Why is subscribing so simple but unsubscribing ALWAYS complicated?

Why are all these menus and buttons so easy to navigate and customer friendly, but nothing in the app you're STILL paying for works the moment you say the words “I’d like to stop giving you my money”?

The last few years have been hard for a lot of Canadians. An annual subscription you were comfortable paying for a year ago you forgot about because life happens auto-renewing and taking up to a few hundred dollars from you can be crushing.

This isn’t good faith business.

This isn’t: “treating people like adults who can manage their own finances”. 

This is PREDATORY unethical behaviour which just happens to still be legal in Canada.

Today, any subscription service (regardless of whether you’ve used it for months or not) can just say:

“It’s not our responsibility to remind you your renewal’s coming up”

or:

“It’s not illegal to have an inconvenient cancellation process.”

Well let’s make it illegal.

Sign this petition if you support the following laws in Canada:

1. Any subscription service that is paid annually through automatic withdrawal from either a bank account or a credit card must send a reminder to the customer via email or text message between 3 and 5 business days prior to the date of renewal.
2. All subscription services that use a mobile app must have a clearly visible, functional cancellation button within the main folder of its settings menu, NOT in any sub-folder (such as account settings, or profile settings etc.).
3. All subscription services are banned from creating any clauses or rules in the user agreement that in any way limit the customer’s ability to cancel at any time.
4. If any of these three rules are determined in a court of law to have been broken, then the customer’s subscription is considered nul and void and are legally entitled to a full refund of any and all subscription fees paid to the service.

Stop these companies from finding ways to legally steal one last payment from you for services you don’t even use anymore.

It’s not fair. It’s not innocent. It’s not acceptable. 

It’s just legal.

But it doesn’t have to be legal in Canada.

Thanks for reading, I hope we can make our politicians listen.