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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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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