March 23, 2023

Cancelling Your Subscriptions May Finally Get a Lot Easier

From gym memberships to magazines, the FTC is cracking down on schemes that make it difficult to escape.

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We’ve all been there. You sign up for a gym membership or online delivery service. You eventually lose interest or start tightening your budget, so you try to cancel. Yet, despite it only taking two clicks to sign up, the company requires you to call a hotline in order to escape. The result could end up costing you hours of your precious life waiting on hold or arguing with an employee who has been trained to keep their grip on you.

Well, relief could soon be on the way.

On Thursday, the Federal Trade Commission introduced a “click to cancel” policy that would require merchants to allow consumers to cancel their subscriptions in the same way that they signed up. Meaning, if you signed up for a new streaming service online, you should be able to cancel that service on the same website in the same number of steps.

The FTC announced the proposal alongside other new consumer protections designed to prevent unwanted payments. Together, the policies hope to alleviate the thousands of complaints the agency receives each year. 

“Some businesses too often trick consumers into paying for subscriptions they no longer want or didn’t sign up for in the first place,” said FTC chair Lina Khan in a release. “The proposed rule would require that companies make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up for one. The proposal would save consumers time and money, and businesses that continued to use subscription tricks and traps would be subject to stiff penalties.”

The proposal also requires two other stipulations: 

  • It allows businesses to offer other products or services once they’ve canceled, but only with the consumer’s consent. That means no more random pop-ups trying to rope you into other other services when all you want to do is cancel your current one.
  • It also requires merchants to provide an annual reminder of your subscription before they bill you.

The proposals have not been finalized, and you can share your thoughts on them online. Here’s to hoping you can leave your gym membership soon.

This story has been updated. 

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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