Why is it still so hard to work out how to cancel subscriptions?

I'm not even sure you need 'tantamount to' in that sentence. I'd maybe describe it as willful corporate theft.

I even think that the permanent "we are experiencing a higher volume of calls than normal" lie should be subject to official investigation, personally, with these massive companies held to account.

At the very least, they should be forced by law to have a message saying "Your call is NOT important to us; we only care about your money - we have the same high volume of unanswered calls as always, because we deliberately don't hire enough staff to offer an acceptable level of customer service".

Your tiny little local companies can manage to have an actual person answering their phone within a few rings, so why do the behemoths pretend that this is beyond them - with their multi-million pound turnovers? Being a massive company should bring greater efficiency and economies of scale; not the exact opposite.

It should be a legal requirement that every commercial email has a large, clear unsubscribe button that when clicked once stops those emails.

In theory, it is, sort of. The law is quite clear within GDPR and PECR as to what is expected of companies when direct marketing and how easy it should be to withdraw, but companies always skirt around the edge of it and the ICO are as useful as a chocolate teapot.

It's tantamount to theft.

It's not just subscriptions. Unsubscribing from emails is a pita with some. It should be a legal requirement that every commercial email has a large, clear unsubscribe button that when clicked once stops those emails. No more clicks, just one click. Done.

It is absolutely deliberate. So is hiding the phone number for a company

It's on purpose.
I cancelled my amazon music a few days ago, I tried for 20 minutes, then had to Google it, then took another 5 minutes.
Got there in the end.

I keep wanting to cancel my Audible but I need to use my credits first and I don't know what I want to buy, so each month goes by and I just keep accumulating more credits.

Ps insane audible is so difficult when kindle unlimited is sooo easy, cancel then pick up again whatever month you want! Same company!

Sky was fun to cancel- phone to cancel- after waiting for ages they’d tell you they had high caller volume and end the call. You had to cancel 30 days before actual cancellation or would be charged again. Only way I could finally get them was to ask on social media (shaming without shaming)

I feel your pain! I did the special offer for my Mum, forgot all about it, then had an email 7 months later to say the full payment had come out of my account 😢.

I tried to cancel it there and then, so that the following payment didn’t go through, but I was just going round in circles. I ended up having to cancel the scheduled PayPal payment, and I just hope I did it correctly 😬.

You can not cancel Audible via the mobile app

You have to go online via laptop to do it

I go to Audible via Amazon to do it

You're right though they make you jump through hoops to find the cancellation part

Go to payments or manage subscriptions that sort of page to do it

I've been burned by this and mostly refuse to do subscriptions any more. I'm not the only one: there is actually research indicating that subscription burn has made people more reluctant to subscribe to things.
https://t.co/pMayoWIskS

The Click to Cancel rule is proposed for the United States. Not sure about the UK. Federal Trade Commission Announces Final “Click-to-Cancel” Rule Making It Easier for Consumers to End Recurring Subscriptions and Memberships | Federal Trade Commission

Do you get the physical magazine? Look at the address sticker, whether there is a sender address and maybe your subscriber / customer number. Otherwise check your bank statements for the company that takes the payment, perhaps one of these options might lead you to find out the company you subscribed with. You can try to search your e-mails/archive for the order confirmation, too.

Otherwise you could try to cast your net wider and look at all options that lead to a GH subscription and contact them one by one to see whether you are their customer 😀

Yes. That should be illegal.

I was able to tell Paypal to stop paying it. I can't remember how.

They actually changed this recently. You sued to only be able to delay it without phoning up.

I’ve taken all my cards off Amazon because of the Amazon music thing. Have Spotify but it always goes to Amazon music then charges you a subscription.

For information: Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act receives Royal Assent - GOV.UK

but as I said the subscription rules aren't coming into force until early 2026 and will only apply to new contracts

Outrageous, isn't it? It's not that far removed ethically from shoplifters lobbying the government hard against more hands-on policing laws in retail, arguing their 'case' that it will make their own 'model' for acquiring goods a lot more difficult.

Apart from anything else, why do the big companies and their hefty profits from their shady business models take precedence over consumers and active consumer choice?

I would wonder if it was because the government gets in loads more tax from the massive companies and so want to keep them sweet - but in reality, most of them have (another) shady 'business model' with clever accountants which means that an ordinary individual in an ordinary job will often pay more tax than their huge enterprise does.

@Brefugee

I'm not sure if it's the UK or EU or USA but one of the three is shortly bringing in a law about this, that unsubscribing from things must be as easy as subscribing.

We definitely need that here in the UK. It needs to be law to be able to unsubscribe in exactly the same way as you subscribe, whether online, email, phone, or in person. It has to be consistent.

Fair enough to have minimum subscription periods, cancellation notice periods, etc., as they're just normal terms of business that people should check before signing up, but the method of unsubscribing/cancelling must be the same method as signing up in the first place.

Yes, it's so obviously baked in to their business plan that you don't just choose to continue paying every month for a product/service, but that a sizeable number of people won't check their bank statements, or won't get around to cancelling, so that they will continue to get money from people who don't want/use the product anymore.

They have deliberately designed it so that they make money from people who don't/no longer want what they sell. An extremely unethical business practice, but a technically legal one.

This is exactly why charities are so desperate to sign people up to monthly direct debits of relatively small amounts and seem to actively not want a one-off significant donation, unless it's a huge amount. You'd think they'd love to receive £100, but they would obviously much rather take a tenner each month, under your radar, for (they hope) years and years and years. They also seem to particularly target elderly and vulnerable people, who they know may not be as internet savvy and may struggle to find out how to cancel it, once they've 'so helpfully' set it up 'for them'.

Yes. When the new act was going through parliament there was a lot of whining from various companies saying it was their business model.

Ah yes, you make money out of stopping people cancelling services that they no longer need.

It's a feature not a bug

You might be able to make it as spam so you don't see it anymore.

Yes did you sign up via a direct debit? You can just cancel, if so.

And even if it's via your card, if you speak to your bank they might be able to do something. My mum had it with an old subscription that she thought she had cancelled (and a year later, when it came out again, I tried doing it for her as well) and she went into the bank and they stopped it for her. It helps if you have a branch with helpful staff though.