Six Psychological Tricks Companies Use to Keep You From Canceling Your Subscriptions
18th February 2025
Lifehacker, a Crust-adjacent source of advice.
Canceling memberships has become an everyday thing for a lot of people. We cycle through streaming services, we sign up for trial memberships, we find cheaper, better options for everything from television to gyms and jump whenever it makes financial, emotional, or psychological sense for us to do so. We’re pretty much at a point where the moment you sign up for a service or subscription, the countdown to your inevitable cancellation begins.
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.”
If, of course, that’s what you want to do.