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.
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.