All about subscription #5
In October 2024, the US Federal Trade Commission voted to make cancelling a subscription as easy as starting one. In July 2025, a federal appeals court threw the rule out on procedural grounds — days before it was due to take effect. In March 2026, the FTC started over.
Forget the politics for a second and sit with the premise. A government decided it needed a rule to make sure people could stop paying for things they no longer wanted. Not a rule about fraud, but a rule about the exit door.
That is what "subscription fatigue" looks like from orbit. And when people tell me they hate subscriptions — which they do, often, usually right after learning what I do for a living — I've learned to listen to the complaint very carefully. Because it's almost never the complaint they think it is.
Nobody hates subscriptions. People hate paying for a decision they don't remember making.
That's my whole argument. In the last post I said inertia revenue is borrowed, and the interest is resentment. This post is about the interest.
Listen to the complaint
Ask anyone to tell you about the subscription that made them angry. You will hear one of three stories.
I forgot I had it. I couldn't get out. The price went up and nobody asked me.
Now notice what nobody says: I hate that I pay every month for something I love. People don't rage at their electricity bill for arriving monthly. The recurrence was never the crime.
Each of the three stories is something we've already met in this series. "I forgot I had it" is inertia revenue, discovered. "I couldn't get out" is a renewal the customer wasn't allowed to vote on. "The price went up" is a snap election the company called on a weak record. Subscription fatigue isn't a new disease. It's those three, piling up across every company a household pays — until one day the household notices.
How far apart are the noticing and the paying? In a 2022 C+R Research survey, consumers guessed they spent $86 a month on subscriptions. When asked to itemize, their lists added up to $219. That $133 gap is borrowed silence, sitting on one household's statement.
Nobody hates vacations
Here's the analogy I use. Nobody hates vacations. A lot of people hate timeshares.
A timeshare is a recurring commitment to something genuinely nice — a week at the beach, every year. The beach is not the problem. The problem is everything around the beach: the high-pressure sell, the fees that creep, and above all the exit, which is engineered to be somewhere between hard and impossible. A timeshare doesn't keep you because you still want the week. It keeps you because leaving costs more than staying.
Every subscription business eventually faces the same fork. You can be a vacation people keep choosing, or a timeshare people can't escape. Both produce recurring revenue. Only one of them survives the customer finally paying attention.
And here's the tell for which one an industry has become: look for the exit industry. Timeshares spawned a whole business of people paid to get you out. Subscriptions did too. In 2021, Rocket Companies paid $1.275 billion for Truebill — an app famous for finding the subscriptions you forgot and cancelling them for you. When someone can build a billion-dollar company helping customers leave you, you don't have a pricing problem. You have a door problem.
Resentment is contagious
This is the part that should worry the honest operators most.
A forgotten charge, once discovered, doesn't cancel one subscription. It triggers an audit. The customer opens the bank statement and reads every recurring line with fresh suspicion — including yours. One bad actor calls a snap election for the whole category. You can have earned every renewal you ever got and still lose the vote, because somebody else's timeshare made your customer start reading the ballot.
That's why fatigue is real even for companies doing nothing wrong. Resentment doesn't stay with the business that created it. It spreads to everyone billing the same household.
The part I should be honest about
Two things.
First: my first industry died of exactly this. Premium text messaging — the world of WIN and LOVE to our service code — was built on charges that landed on your phone bill. Over the next decade, too many providers in that world learned that a charge nobody noticed was a charge nobody cancelled. "Cramming" became the industry's name in Washington. In November 2013, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint stopped billing premium text charges altogether. The whole channel closed.
The model didn't kill that industry. The exits did.
Second, a concession to the other side. Not all fatigue is borrowed silence. Every subscription is a standing decision, and a household can only hold so many standing decisions before the holding itself becomes the cost. Even a good subscription competes for a slot in a finite attention budget. That's a real ceiling on the model, and it has nothing to do with value. I don't think it changes the argument. But it means "just deliver more value" is not a complete answer — sometimes the honest move is to be one of fewer, better line items.
The exercise
Put your signup flow next to your cancel flow. Count the steps.
If cancelling takes more steps than joining, you aren't running a subscription. You're running a timeshare — and you're collecting interest you will eventually pay back, with resentment, possibly on someone else's behalf.
That's the "bad" seen from the customer's side. The bad from inside the building is quieter, and it wears a nicer outfit. It's called generosity. Next post.