The Economist

"The Economist requires you to call a call center or use a live chat to cancel your subscription. This is a use of friction and social pressure to inconvenience those attempting to cancel."

"Trivial self-service subscription through website Deceptive subscription cancelation process. Appears as a simple button press, followed by a screen asking for confirmation and an option to select a reason from a set of choices. This does not cancel a subscription but presents three options: Contact customer support by phone, contact customer support by live chat, or keep the subscription. The live chat option was a needlessly drawn out series of retention tactics, while requests to confirm cancelation were ignored. A ~1 minute subscription process is countered by a nearly 20 minute chat. The account management page design gives the strong appearance of trying to provide assurance that cancelation is as easy as updating other details. If the process had been disclosed up front its unlikely I’d have subscribed at all."

"The cancellation flow is the worst I’ve seen from a large international company. They require you to click through 3-4 screens that attempt to communicate the “value” of the product (pretty standard). As you progress through the cancellation workflow, the button for continuing with cancellation is deemphasized, while a button that takes you out of the cancellation workflow is featured very prominently. This was frustrating, but unfortunately, is all too common these days. Once you get through this workflow, you reach a page that requires you to call a number or live chat someone between 8am and 6pm EST to complete the cancellation. Because I tried to cancel on a Sunday, I had to go through the process again on a Monday morning. When I got in contact with a customer support rep through the live chat, I expected to be able to cancel with a simple, “I would like to cancel.” In response to this, they took 3 minutes to reply, and then asked if I really wanted to cancel, because I may get value out of other parts of the product. This sort of “value reminder” response happened three times before I was finally able to cancel. In total, I had to have a 10+ minute conversation with the customer support rep before they canceled my subscription."