for policymakers to make it easier for us to avoid predatory subscription models,” says Owens. “The onus should not be on the consumer to bob and weave our way out of this. It’s a huge waste of time, money, and energy. We all have a lot going on, and companies know that, and they’re exploiting it.”
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