I live in Germany and have cancelled several physical magazine and newspaper subscriptions and even political party memberships via e-mail after signing up online. I can&#x27;t say anything about Der Spiegel but I would be surprised if they did it any different given that German consumer protection agencies have some teeth.

&gt;[...] and Der Spiegel both do it.They might have changed. When I checked just now, they offer a phone number and an E-Mail address to cancel a physical paper subscription (there&#x27;s no account, so that makes sense).An online &quot;Spiegel+&quot; subscription can be cancelled via their website.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abo.spiegel.de&#x2F;de&#x2F;c&#x2F;abo-service&#x2F;spiegel-abo-kuendigen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abo.spiegel.de&#x2F;de&#x2F;c&#x2F;abo-service&#x2F;spiegel-abo-kuendige...</a>It may be different for their non-German publication, but I had trouble finding any English information - which may be saying something...

Fortunately I have been able to cancel my Le Monde Diplomatique for many years through email. I did not get a confirmation email but they stopped billing me at least.

Shouldn’t the company bear the burden of that cost, not the consumer? That’s kinda silly.Oh you require it by certified air pigeon? Great, happy to; pay for it.

To be picky, at least here in Italy, not &quot;send a letter&quot;, but rather &quot;send a registered letter with delivery receipt&quot;, which plainly means that you have a non-trivial cost (several Euro, I believe in Italy it is now 10 or 12 Euro) and you have to physically go to the post office to send it.Recently many companies are (finally) allowing to use the PEC (which is a form of Certified Electronic Mail) which has the same legal value as the registered mail, but that the average citizens do not have (unless they have it for other reasons), which however has a (small) yearly cost, but that may be &quot;dangerous&quot; in the sense that it becomes your &quot;legal address&quot; so it needs to be monitored as anything that arrives there has legal value and is considered delivered to you the moment it arrives in the inbox.

Most importantly, Germany has the Verbraucherzentralen which have the right to sue on behalf of (all) consumers.Many countries that don&#x27;t have that will have consumer protection laws that simply get ignored, because simply ignoring them works for the company.

I thought that was illegal already, and has been for a few years? Not sure if by EU or German regulation.FWIW, from 2022 on, Germany will have a 2-click unsubscribe law [0]. It requires clearly labeled buttons and forbids a lot of dark patterns.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mofo.com&#x2F;resources&#x2F;insights&#x2F;211006-new-two-click-cancellation-button.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mofo.com&#x2F;resources&#x2F;insights&#x2F;211006-new-two-click...</a>

Check the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. They do not even allow to subscribe by credit&#x2F; debit card, only by sharing your bank details. What a joke.

Also a common practice in Europe (Germany, France, Switzerland...), but frequently even worse: click to subscribe, send a fucking letter to cancel it. Le Monde and Der Spiegel both do it.I&#x27;m a news junkie, I think paying for news is important, but I don&#x27;t have even 1&#x2F;4 of the subscriptions I would have if it wasn&#x27;t for scummy tactics and&#x2F;or the fear that I will be subject to them in the future.

Good. The more exposure this tactic gets, the better.I remember trying to cancel my The Times (of London) subscription a few years ago. It was a terrible experience - having to ensure a pushy sales call for 20 minutes, where the call handler kept ignoring my requests to cancel as they kept reading a hard sell script.The sooner this practice ends, the better.

I used online chat to do it. It took several attempts to get connected. They offered me a really good deal to stay but I declined on principle because I don&#x27;t want to support such practices.

I had that exprience with the NYT - I had to time my call right to hit the office hours on the US east coast.That said, when I last had an interaction with them about a subscription, I did the whole thing via a 24&#x2F;7 online chat. A far better and more convenient experience, if one that still lacks the simplicity of a simple ‘unsubscribe’ button.

Now I just wish this was implemented in my country&#x2F;EU. NYT set the precedence for our national newspapers.

Was cancelling my cell provider and was required to send a fax - hello Vodafone.de

This is true for traditional &quot;contracts&quot;, e.g. phone, apartments, gyms, etc, but these generally also involve paperwork when signing up (though in some of these cases you can sign up online and then have the confirmation mailed to you).This is definitely not the case for websites or apps and I&#x27;m pretty sure what the NYT is doing wouldn&#x27;t amuse German consumer protection agencies.

In general I write an e-mail saying &quot;please don&#x27;t make us waste more time by requiring me to send a letter and please revoke my current subscription&quot;.Works somewhat

Stupidly enough, you have to cancel SEPA direct debit mandates with a written document to the merchant.

In The Netherlands there are companies that will fill in, print, and send cancellation letters for you as a service. They rank very high in Google search.

At least in Germany, having to cancel by sending a letter (or, amusingly, sometimes a fax works) is still common.

I once had a paper&#x2F;digital subscription, and at some point I had cancelled the card linked to it. Unbeknownst to me (my parents were receiving the subscription), they had kept sending the paper despite the card being cancelled. When NYT eventually realized the card had been cancelled, they claimed that I owed them for the ~year or so that I had been receiving the paper after the card was cancelled, and attempted to send this to collections.Completely outrageous business practices if you ask me.

You hand that info to the merchant because your credit card company can issue chargebacks against them and that costs them a pretty penny with their payment processor, especially if it happens often. Credit card disputes almost always slant in favor of the customer.Folks just don&#x27;t seem to realize: you make a reasonable effort with the vendor, and then go straight to your credit card company.I caught a restaurant &quot;helping&quot; themselves to a very healthy tip for delivery; I&#x27;d tipped in cash. The owner repeatedly professed that he didn&#x27;t know how to issue a refund and offered cash.He was playing stupid because he didn&#x27;t want to deal with the transaction fee, nor did he want a paper trail of his fraud; I strongly suspect he was doing this to other people, too. Warned him three times and three times he said, gosh, he had no idea how to issue a refund to my card.I asked for just the fraudulent tip back and my credit card company reversed the entire charge. So not only did he lose the tip, he lost the cost of the food and he got dinged with a chargeback fee. He also lost my weekly pizza order.

It&#x27;s not a token, but similar: Europe has Direct Debit mandates, which you give to the biller and they can be revoked.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gocardless.com&#x2F;guides&#x2F;sepa&#x2F;mandates&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gocardless.com&#x2F;guides&#x2F;sepa&#x2F;mandates&#x2F;</a>

I had to resort to cancelling a card once too, but it didn’t fix the problem. My Credit Card Provider (Barclaycard) implemented the Visa Account Updater service with no way to turn it off so my new card details went straight to the merchant.Ended up cancelling the account I was so frustrated, lost a customer of 10 years.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.visa.com&#x2F;capabilities&#x2F;vau" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.visa.com&#x2F;capabilities&#x2F;vau</a>

That&#x27;s what 3dsecure is for.in EU (well, at least in my country, France) a payment without 3dsecure is extremely easy to chargeback.

&gt;I still find it insane that the &quot;normal&quot; way to pay for goods and services is to pass full details of your payment card, sufficient to make any future payment, and just trust the merchant. Surely the sane way is you generate some token they can redeem against, but you can e.g. expire it or modify it.That&#x27;s kinda how Blik payments work in Poland. They generate one time code that is used to purchase goods, you also have to confirm it on your device(usually a banking app).That code is one time use and expires after 2 minutes - and it can be safely told out loud. You also get transaction details before you confirm it on your device.Expanding this system to a token that allows recurring subscription would be pretty convenient.

A few times I found it was easier to cancel a card than to cancel a subscription.I still find it insane that the &quot;normal&quot; way to pay for goods and services is to pass full details of your payment card, sufficient to make any future payment, and just trust the merchant. Surely the sane way is you generate some token they can redeem against, but you can e.g. expire it or modify it.It thankfully is now more of a thing of the past, but it used to be the case in the UK at least that places would take a telephone card payment, where you recite your card number, expiry date etc. So not only can they make any future payment they like, there is even no durable record of them having these details.

Which is ironic from what I understand to be a mobile phone operator. Clearly they don’t trust their own network

Still better than waiting hours on a &quot;support&quot; phone line

This is not all of Europe, though Germany is known for this shenanigans (but on the other hand this gives you a confirmation of when you cancelled it if you send it Advice of Receipt)

You can instruct your bank to stop the direct debit payments and they&#x27;ll cancel your subscription.

This isn&#x27;t &quot;Europe&quot;, it&#x27;s Germany. Germany is still well known for using fax for government and corporate communication, and there was heavy criticism for how the Covid pandemic was initially handled because faxing records was so common which meant they could not be easily digitized, collected and searched.In Sweden, sending a fax or physical letter to a government instance or private companies rather than an e-mail is more or less unheard of, unless they for some reason need a physical paper with your signature on it (I&#x27;ve heard this happen with customs, for example), but in almost all areas of society this has now also been replaced with Bank-ID, which is digital.[1][1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;BankID" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;BankID</a>

There are 3 ways to cancel an O2 contract - (1) Online intimation + phone call, (2) Letter or (3) Fax [0]. Most routers (like Fritzbox) come with a fax function which you send an online fax [1]. O2 charges a maximum of 0.14 cents per fax page or free based on your DSL plan. Alternatively, you can also send a physical letter online (0.70 cents) [2].Your comment below says that there is no receipt for confirmation. O2 provides a default PDF form on their website which to fill for termination. The letter explicitly states that &quot;o2 should send you a written confirmation of cancellation&quot;. It is illegal for O2 to be in receipt of a letter and not send a confirmation. I am sorry if that happened to you!Don&#x27;t get me wrong - the auto-renewal of contract practices in Germany are predatory for the consumers. Recently, there has been a change in law that forces providers to extend contracts by 1 month instead of 1 or 2 years.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.o2online.de&#x2F;service&#x2F;kuendigung&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.o2online.de&#x2F;service&#x2F;kuendigung&#x2F;</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.avm.de&#x2F;service&#x2F;knowledge-base&#x2F;dok&#x2F;FRITZ-Box-7490&#x2F;193_Configuring-the-integrated-fax-function-in-the-FRITZ-Box&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.avm.de&#x2F;service&#x2F;knowledge-base&#x2F;dok&#x2F;FRITZ-Box-7490&#x2F;...</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deutschepost.de&#x2F;de&#x2F;e&#x2F;epost.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deutschepost.de&#x2F;de&#x2F;e&#x2F;epost.html</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static2.o9.de&#x2F;resource&#x2F;blob&#x2F;498264&#x2F;12cd6ca6ee17a02b9e4045de0c3d9dd1&#x2F;o2-faxvorlage-kuendigung-mobilfunkvertrag-pdf-download-data.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static2.o9.de&#x2F;resource&#x2F;blob&#x2F;498264&#x2F;12cd6ca6ee17a02b9...</a>

That&#x27;s illegal in Europe. You have to be able to cancel via the same means as you signed up. So if you can signup online then you must be able to cancel online.

Probably no less than 90 days in advance too.

It&#x27;s just as bad in Europe! Signed up to O2 Deutschland - had to send a fax or send a physical letter to cancel.

Tip: when you’re ready to cancel, change the physical address in your account to one in California. Magically, a cancel button appears (to comply with California law).I did this the last time WSJ decided to jack my rate to something obscene.

Wall Street Journal does the same thing. It&#x27;s completely mad.

THIS. I am thinking that I can finally cancel my nytimes subscription^^I mean, I really appreciate the articles but I haven&#x27;t been able to follow as closely as I wanted.

I immediately instructed my bank to block the upcoming payments and on the renewal day the subscription was cancelled. This is pretty much a flow of their cancellation.

I got this issue with the newspaper &quot;Le Monde&quot; in France a couple of months ago. Had to send them a 8Euros letter to cancel the subscription.

It’s why they hate people that sign up via IAP - literally one click and the subscription is gone.

Had a similar issue with a US publication recently. They emailed to say &quot;Your subscription of $120 has automatically been renewed, please check your card details or contact us to alter it.&quot;Fortunately the card they have expired last December.

Yeah; I&#x27;ve had this &quot;send us a letter via snail mail to cancel&quot; recently.  Saying &quot;it&#x27;s unreal&quot; doesn&#x27;t capture the absurdity.

Living in Europe, I couldn&#x27;t believe that if I wanted to unsubscribe to New York Times, I would need to call one of their hotlines which operated in US time-zones. IIRC the open hours were after midnight in my timezone, and their local hotline was out of order.I seriously thought that I had signed up for a phishing site ...

&gt; You’d build easy sign up before you built easy canceling. Even if you were the least nefarious business owner in the history of the world, the ctime on your signup page would be older than that of the cancel page. Whether it would be 15 minutes, days, or months later is a question, but I doubt anyone has coded their cancel page first.I think many startups undervalue the value proposition of &quot;It&#x27;s easy to change away from us&quot; or &quot;It&#x27;s easy to cancel if you&#x27;re not happy&quot;.I can&#x27;t even count the number of times I&#x27;ve heard from users signing up to services I&#x27;ve built that one of the top reasons they signed up in the first place, was because it was easy to migrate away if they ever needed to. Preventing vendor lock-in has always been high up on my list of features for every service I build&#x2F;am involved in.

Employing people to handle phone cancellations is way more money and effort than a cancellation script.I’ve never encountered a small startup that relies on call to cancel—only big companies that actively know they’re making it hard to leave.

You don&#x27;t have to &quot;build&quot; anything. Just have a button &quot;cancel subscription&quot; with a mailto: link... or even some text saying &quot;email us at @ from your account and it will be cancelled within N hours&#x2F;days&quot;.Currently what most companies (including startups) do is burying the cancellation instructions in some Knowledge Base, or forcing some back and forth via email or phone.You can rationalise bad behaviour all day, but we all know very well the reason people don&#x27;t make it easy to cancel.

I also dislike this business practice, but I don’t think the only way it comes about is from lack of confidence in product&#x2F;service.Let’s say you were building a startup and had to prioritize limited resources on everything that sucked about it. You’re talking to users, tracking various metrics, trying to get people to use it, and your backlog of things you wished you could do is 3+ years long.You’d build easy sign up before you built easy canceling. Even if you were the least nefarious business owner in the history of the world, the ctime on your signup page would be older than that of the cancel page. Whether it would be 15 minutes, days, or months later is a question, but I doubt anyone has coded their cancel page first.

If it&#x27;s so amazing that people only unsubscribe by accident, they&#x27;ll certainly miss it quickly and subscribe again immediately.  The practice of using &quot;dark patterns&quot; to prevent people from unsubscribing is utterly disrespectful.

Gave me a giggle, but yeaaaaah, no. XDLet&#x27;s be real. It&#x27;s a dark pattern to make people give up on cancelling, rather than go through with it.The more difficult something is, the more likely people are to give up on any phase of doing that thing.

&gt; it shows such complete lack of confidence in their product.It can also show complete and utter overconfidence. &quot;The only reason people would want to unsubscribe is by accident. We&#x27;re doing people a favor when making it as hard as possible to make that mistake.&quot;

So much of the current economy derives benefit from captive customers who are charged ridiculous fees because they have no other place to go (think drinks at a movie theater or baggage fees on an airline, but there are many versions of the captive-customer squeeze), use extortion-type tactics to retain customers (you lose functionality of the product you&#x27;ve &quot;bought&quot; if you leave or otherwise lock you into their product making it painful to leave), or otherwise strong-arm their customers from leaving once they have them on board (high termination fees, impossible cancellation methods, threatening collections if you do a chargeback).Many SaaS compaines even do this -- luring their customers in with low or even free offerings and then turning off those free or low priced offerings to force their users into higher paying brackets without providing any additional functionality. Pipedrive just announced that they are sunsetting their popular Esssentials plan for no really good reason than to squeeze their customers into a higher plan. I have had other companies decide to arbitrarily double or even quadruple the price of their offering for the same features because they can&#x27;t find any other way to generate more revenues and probably didn&#x27;t have the right price to begin with if it can&#x27;t sustain their business.Are these products good? Yeah they&#x27;re decent enough. But these tactics say more about trying to squeeze every nickel not only out of those who would otherwise want to leave, but even those who would like to stay.

That would require that there is somebody overseeing the complete user experience. In reality the people who design the product probably never meet the people who design the subscription management systems.

If you are concerned that the only way to keep people subscribed is to offer them a one-off promotion when they&#x27;ve decided to cancel -- isn&#x27;t that kind of a tacit acknowledgement that your product doesn&#x27;t contain the value that you are charging for? To me, it seems a bit like you&#x27;ve actually reinforced the GP&#x27;s point...On the non-profit point of view, that&#x27;s hard for me to understand -- I run a small non-profit and I can&#x27;t imagine having any other response to someone cancelling their recurring donation than sending them an e-mail thanking them for their support and offering a conversation for some feedback if they&#x27;d be willing to tell us how we could do better. I suppose it depends on the non-profit sector you are in, but often times people giving low dollar recurring donations aren&#x27;t particularly well off and I can&#x27;t imagine forcing them to call me and tell me that they love our organization but they&#x27;re just too broke for a while to continue..

That&#x27;s not really it. They want a chance to convince you to stay and&#x2F;or get feedback on why you&#x27;re leaving. They can also offer some kind of one-off promotion or something to retain people. Subscriber loyalty is the absolute lifeblood of these kinds of businesses.I work at a non-profit and we collect recurring payments from people who don&#x27;t actually get anything tangible in return. The membership are rigidly ethical in all their fundraising and messaging, but they think of &quot;call to cancel&quot; as being a fair practice.

This has nothing to do with confidence.It is a psychological manipulation tactic to make it more difficult to cancel, in the hopes that the subscriber will give up partway through the process because they don&#x27;t want to pick up the phone.It&#x27;s all about profit. The shareholders don&#x27;t really give a damn about the company&#x27;s confidence in its product. They care about subscriber numbers and the dollars that come from them. The quality of the product is way secondary to that.

If they do something like this, it shows such complete lack of confidence in their product. &quot;The only reason why people would continue to use this product is... if we make it sufficiently difficult to cancel&quot;.When signing up for a product, if it uses tactics like this, I assume the product is no good, and even the producers of the product know it...

T-Mobile Thuis literally delayed the end of my subscription by two months, and only cancelled it when I called back. There wasn&#x27;t ever a way to cancel online. In practice they&#x27;ve really been truly garbage, lawful or not.

This is the case in the Netherlands and a contract cannot revoke this right (Burgerlijk Wetboek 6:236). If you subscribe online, you should be able to unsubscribe online.Another thing that helps if you don&#x27;t want to fight someone who violates this and they require you to send a letter, that an e-mail also qualifies as legally binding. So, if they ask a letter to end a subscription, they must also accept an e-mail.(IANAL)

Member lagadu nearby (root post) states it is the case of Portugal.Edit: according to member t0mas88, it is not just Portugal, or the Netherlands as mentioned nearby: it should be a European directive, not yet implemented by all Members. I guess that this should push heavily on the service providers for general compliance (as opposed to changing the options according to geolocation, as another member here revealed mentioning California).

This TBH, I think we&#x27;re so used to being taken advantage of that we don&#x27;t realize we should be asking for more. Especially if it&#x27;s the kind of service which doesn&#x27;t involve extra preparation costs for the provider.

The problem is that in the US, one cannot easily stop a debit&#x2F;credit card from being billed for a particular service.A more general solution is to make the payment infrastructure allow me to ban a particular merchant. You can implement this by reissuing a debit card, but there&#x27;s no reason not to make it seamless for individual merchants.

Reasonable would be lack payment ending the contract. We should be able to simply stop paying them with zero repercussions. Let them deal with the administrative trivia required to cancel a service.

Then you will be happy to learn the content in the article this thread is about.

A reasonable legal requirement should be that customers are able to unsubscribe using the same method used to subscribe and the process should not require more time and effort than the initial subscription.

My understanding is this is only available in certain jurisdictions which mandate symmetry between subscribe and unsubscribe options. Others direct you to phone or Web chat.

These days you can cancel yourself via myaccount.nytimes.com.Go to Subscription overview, and at the very bottom click &quot;Cancel your subscription&quot;.You can also use this to get a better deal. Just start the cancellation, choose &quot;My subscription is too expensive&quot; as reason, click Continue a couple of times and they&#x27;ll give you a reduced rate to keep you. I now pay 2 euros a month for a digital subscription.

It is really not the same thing: they lent you equipment. That «no cost» is not really such, but if it were, you cannot demand further &quot;favours&quot; on the basis of former or other favours. (Or, they could go along the lines of that &quot;fake&quot; «no cost» and charge you for both equipment deployment and full equipment costs incorporating them in the general fees, increasing them.)

I’m also annoyed by having to return or mail back routers when disconnecting from ISPs. When you sign up they are glad to deliver and install at no cost, but now you have to waste time or money sending them the equipment back.

Well, making something illegal doesn&#x27;t make it non-existent.Let&#x27;s see how this is enforced before putting those &quot;Mission Accomplished&quot; banners up.

Great - please inform the NYT immediately so they can stop this incredibly sleazy practice for their own business.

Took me nearly an hour on hold with the WSJ to cancel my account. The longer I had to wait, the stronger my resolve got.

I vowed never to pay the NYT another dime after the hassle they gave me about unsubscribing from their crossword subscription a few years ago. It was such a pain, I told to actually cancel my news subscription too. Never looked back. These days I mostly read the WSJ and it meets my needs.

Don&#x27;t subscribe again. You can read all these articles for free via archive. If they&#x27;re going to be doing abusive things to you like that, you have a duty to pirate their content.

Sometimes I wonder what little things differ between countries. But this is new to me. Is it true that you find that hold time to be annoying&#x2F;out of place in the UK? I once was on hold with an insurance company for ten hours... I began to wonder if 1. something happened that got me stuck in the queue, or 2. if they even had a single person working the lines.

This is the FTC, not the EU (as far as I&#x27;m aware theres no EU legislation planned or in place for this).Of course you could argue that the EU might do it one day, but you could say the same about the UK.That being said I thought it already was against UK law. Maybe I got that wrong, or there are loopholes around it, or its just not heavily enforced. Who knows

I thought of beer52 too, but not because I was thinking of cancelling (I quite like beer52)But because they offered a free month to wine52. Easy to sign up, phone up to cancel

When I had an account with Beer52 I them and said, effectively, &quot;This is my notice to cancel and the main motivation to cancel is because of anti-consumer behaviour like having to call to cancel. I do not authorise any further payments and any payments you do take will be subject to a dispute with my credit card company&quot;.To their credit they did send me a reply saying my account had been cancelled and I never spoke to anyone on the phone.

Hah, literally saw the title of the post and came to comments to find beer52 (after dealing with them over a year ago)... must say something about a company.But I immediately cancelled with card after I tried to cancel the subscription. I misread that and thought I&#x27;d cancelled, then got stung with a bill, but they didn&#x27;t send as they couldn&#x27;t take payment.
So I retried to cancel and realised what had happened... I think the most annoying bit that that you can _try_ to cancel on their site and then, after answering several questions (are you sure if we offer X or Y), several pages later, they tell you that you need to call them (IIRC the wording if you skim read it almost makes it sound like you _have_ unsubscribed.For a &#x27;hip&#x27; beer company, I was surprised at how baroque it seemed.. I refuse to recommend them to ANYONE, even though I actually quite liked the beer.

Same with the UK subscription craft beer service, beer52.com [1]. Subscribe easily with a few clicks, but they make you call during office hours and endure 10+ minutes on hold to cancel.Sadly in the UK I guess we won&#x27;t get the benefit of any new EU legislation to address this.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ibb.co&#x2F;r4LfK5F" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ibb.co&#x2F;r4LfK5F</a>

In the past when I&#x27;ve had to deal with a retention person and they ask why I&#x27;m leaving, I usually just say personal reasons. I&#x27;ve had pretty good luck with that.

Very prisoner-of-war-esque. I might try that if I ever get into such a subscription trap. I am just not sure if I could maintain my composure enough to keep saying &quot;please&quot;.

Having dealt with The Guardian and others like them to cancel, I say &quot;I will not explain why I wish to cancel nor will I reconsider my decision. Please cancel my account. My account number is x, my email is y and my address is z.&quot;I usually have to repeat it 3-4 times before they finally give in and do it.

When I had to deal with &quot;customer retention dept&quot; as a part of cancellation I was saying that I&#x27;m moving to another country and that immediately killed their interest.

Can confirm that The Economist requires you to chat with a human to cancel. The representative will basically try to get you a &quot;new&quot; deal to prevent cancellation and the whole process took about 5 minutes (with me just saying no to everything).Still better than the Globe and Mail though, had to call and talk with them for 10 minutes while they tried to sell me a different subscription.

The Economist I just didn&#x27;t renew. Nothing beyond that.What is true is that, with a lot of magazines, to get the best rate you have to select an autorenew option and then they make it difficult to cancel. (That may be the case with The Economist; don&#x27;t know.) In general, you&#x27;re better off just paying a bit more and passing on autorenew unless you&#x27;re sure you want to keep on subscribing.

But can also only read your newspaper subscription using Apple&#x27;s walled garden rather than a web browser.

I&#x27;m subscribed digitally using apple app subscription. That means I can just end it whenever and The Guardian wouldn&#x27;t be involved.

Similar with New Scientist, needed to phone during office hours and was on hold a while, which would put me off subscribing again in future¹ though in fairness they were very quick to follow my cancel request, not hard sell on staying, etc, once I got through.[1] of course that is now a moot point as they&#x27;ve been bought by DMGT and I refuse to give any money at all to those in any way responsible for, or benefiting from, the Daily Fail.

Careful; if you don&#x27;t go through their unsubscribe process, they can consider the contract still valid, and collect on the legally-still-valid subscription through liens and paycheck garnishments.

I was kinda shocked by The Guardian to be honest with you - I had a similar experience when I came to cancel my subscription to The Guardian Weekly, which is an excellent magazine.In the end I just told my bank to stop the direct debit - I had a few what seemed like automated payment emails from The Guardian telling me that my payments had failed and to update my payment choices - but other than that I considered my subscription over.

As a WSJ subscriber I&#x27;m so used to their blunt &quot;to the point&quot; editorial style that I find Economist articles too long winded and short-storyish. I always get 5 paragraphs in and still can&#x27;t figure out what the article is getting at. Ain&#x27;t nobody got time for that.

The Economist reached the point of calling me to ask if I knew someone who would be interested into a subscription. 
I love the magazine but their marketing is really invasive and annoying.Last time I cancelled they were a nightmare calling me every other day.

I don&#x27;t know if this is the case, but these are exactly the sort of awful &quot;customer retention&quot; strategies I would expect from an organization where somebody is being judged&#x2F;rewarded based on minimizing customer turnover metrics below some threshold.

I had a different experience with the Economist. I forgot to cancel and was billed. I emailed saying I forgot to cancel, could I unsubscribe now? And got a quick reply saying they&#x27;d cancelled and also refunded me despite me not asking.I recently cancelled again after getting the 1-month renewal warning, and immediately got a 50% off offer, so I&#x27;ll probably subscribe again.I had a similarly easy experience with the Guardian a few years ago, based in Europe.

The difficulty cancelling Economist one time put me off from subscribing to a paper ever since. I don&#x27;t get it, their content is good, let me cancel easily and I&#x27;ll come back easily. How desperate are those services that they implement  measures like that, counting on people to not follow through the cancellation process, forgetting to cancel altogether, etc. And then doing the absolute minimum necessary, e.g. offering the easy cancel button for California residents only because they have to. It&#x27;ll be the same with this piece of legislation. Sure they&#x27;ll do it for US residents but they&#x27;ll continue to pull the same crap for us here in Canada and elsewhere. 
They deserve to go out of business in my opinion and I hope they do.

They must have changed recently since I subscribed and unsubscribed online earlier this year with no trouble (I unsubscribed because they signed me up to new email lists without my permission, something another newspaper I&#x27;m subscribed to (but will likely be canceling) just did as well :().The one newspaper I&#x27;ve had no issues at all with is Indian Country Today. They use qgiv and while you can make an account with qgiv to edit payment details, they also send you an email every time they bill your card with a link that lets you unsubscribe in one click with no account (so it is easy to just cancel and resubscribe if you need to make changes rather than needing yet another account). All around excellent experience with ICT and qgiv.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;indiancountrytoday.com&#x2F;news" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;indiancountrytoday.com&#x2F;news</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qgiv.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qgiv.com&#x2F;</a>

I told the person at the The Economist&#x27;s live chat that I was unsubscribing due to that dark pattern. The other reason is that even if the content is great their app isn&#x27;t. The saved articles feature isn&#x27;t shared between different devices. Another reason is that you need to get into an article and then get out instead of doing continuous reading. Ended up reading&#x2F;annotating downloaded PDFs because it was a better experience than using their app.

I had very good experience with The Economist but, despite that, I&#x27;m still hesitant to re-subscribe because I just don&#x27;t want to bother e-mailing them if I want to suspend or cancel my subscription (or add&#x2F;remove print etc.).

Same with the New York Times. Having gone through calling to cancel, I vowed never to subscribe again. Now I simply scan the front page to make sure the end of the world isn’t upon us. (Many days, reading it, it appears as though it is!)&#x2F;s

Newspapers are awful. I had one thrown in my yard DAILY, that the previous homeowner had signed up for. I couldn&#x27;t figure out what the publication even was, or how to contact them. I ended up flagging down the delivery guy (4am), he doesn&#x27;t know who the publisher is and so I just tell him to stop throwing in my yard (put in trash for all I care). It worked for a while, but probably the turnover happened and the next delivery guy started throwing in my yard again. So I wake up, flag him down, and ask for his bosses info. Call them, they&#x27;re confrontational about it so I basically went on to say I feel they are littering on my property and I will report them to police if it keeps happening (yep, Karen move). That led to them telling me who the publisher was, they had a corporate holding company website, with an image of text instructing how to cancel (not SEO friendly). I had to call. After calling, I had to write a letter to some PO Box. It was insane.Meanwhile, I signed up for a magazine 20 years ago for $8&#x2F;year and still get it monthly as well. I haven&#x27;t paid since, they send me an annual reminder pay which I ignore. I suppose they like including me in their readership numbers to sell print ads, so they keep sending me magazines. Luckily, I enjoy the magazine. Monthly in my mailbox (not wet out in my yard). I would not want to even think about trying to stop the deliveries, they follow me wherever I live.

Same thing with The Guardian. Subscribed online and was then told I can’t cancel via email and have to endure a pushy sales call if I want to cancel. Similar experience with The Economist except it was via live chat instead.These experiences honestly make me want to never subscribe to a newspaper again.

The email is evidence he&#x27;s let them know of his intention to cancel. Unless there is some major clause in the contract that entitles them to more money such as a minimum commitment, I don&#x27;t see a problem.Granted anyone can sue for anything anyway, but I can&#x27;t see them having a strong case. They&#x27;d be paying a lot of money to try and litigate this and demonstrate their bad faith in the process.

No one would sue unless the balance was into thousands, or they&#x27;re just an individual pursuing a vendetta. What would likely happen is they&#x27;d charge it off to a debt collection agency that would hassle you by whatever means of contact they have for a couple years until you paid or they gave up on it. And when they give up on it they usually just sell it downstream to an even more crappy company more willing to use aggressive tactics.

Could they have sued you if they had wanted to?If, theoretically, there was an unsubscribe button in one&#x27;s user settings that you hadn&#x27;t seen, and you sent an email instead and blocked the payment card?

Good thinking. When I cancelled it (No complaints, I just did one of the 12 week offers as it&#x27;s too expensive for me in general) they made me go talk to a sales person in their chat room, and they actually put me on hold for ~20 minutes while waiting for the queue to clear. Then they try to sell you on a reduced rate before they&#x27;ll let you cancel. C&#x27;est abusé.

Yep, if you&#x27;ve signed an agreement to remain a paying customer for a set duration and you pull this, they can send collections after you. In this case, I hadn&#x27;t.

Making them unable to easily collect money from you doesn&#x27;t magically erase your contractual relationship.They probably still just canceled your account since it&#x27;s paid up front and it&#x27;d be more hassle to try and collect on your debt.

I just expect these tactics from periodicals these days. Last time I signed up to one (The Economist) I used a pre-paid debit card for this very reason.Sure enough, they eventually gave me a reason to cancel (popup modals over their online articles for paying customers) and I just emptied the card and sent an email to their customer service saying &quot;I hereby cancel my subscription; you are no longer authorized to charge my card&quot;.Can&#x27;t refuse to cancel me if I have no money taps temple

This is the reason i have a label next to my doorbell that says: &quot;Donations only without subscription and to volunteers&quot;. Since then we&#x27;ve not have a lot of charities ring the bell, and the ones that do I actually want to give to.

In my case it was trivial to unsubscribe, but they then started sending me all kinds of letters in regular intervals. And never stopped, I still get them years later. I&#x27;m certain by now they paid more for those stupid letters and pens than I donated in the first place. Which is yet another reason for me to never waste money there again, as I now know where it&#x27;s used.

A lot of charities in the Netherlands do the same thing, where you can&#x27;t just give a one-time donation, but have to subscribe to a monthly contribution.That is horrible enough as it is.But then to unsubscribe, you have to call them (during their and your office hours) and endure another couple of pitches to keep you subscribed until you are finally allowed to cancel.And then some of them even have a cancellation term of one month.

Reminds me of my wsj cancellation. I procrastinated twice calling via hotline and they ripped off three months of subscription from me.

I&#x27;ve used the Times a handful of times as a student. It&#x27;s always painful when student discount ends and you ring up and say I can&#x27;t afford £26 a month. They&#x27;ll drop it to £10 then £5 but they never match my student price. I&#x27;ve had to leave during bachelors and professional qualifications.

The Telegraph have stopped doing it. I think they have now realised it&#x27;s counter-productive. Hopefully, others will follow.Incidentally, I also think it&#x27;s now common knowledge that unsubscribing will, in most case, initiate a lower price offer.

The Times of London does this, and so does The Telegraph.Most of my subscriptions go via PayPal or Google so I can just cancel the payment and eventually my service will be cancelled for lack of payment.

&gt; Would you say that the rest of the legislation in Portugal is consistent, and the direction of the Country is towards good sense and reliability?not GP, ... it is a role-model when it comes to the points listed above. I think it&#x27;s hard to answer your question because how would one define &quot;good sense and reliability&quot;. At the risk of being called out for whataboutism, here is something that would be sobering for most people (like myself) applauding the current &quot;good parts&quot;:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.biometricupdate.com&#x2F;202111&#x2F;portuguese-lawmakers-try-to-unshackle-biometric-mass-surveillance-alarms-ring" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.biometricupdate.com&#x2F;202111&#x2F;portuguese-lawmakers-...</a>

No. Portugal is a (atm) an radically aging country, it is rife with corruption and politics are poorly led. Brain drain is massive. Employment is extremely difficult for both the jobseeker and the employer due to poor competitiveness, low productivity and terrible regulation. Healthcare systems have been dropping off a cliff.IMO going the direction of a dying country. And I am Portuguese.Virtually anyone I know with a good skill set that’s profitable abroad has moved.

This is extremely reasonable and civilized. Would you say that the rest of the legislation in Portugal is consistent, and the direction of the Country is towards good sense and reliability?I have noticed of other EU countries that a response against abuse may exist, but severely delayed and only partial (e.g. about sale of misrepresented services and other contractual scams, especially when carried out over the phone).

I can confirm this is supposed to be the same in Spain.  Implementation varies across industries, of course.

EU regulations take effect directly and are roughly equivalent to national law (see GDPR).In contrast, EU directives stipulate the desired outcome and let countries draft their own national law to achieve the directive&#x27;s desired outcome.

&gt; That&#x27;s the weird thing with some European &quot;laws&quot;, they give countries 1 or 2 years to implement it and some countries abuse that to go and implement it on the very last day.If you give them to the last day and they do it on the last day, they have done what you asked, it&#x27;s not abuse. Want it done sooner? Require it done sooner.

Not just Portugal, this is a European thing but apparently Germany hasn&#x27;t implemented it yet and will do so starting next year.That&#x27;s the weird thing with some European &quot;laws&quot;, they give countries 1 or 2 years to implement it and some countries abuse that to go and implement it on the very last day.

&gt; Another example is prostitution is legal but you can only advertise yourself.that&#x27;s an excellent rule - because pimping should be illegal.

That&#x27;s essentially the UK&#x27;s law too -- but many arent aware.

&gt;Another example is prostitution is legal but you can only advertise yourself.And then serious criminals are out of the advertising business, but can still offer consultation, business and personal protection, and, of course, forced sex labour through human trafficking.

The drug policy is well known, but the speed traps is new and amusing. It reminds me of the horn activated red lights in India. Genius idea.

&gt; Or the speed traps that just trigger a red light.This sounds interesting. Since when have they been doing this, and do you have a link to photos, video or a more detailed description?

&gt; speed traps that just trigger a red lightMuch better than what I&#x27;ve seen in my (US) city: speed limit 30 mph, but lights timed for 40-45 mph to get a continuous green light down the one-way street. Either you speed, opening you to tickets, or you stop needlessly on lights that are set for a faster speed than you are traveling.

I am from Brazil, and here speed limits are literally dangeorus.1. In my city people mostly ignore speed limits, because often they are unreasonable.2. At same time people are so used to the above, that they ignore speed limits in very unsafe places.3. I don&#x27;t ignore the limits myself since I am a new-ish driver, but I almost crashed multiple times, either because I was with my eyes too gluted at the speedometer, or because everyone else was ignoring the speed limit and almost crashed into my rear.4. I got fined for crossing speed limit anyway, when I was trying to understand the fine, I found out they been placing radars on steep hills on fast roads, so you have basically two choices there: climb the hill using higher gears, and cross speed limit, or slow down until you can use lower gears, and risk people crashing into you.5. In a specific very steep hill they put the speed limit so low that the only way to climb that hill is actually go fast as you can until right before the radar, brake hard, immediately put first gear, and shove your foot in the accelerator pedal again and resume the climb tires screaming, if you attempt to climb the whole hill slower your car is likely to stall, thanks to Brazillian popularity of really low power cars, our cars are literally illegal in some european cities because of how underpowered they are and thus dangerous in hilly places.

&gt;Or the speed traps that just trigger a red light.Sounds like a great way to train the entire population is to run reds between 10pm and 5am.

&gt; Or the speed traps that just trigger a red light.This is the best. You trigger a red light because you&#x27;re speeding, and everybody around you just glares at you. Including the old woman walking on the side of the street.It&#x27;s like public shaming.Thanks bud, because of you, now we all have to sit at this red light and wait. Good job.That works so much better than the hidden speed camera ticket I get in the mail 6 months later, when I&#x27;m not even in Portugal anymore.One is about slowing you down, the other is about revenue.

In Poland it&#x27;s similar (you can only work for yourself). It&#x27;s not even taxed (don&#x27;t know why).
I guess NL and CZ has most liberal laws in this case.

Portugal is logical on some stuff.Another example is prostitution is legal but you can only advertise yourself. I wonder what other countries have prostitution set up like this.Or the speed traps that just trigger a red light.Decriminalization of all drugs obviously too.

What in case that some company doesn&#x27;t collect your email e.g. they try to sell you only over the phone?

In that case, it seems that they should have people going door-to-door offering cancellation as well.

It&#x27;s an EU thing, we have this in the Netherlands as well.We see a lot of services trying to sell you subscriptions at the door or on the street, though.

&gt; you can cancel any service using the same means that you used to subscribe itThis should be the way for everything. I&#x27;m about to move and I need to cancel my power and my cable and I just want it to be as easy as logging into the system, selecting my last day of service, and that&#x27;s it

In Portugal the law makes it so you can cancel any service using the same means that you used to subscribe it, so if they support subscribing online, unsubscribing also has to be doable the same way; same goes for via phone, personal or whatnot.
It makes sense, prevents service providers from making it too difficult to terminate a contract.

I wouldn&#x27;t get your hopes up too much. It has been illegal in Europe&#x2F;the Netherlands for years, however it is not enforced at all. Most newspapers don&#x27;t let you cancel without calling them, having to deal with sales people trying to convince you to keep your subscription.

&gt; The new guidelines around “negative option marketing” — which includes everything from automatic renewals to free trials that convert to paid subscriptions if consumers take no action — go beyond mandating that companies offer straightforward cancellation.No, fuck this! If I get a free trial I want it to auto renew; if I have to take another step to make it renew that’s a waste of time, and inconvenient. If I don’t want it to renew I’ll cancel.

Hedge fund dweebs: &quot;We kill newspapers intentionally.&quot; Everyone here: &quot;Fuggin NYT&quot;

Perhaps &quot;small claims court&quot; would fit the bill. Maybe there are lawyers specialized in that.

How would one go about trying to get this law enforced on a company?  I live in California where this tactic has supposedly been illegal for 3 years already, but when I go to cancel my AT&amp;T internet subscription, I still can not do it online and am forced to call.

Should not you only use anonymous &#x2F; pre-paid &#x2F; virtual &#x2F; revocable credit cards for those operations?

I would suppose you&#x27;d have to actually have a choice in the matter. If you have to spend 30+ minutes to unsubscribe, surely it&#x27;s not the only law that applies.

True, but easy way to get around this is to just revoke the SEPA mandate - which you are always allowed to. You still owe the money, but after revocation they will have to send you an invoice and wait for your payment. Larger companies will not do this as they have no process for this, and rather allow termination.

German law knows “Dauerschuldverhältnis” (permanent indebtedness). If you don’t cancel the contract and just cease payment, the other party can obtain title against you, and eventually impound you.

If there&#x27;s a minimum term&#x2F;commitment it can be considered morally wrong (as you&#x27;re depriving them of revenue you&#x27;ve agreed to pay in advance) and there might be more incentive to collect that amount.If there&#x27;s no minimum commitment (or it&#x27;s expired already) there&#x27;s basically no problem. Yes, they can in theory send that debt to collections and litigate. Both of these are expensive and are unlikely.If you&#x27;ve made reasonable efforts to cancel you can indeed block future payments and let them sort it out. If they want to litigate they&#x27;d have to explain why those reasonable efforts were ignored (and have the court rule in their favour).

What would the consequences be of subscribing to something with a disposable card, then deactivating that card instead of formally unsubscribing? Can companies send your information to a debt collector or somehow force you to pay since you didn&#x27;t cancel? Can it affect your credit score?

&gt; God, I never realized how passionately I could hate a company like this.May it burn in hell huh xD sorry but this is so relatable and cracks me up badddd

He tried to reach them to cancel his subscription. In that case, he could challenge collection and then go to court to prove his case?For the gym, it depends on your contract. Maybe you had a 1 year commitment but you paid monthly?

Just to play devils advocate, can’t they just send it to collections if they really wanted to?I did the same thing for a gym membership (NYSC) and they threatened collections 3 months later. Fortunately, they went bankrupt.

Reading about opposing viewpoints broaden your horizons, and surrounding yourself with media that reinforces your own world view does nothing to make your life better.

Why would I want to read their woke hysteria anyway...

Subscribing through something like Amazon also makes it easy to cancel.

This. To give you an example I signed up for a local Gannett newspaper subscription for $17 per month delivered. I have since learned...-twice a moth they claim they send premium content newspapers charged at $7 each extra. This content is trivial mass produced garbage.
-there is no billing statement detailing monthly charges. You can pay $5 a month to get an detailed billing statement.
-if you go on vacation there is no credit since they claim all the content is online.
-the newspaper shows up at my house some days at 12:15 am, so it is devoid of most news from the previous day.I only get this for an elderly family member who reads it cover to cover everyday or I would be long gone.

There&#x27;s been a lot of talk about how newspapers are dying because nobody wants to pay for digital subscriptions. I think this industry seriously gets to blame themselves for this. I&#x27;ve tried subscribing to a couple of magazines back in the days and with every one of them it was a living nightmare to get out of the subscriptions. Once ending the subscription one even started sending what looked like regular invoices with due date in red and everything, but if you read the fine print at the bottom of the page it just said that &quot;this is to start a subscription, if you are not interested ignore this mail&quot;.Generally I don&#x27;t have a problem paying for culture, and I also like reading both news papers and magazines but now days I always buy them at the local news stand. I&#x27;ve got enough proof that newspapers and magazines can&#x27;t handle the trust with personal information and payment details.I&#x27;ve also always admired journalists and the craft of good investigative journalism. It&#x27;s sad that these creatives are stuck with the most hostile sales people in probably any industry (except maybe phone companies).

Apple Pay is just a one-time payment authorization mechanism; it does not keep track of subscriptions and doesn&#x27;t have a way to cancel them. You may have been confused with App Store subscriptions which are mediated by Apple (and they take a cut) and do allow you to cancel there.

I subscribed to NYT via apple pay (through their website not the app) to avoid these shenanigans but the subscription won’t show up in Apple pay. Does anyone know why?

I fell for this trap once, and instead of going through their rigamarole, I reported my credit card lost and got a new one with a new number.  Of course I had to update the subscriptions I wanted to keep with the new number, but that was less hassle than cancelling that one service.

Fuck New York Times, I had to go through this chaos once and promised to never ever use any of their services ever again. I even went to the pain of making sure all my ad blockers were in full force when visiting the NYT. I developed a strong sense of hatred after realize what kind of slimy tactics they used to stop you from cancelling a subscription.One day, I found a loophole. I would email them requesting a cancellation for my record and initiated a chargeback against them via my credit card company. I had no hopes of getting the money back, but then I also had evidence that I tried to reach out to them via calls and emails to make them cancel my subscription and the chargeback went through and I got a full refund. I really enjoyed that feeling knowing that the NYT lost more than they made from me as for every chargeback, the credit card company would penalize the merchant with a fixed fee - usually anywhere from $20 to $50 per chargeback if I&#x27;m not wrong.I wish all those who had been scammed by NYT raises a chargeback and burn them to the ground. God, I never realized how passionately I could hate a company like this.

I had this exact experience with New York Times. I subscribed, realized I didn&#x27;t like their editorial style at all, and then had to call long international phone calls to get it to stop.

This exactly is why every year I think about subscribing to some expensive (for me) journal, then google horror stories about unsubscribing and abandon this idea.Some people above mentioned inconvenient work hours when calling to unsub, but it&#x27;s not only that. International subscribers must also pay to simply call another country. If will be put on hold for tens of minutes or more, then the price of that call will easily be more than annual sub price.I suspect that even if FTC will change something in US, international subscribers will still be left out, because this is what usually happens in such cases.

Stripe can be a good enforcer of this. A lot of banking accounts opened online refuse to close the same way too.

Same with American Express. I couldn&#x27;t believe that such a well known brand whose entire value proposition is great customer service has a &quot;call to cancel&quot; process. I hope it dies.

I’ve had gym memberships where calling to cancel wasn’t good enough, you had to come in person to cancel.

I found a loophole for NYT and The Economist. Convert your payment to PayPal (they allow you to edit payments, but not remove them), and then go into PayPal to cancel the active payment agreement. Easier than cancelling the card, or calling them.

I wonder if this strategy could impact your credit rating though?

You cant ding a credit rating unless you have a users SSN, which the NYT almost certainly does not.

Don&#x27;t these subscriptions charge at the start of the bill cycle and not rears?  You&#x27;re not incurring debt.

The problem with that is that you still have a valid contract, some companies will ding your credit rating and still pursue you for the money.

You still owe them the money technically.

&gt; but it only took 5 minutesI live in a different country &#x2F; time zone, wasn&#x27;t unsure how long it was going to take and if my phone would be charged. Also English isn&#x27;t my native language and it adds to the burden of having to call them.

I cancelled my wsj subscription the other day, I had to call to cancel which is insulting but it only took 5 minutes. Wonder if someone sued them in between our cancellations. I actually cancelled because I found out call to cancel was their policy. Wont do business with companies that have this process.

I had the issue with the WSJ. I couldn&#x27;t believe it was so hard to cancel. My solution was to update my card with an incorrect number, they canceled the subscription after the payment was declined.

This is why consumers are so eager to use obscenely expensive (in terms of what the recipient actually gets) payment methods like Google&#x2F;Apple in-app subscriptions.

I don&#x27;t think this concept is new. I mean look at the gym&#x2F;fitness market. It is largely defined by gyms looking to onboard members with special discounted entry rates and then largely leaving them be and milking the monthly payments.

&gt; Publishers tend to think of this as “retention.”My understanding was that &quot;retention&quot; used to be simply a measure of how many unique users&#x2F;customers kept using your product. With some implicit (maybe too optimistic) understanding that they stayed because they wanted to.In classic &quot;if your measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a measure&quot; tradition, &quot;retention&quot; today seems to be about keeping as many recurring visitors as possible, no matter how and no matter the reason why they are staying.

It would be great to have this universally, especially with gyms, where one can click to join but must write a letter and mail it via the postal service to cancel.

I think &quot;unsubscribe&quot; should only be offered after a customer has been charged. Before that, it should be &quot;cancel&quot; or &quot;annul&quot;.For instance, if there is a &quot;free trial&quot; period, wait until after that expires, and the customer has been charged, before offering an &quot;unsubscribe&quot;.But aside from the hair-splitting, yes, you are absolutely correct. If I have instant buyer&#x27;s remorse, I should be able to click it away just as instantly.

It should have been stipulated that unsubscribing should be offered immediately after the option to subscribe.

Some might try that but one call with the FTC legal team will make any company stop that shit immediately.You don&#x27;t piss off gov&#x27;t regulators

This is the most tone-deaf thing I have read today. Logging in to a website is miles easier than waiting hours in a phone queue.

2010&#x27;s GoDaddy, is that you? They used to pull this, then you would stay on the phone seemingly forever until you got a (the?) CSR that would first try the carrot of more services for free if you just re-upped then tried to browbeat you into the deal if you still weren&#x27;t convinced. Also, the New York times did this, I think you can cancel online now. There should be multiple ways people can sub&#x2F;unsub, but if you sub in one manner, you should be able to unsub in the same manner without jumping through hoops.

that&#x27;s not even mentioning seperately fetching, parsing and evaluating the html, css and javascript code, decoding the image formats, often multiple different ones, to render any images on the page and still having to also render the page itself. god help you if it&#x27;s an SPA and you have to asynchronously make further requests, only to then have to parse those resources also

Perhaps you are being cynical, but..I absolutely detest having to make phone calls, especially when a simple email (or web page click) will do the job.My main hate is companies that make a big fuss about their availability on the web, right up to when you need to contact them, when suddenly they are absolutely uncontactable, unless you are prepared to hang in a phone queue for hours.

“What’s easier than making a quick phone call? It’s certainly easier than getting internet access, typing a url into a browser address bar, validating a ssl certificate, establishing an http session, authenticating with your credentials then finding and clicking the cancel button.”

Other countries do, and it works fine. Why not?

Why not?This is exactly the kind of UI that a company would want to sabotage with dark patterns - so I think if any UI had reasons to have strict legal requirements, it would be this one.

&gt; I&#x27;d rather not put into the law that strict a requirement on our UI design.But you all had it your way and it is a net negative for the actual humans who have to deal with not having that UI element available. If it wasn&#x27;t common practice to skip that UI &#x27;option&#x27; in the first place, the regulation wouldn&#x27;t be needed now.

I would like to see 1 reason you would find that this UI restriction would be a bad thing.

It&#x27;s not really a strict requirement. If you want to make your cancellation workflow opaque, your signup workflow should be similarly opaque. There&#x27;s no mandate for a specific UI, just that you can&#x27;t fuck over your users more on cancellation than on signup.

In the meantime I&#x27;m sitting here and reading how the way out of one service includes registered mail. Probably multiple, couldn&#x27;t figure that out. Fun, eh?

What&#x27;s your super innovative cancellation UI that&#x27;s being held back by all of this overzealous regulation?

Tough. We live in a society, and that means we all have to follow rules that protect the less-well-off members of society.

&gt; mandating that cancelling must be possible using the same workflow as subscriptionI&#x27;d rather not put into the law that strict a requirement on our UI design.

I&#x27;m sorry sir, but the Cancel button is only available on the Advanced plans. Please upgrade to cancel (and allow 30 days for changes to occur).

That&#x27;s what happens with many of the Unsubscribe (from mailing lists, that is) buttons unless they are provided by a reputable third party such as Mailchimp etc.

There&#x27;s also a &quot;genuinely super easy way to unsubscribe, except it unfortunately is experiencing technical problems&quot;

Ah, this sounds a lot better. Thanks for digging in!

That&#x27;s just what&#x27;s in the summary. The actual policy [1] spells this out in more detail with examples:&gt; ROSCA requires negative option sellers to provide a simple, reasonable means for consumers to cancel their contracts. To meet this standard, negative option sellers should provide cancellation mechanisms that are at least as easy to use as the method the consumer used to initiate the negative option feature. For example, to ensure compliance with this simple cancellation mechanism requirement, negative option sellers should not subject consumers to new offers or similar attempts to save the negative option arrangement that impose unreasonable delays on consumers’ cancellation efforts. In addition, negative option sellers should provide their cancellation mechanisms at least through the same medium (such as website or mobile application) the consumer used to consent to the negative option feature. The negative option seller should provide, at a minimum, the simple mechanism over the same website or web-based application the consumer used to purchase the negative option feature. If the seller also provides for telephone cancellation, it should provide, at a minimum, a telephone number, and answer all calls to this number during normal business hours, within a short time frame, and ensure the calls are not lengthier or otherwise more burdensome than the telephone call the consumer used to consent to the negative option feature.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;system&#x2F;files&#x2F;documents&#x2F;public_statements&#x2F;1598063&#x2F;negative_option_policy_statement-10-22-2021-tobureau.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;system&#x2F;files&#x2F;documents&#x2F;public_statements...</a>

&gt; including an option that’s “at least as easy” as the one to subscribeWeirdly enough this sounds like a loophole.I can already see some companies trying to bullshit their way through an investigation: &quot;Oh sure, we don&#x27;t provide online cancellation, because our way to cancel is even easier than online:&quot; *presents a way to cancel that is in practice more difficult than online*.I think either mandating that cancelling must be possible using the same workflow as subscription or more clearly defining what &quot;easy&quot; means would be important.

“Click to subscribe, call to cancel” is illegal, FTC says