Canceling a subscription shouldn't be hard. Yet here we are, with entire teams at major companies dedicated to making it difficult. This isn't incompetence. It's deliberate design.
The economics of retention
Companies spend millions acquiring customers. But retention is where they make real money. A customer who stays is a customer who pays forever. A customer who leaves is a sunk cost. So companies optimize for one thing: friction at the exit.
Stripe's research showed that companies with intentional cancellation friction retain 20-40% more customers. Some of those are people who genuinely want to stay. Many are people who couldn't find the cancel button or gave up halfway through the process.
Common cancellation tricks
The hidden button
Cancel buttons are buried in account settings, buried in footer links, or hidden behind multiple clicks. Netflix makes you navigate through four menu items. Hulu asks you to call a phone number. These aren't accidents.
The save offer
The moment you try to cancel, you're offered a discount. 50% off. One free month. These are designed to stop you from leaving. And they work. The average save rate is 10-20% of customers who start the cancellation process.
The survey trap
Some companies require you to fill out a survey before they'll let you cancel. They claim it's for feedback. Really, it's a speed bump. It adds friction at the exact moment you're most likely to abandon the process.
The phone call requirement
Only available to cancel by phone? That's intentional. Phone calls take time. You have to wait on hold. You might talk to someone trained to persuade you to stay. Most people give up.
Why this matters
The subscription economy only works if companies can reliably prevent people from leaving. This friction costs the average person $150/month in forgotten subscriptions. That's intentional wealth extraction.
Canceliio exists to flip this dynamic. We make it easy to remember your subscriptions and easy to cancel them. No tricks. No friction. Just control.