And everyone knows that canceling those subscriptions and services can be a challenge, even with new rules in place that are supposed to make it easier. If you’ve ever tried to cancel something and found it very difficult, or even outright failed to get it done, you were probably a victim of “dark patterns” and psychological tricks that companies use to stymie your efforts to dump them. In other words, you got sucked into their “cancellation funnel.”
It’s important to understand that the difficulty is itself a psychological trick: Obstruction. Companies know that many people make these calls when they have limited time or energy, like during their lunch hour at work or at night when they’re tired. Making the cancellation process long and grueling means more people will simply give up halfway through.
Common tricks companies use to keep you subscribed
Half the cancellation battle is being able to recognize the tricks being used against you:
If your goal was just to reduce costs or wring some other perk out of the company, maybe that’s fine! The trick, though, is that the fix is temporary, and they hope that by the time the higher rates kick back in you will have forgotten about canceling, and they can get a few more months of sweet fees out of you before you notice. The best way to handle this is to refuse to give them information to work with—just say “Because I want to” or “No reason” and wait. It short-circuits the retention script if you don’t give them anything to work with.
Cooling-off periods. Companies will often seek to delay the actual cancellation of your account to give you time to “cool off.” This can be done with an offer of a free month, or suggesting a temporary pause in your subscription instead of an outright cancellation. This might seem like a victory, but it’s just designed to give you time to forget the reasons you wanted to cancel in the first place without actually addressing those reasons.
Similarly, many sites will use words like “benefits” instead of “membership” or “account,” because it implies something really good that you’re throwing away instead of a simple cost-benefit decision.
Comparison prevention. If you’ve ever experienced a CSR presenting you with a complex list of options that will supposedly solve your problem without canceling, you’ve experienced "comparison prevention." This is when the company deliberately makes it difficult to figure out the true value of an offer with a lot of unnecessary complexity. This can be done by bundling features and costs in different ways across different packages or subscription levels, making it difficult to perform a one-to-one comparison, and by forcing you to click through to separate web pages to see details, or by simply hiding details in documentation you probably won’t read.
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