Joining took two clicks and leaving requires a phone call

Signed up for the streaming service in ten seconds. I've been on hold to cancel longer than I ever watched it. — Subscriber, 2024

Web designers have had a name for this since 2010: the roach motel. Easy to get in, near impossible to get out. A federal regulator was using the term by 2020, and its complaints about subscriptions were up to nearly 70 a day by 2024. A federal rule to make canceling as easy as signing up was due to take effect in July 2025. A federal appeals court struck it down six days before. So you're on hold. Don't hang up first.

For now: billed through an app store? Skip the call; the store's Subscriptions page cancels it.

The full file

Amazon's own people had a name for theirs. The FTC's 2023 lawsuit said Amazon called its Prime cancellation process "Iliad," after Homer's poem about a long, miserable war. Canceling meant getting through four pages, six clicks and fifteen options.

It cost them. On September 25, 2025, as the trial got going in Seattle, Amazon agreed to pay $2.5 billion: a $1 billion penalty, reported as the largest in the FTC's history, and $1.5 billion back to customers.

As for the rule, the court never said canceling should be hard. The Eighth Circuit threw it out on procedure. The FTC had figured the rule's yearly cost at under $100 million and skipped an analysis required above that line, and a judge found the cost would run higher. The court called the mistakes "fatal." So it's back to the phone. Bring a sandwich.