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've "bought" 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't find any other way to generate more revenues and probably didn't have the right price to begin with if it can't sustain their business.

Are these products good? Yeah they'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.

> it shows such complete lack of confidence in their product.

It can also show complete and utter overconfidence. "The only reason people would want to unsubscribe is by accident. We're doing people a favor when making it as hard as possible to make that mistake."

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

Gave me a giggle, but yeaaaaah, no. XD

Let's be real. It'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.

I also dislike this business practice, but I don’t think the only way it comes about is from lack of confidence in product/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.

> 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 "It's easy to change away from us" or "It's easy to cancel if you're not happy".

I can't even count the number of times I've heard from users signing up to services I'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/am involved in.

Exactly this line of reasoning brought me to Obsidian tool, which manages files you already own. It could be a minority of users, but we love that attitude!

You don't have to "build" anything. Just have a button "cancel subscription" with a mailto: link... or even some text saying "email us at @ from your account and it will be cancelled within N hours/days".

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't make it easy to cancel.

> Well a simple email would be too easy to forge.

Email is how thousands of SaaS handle cancellations today already.

> But I'm sure its not hard to setup something I "your account" page.

That's the whole point of the subthread...

Email reception, yes. Email sending is different, you would need to check DKIM that the sender is really the one, and that has also some setup cost.

I'm sorry, I don't think your posts have anything to do with my message or with this thread.

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.

the NYT is not a small startup.

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.

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't want to pick up the phone.

It's all about profit. The shareholders don't really give a damn about the company'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 you are concerned that the only way to keep people subscribed is to offer them a one-off promotion when they've decided to cancel -- isn't that kind of a tacit acknowledgement that your product doesn't contain the value that you are charging for? To me, it seems a bit like you've actually reinforced the GP's point...

On the non-profit point of view, that's hard for me to understand -- I run a small non-profit and I can'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'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't particularly well off and I can't imagine forcing them to call me and tell me that they love our organization but they're just too broke for a while to continue..

Almost every subscription is priced to whatever the market will bear and not an actual unit cost plus fixed margin. Our services are digital. It costs us $XX million to operate all the services we do and next to nothing to serve that a single user. In fact we give 99% of our services away for free and only ask for donations of whatever they care to give. Most donors don't actually get anything in return for their money.

Thank you for that, it's good we have smart people working our nonprofits.

On the unrelated topic of subscription cancelation, what do you believe leads your donors to accept "call to cancel" as an ethical option, compared to the apparent overwhelming majority of people who believe it unethical for the reasons stated?