Easy-to-cancel subscription services?

OK, so you can sign up for just about anything online now. That’s not a new thing, since you’ve been able to do this for many years now. However, isn’t it annoying that whenever you want to cancel a service that you signed up for online, they force you to call a number to talk to someone? Their reasons for this aren’t exactly a big secret; they want to have a chance to talk you out of canceling their service. In fact, most times, they will make you a pretty good offer to stay. Now, that offer will likely be just a temporary offer. But that’s how it works. And this has become so normalized that it’s what you expect when you go to cancel something.

Or so I thought. Recently I had been going through the numerous subscription services I had for my consulting business and put together a list of those I wanted to cancel. This wasn’t because any of them were bad services; in fact, I was happy with what they did. But times change, and now had alternative means of accomplishing the same thing for some of them, and others, I just didn’t use enough to justify the cost. So I had my list, and set some time aside since I expected to be on the phone canceling them.

This is where I got a little surprise; though many of them did require a phone call to cancel, some of them didn’t. My expectations of have-to-call-to-cancel were so entrenched in me, that it was shocking when I could just cancel a couple of them with just some mouse clicks. So rather than writing an article complaining about all the services that required a phone call, I decided to write an article thanking those that made canceling easy.

While it would be nice to put together a comprehensive list of those that make canceling easy, I’m not sure even how I would go about that. But, I do know of three services that did allow easy canceling of my subscriptions. And here they are.

Adobe Creative Cloud.
Transferbigfiles.com
Siteground Web Hosting.

Again, I want to mention that I wasn’t canceling these because of bad service. I had used these for years, and they met my needs during that time. They were just no longer right for my needs. Actually, this site is still hosted on Siteground, I had multiple accounts with them.
So, thank you, Adobe Creative Cloud, Siteground, and Transferbigfiles.com, for making it easy to cancel your services. And for those that force me to call and talk to someone, all you are doing is adding cost by having to pay someone to do what I could have done online for free without any additional human interaction. I’ve never called to cancel a service and been talked out of it.

Another one.

Shortly after posting this article I was going over my personal email program, Fastmail that I have been using for many years and noticed I  was paying for some features I was not using, and that I would be fine with a lower level plan. And to my surprise, they actually made it easy to downgrade my account. This is something I had never encountered before; You can always upgrade your accounts, but downgrading is probably going to take a phone call and may not even be possible. And while I was there, I checked and saw an easy option for cancelling as well. I only needed to downgrade mine, so I didn't cancel.

I suspect this may be a new trend, and one I welcome. Imagine that, companies that actually respect their customers and operate that way.