Subscription Traps: Built to Be Easy to Join, Hard to Leave

Streaming platforms, meal kits, software tools, gym apps — nearly everything is a subscription now, and regulators say a troubling number of these services are engineered with a lopsided design: a single click to sign up, but a maze of phone calls, retention offers, and hidden menus to cancel. This is often called a “negative option” or “subscription trap,” and it has been a top enforcement priority for federal regulators, who have pursued major companies in recent years for making cancellation deliberately harder than enrollment.

The concern isn’t just annoyance — it’s money quietly leaving people’s accounts for services they’ve actively tried, and failed, to stop using. Multiply that friction across millions of subscribers and even a small monthly charge becomes a significant, ongoing transfer of wealth from consumers to companies that are betting people will give up before they cancel. If you’ve ever thought “I’ll deal with this later” about a subscription you can’t seem to kill, you’re exactly the consumer this practice is designed around.

The experienced attorneys at Shub Johns & Holbrook LLP have years of knowledge concerning consumer protections efforts and big business violations. With companies finding new ways to siphon money from its customers, our firm is dedicated to fighting on behalf of aggrieved consumers impacted by deceptive business practices like subscription traps.