Cancel One Subscription

Cancelling is made inconvenient on purpose: four screens, an «are you sure», an offer of a discount. You are not paying for the service, you are paying for not having forty minutes.

Choose a subscription you have not used in the last two weeks — not the most expensive one, the deadest one. Find the subscription section in the app or on the site and go through the cancellation to the end, without postponing it until after the holidays. When they offer a discount or a month's pause, refuse: a pause is the same subscription with the charge deferred. If there is no cancel option in the interface, write one line to support: please terminate my subscription as of today and confirm in writing. Get to the confirmation email or screen and save a screenshot. Then go into your bank and check that the standing authorisation on the card has been removed as well.

The cancellation will probably take twenty minutes instead of the expected five, and the irritation will be aimed at the interface rather than at yourself — that is the right direction; the friction was designed in. There will be almost no sense of loss: something you have not used for two weeks does not start being missed the next day. If in a month it turns out you genuinely need the service, coming back takes two minutes, and that is an honest test. If they would not let you cancel — demanded a phone call in office hours, a letter on paper — save the correspondence and tell your bank to withdraw the payment authorisation: you are not obliged to keep paying.