I worked for a SMB startup years ago that had a “call us” cancellation model, mostly out of a need for several manual steps as part of offboarding and yes, probably some recognition that cancelation friction helped metrics. Eventually the support burden was too great and we built a fully automated no-BS cancellation flow. Our retention metrics immediately tanked to a greater extent than anyone had thought possible and we were forced by the CEO to redesign it with a bunch of interstitials and extra clicks.<p>I feel like this is the dark side of SaaS economics: lots of customers pay for recurring services they don’t use, out of optimism or laziness or something else. Being able to leverage that inertia can be profitable, even if it’s also unethical.
This is why I no longer use my own credit card to sign up for anything if I can avoid doing so. Instead, I use Privacy.com to generate cards for each service, and if a service decides to be a pain in the ass in terms of letting me cancel, I simply shut off its card so I can't be charged.
If they can sell stuff in one click, why would being able to not buy stuff be anything harder?<p>Actually maybe mandating that any buying process must be as hard or harder than cancelation process would be good start.
The fact you can cancel online is a good thing though. Some places have you send an email which is terrible. Honestly a unified API endpoint for all this would be a godsend.
That's nothing. You should see what I used to call the program that would kill all the apache2 prefork processes that I was badly sysadmining as a teen. "kill_apaches". Was I enforcing Manifest Destiny, perhaps? Was I part of the brutal campaign to end one Native American tribe? Or did I just not know that:<p>- killall existed<p>- I can control num processes<p>- this brand new nginx thing is probably decent