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Comment by sameermanek | Hacker News Reader

Devil is in the details, they said each company would have to pay for less than 23 hrs to a low level engineer to avoid the $100 mil impact.

How much time do you think an intern would need to render a button on screen that says "cancel" in red mapped to an already implemented function in the code base. Especially with trillions poured into the AI?

This is non sense and horse shit, and these bench full of idiots know it

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These “bench full of idiots” are not blind to the fact that there are deceptive practices regarding subscriptions. FTC didn’t do their job right unfortunately and here we are. Now, new administration and it’s doubtful this will get picked up again barring any law passed by Congress.

It sounds like they did their job fine. 23 hours on average is plenty. Most companies can do this in 2 hours, and a few of them can spend a lot longer.

Sure, 23 hours on average is generous if the goal is honest implementation. But the issue isn’t the time. It is that companies don’t want this button to exist at all. They are not stalling because it's hard; they’re stalling because friction equals profit. That’s why you get weaponized complexity, endless “design reviews” and inflated estimates. The FTC did their job, sort of. They got “cancelled” (hehe) because of a bureaucratic hurdle.

The industry just doesn’t want to play fair.

There’s a non trivial chance this interacts with credit card processing. There is also app the legal liability of you tell someone meet are cancelled and continue charging them. So probably so not something you trust an intern to do.

This is stuff that companies already handle with their current cancellation pipelines. Hooking up a short circuit that flags whatever user in their DB as having cancelled is something that I would absolutely toss a junior engineer at and expect them to finish in three or so working days, maybe slightly longer.

The only way it's more onerous than that is if companies have an absolutely shit design under the hood, or they're using malicious compliance to argue that this feature specifically needs eight weeks of planning poker and at least five senior engineers to sign off on each iteration of the design phase.

Your argument presumes that “cost” is “money spent to implement,” when in reality any reduction in predicted revenue is also a “cost.”

The cost of allowing people to cancel subscriptions is more than the cost to implement a button.

Just testing this should take more than 23 hours for non-trivial code. Ship it and pray it works is not a good plan when if the code doesn't work the government will be coming after you.

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