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Comment by gthtjtkt | Hacker News Reader

Experienced this recently with Hello Fresh. The 'Cancel Subscription' button was so hard to find that I had to spend 10 minutes Googling it (the placement had changed over time and was always difficult to find, so a lot of the search results were no longer relevant). You had to click a button to reveal the cancellation link, and it was a tiny line of grey text on a beige background.

Then, to make it better, they started calling me every day after I canceled my subscription.

I was going to recommend them to all my friends and family, but instead I did the opposite -- I told everyone to avoid them and only mentioned the negative aspects of their service.

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AOL was notorious for almost being impossible to cancel. I remember when I had Netflix for a while and decided to cancel it was really easy to do so. Although I canceled that alone gave me a positive impression of Netflix.

Netflix has always been classy about that - canceling is genuinely easy, and I believe you can cancel rollover on your free trial as soon as you get it. After you leave, it's like one email and then a followup with another free trial 6-12 months later.

I guess selling an actually-good product with few competitors has its advantages.

Ditto to this. I realized I had an unused Netflix subscription, and not only did they cancel it, the rep apologized, said that happens a lot, and helped me negotiate a full refund with no questions asked. I came back a few months later when the Flash came out, re-subscribed, and have been happy turning it on once in a while to watch shows, then back off again when I'm less interested.

It's been lovely. More companies should do this, because it makes me actively want to support them.

I worked for a company that offered a software product that was paid on a monthly subscription. Since a number of the companies in this industry were seasonal, we made it possible within the software to make their own license inactive. No phone call was necessary, but they could if they wanted. So as long as their license was inactive they wouldn't be charged. If they reactivated their license they would start being charged again. They would also immediately get any updates they missed out on while inactive.

Services should be as easy to cancel as they are to sign up for! Too bad that's the exception rather than the norm.

I consider myself a savvy shopper. I pay attention to every single charge, I read the fine print, I keep spreadsheets for "cancel dates" but even I've been burned before. I apparently signed up for auto renewal with magazines.com. They at least emailed me before renewing but I had to call to cancel that and I was on hold for a while. Wouldn't have signed up if I knew there was that annoyance to deal with.

That was my experience as well. I wanted to cancel because the interface for pausing deliveries was so painful to use that my wife and I often failed or forgot to pause weeks which were too busy to receive a delivery, thus wasting large amounts of money. After cancelling they hounded me with phone calls for weeks. We have since signed up for a competing service (Green Chef), and I have no interest in going back.

The Green Chef cancellation isn't easy either. You have to email them and request a cancellation link.

FWIW, I got terrible food poisoning from one of Green Chef's meals. Always make sure the food is still cold when you receive it, I thought it was "cold enough" but I was wrong.

To cancel Blue Apron, you have to send an email, which then sends you a link to a cancellation page. I can't figure out what purpose that could possibly serve.

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