Keith Schacht’s Weblog

The FTC is finally making it easier to cancel.

The US Federal Trade Commission is taking action against subscriptions that are difficult to get rid of. On Wednesday, it adopted a final “click-to-cancel” rule requiring businesses to make canceling a subscription as easy as signing up.

This is bad. It’s another small crack in the glory days of web and mobile startups. I’ve had my share of frustrating subscriptions that are hard to cancel, so I’m sympathetic to this. But anyone who has tried to start a retail business is aware of just how difficult it is to navigate a web of regulations to get your store open. Those regulations don’t come all at once, they’re added one “reasonable” regulation at a time, slowly strangling the startup ecosystem.

And the ecosystem is already well on its way to solving this. I will enable an App Store subscription much more readily than I will others since they’re so easy to cancel and they’re all in one place. Similarly for the Stripe subscription checkout flow. As soon as I see a startup is using Stripe, I’m much more likely to give it a shot.

Pro tip: with Stripe and iOS, I typically subscribe and then immediately go into the subscription flow and cancel it. I know both services will keep my subscription active until the end of the billing period, and now I have no risk of forgetting.