Canceling your tech subscriptions will finally become less painful thanks to new ‘click-to-cancel’ rule

As more and more companies switch their apps and services to subscription models, you might have found it increasingly difficult to cancel your subscription and end the payments. Most of us have struggled with a company that makes it near-impossible to stop the charges, but that could soon become a thing of the past thanks to new consumer-friendly rules that are about to come into effect.

In a press release, the FTC has announced that businesses will have to make it as easy for consumers to end a subscription as it is to sign up for one. The new ‘click-to-cancel’ rule is designed to address complaints about ‘negative option’ billing – that is, subscriptions and recurring payments where you must take action to have them canceled.

Right now, some companies make it as difficult as possible to end a subscription. Instead of allowing you to end it online, for example, they might make you call a phone number where a sales representative will cajole you with offers and other tactics designed to keep you spending. While signing up for a recurring payment can take seconds, canceling one can take hours – or longer.

Once the click-to-cancel rule comes into effect in roughly 180 days’ time, that should all change. The FTC says its new guidelines will prohibit companies from engaging in the following practices:

• Misrepresenting any material fact made while marketing goods or services with a negative option feature
• Failing to clearly and conspicuously disclose material terms prior to obtaining a consumer’s billing information in connection with a negative option feature
• Failing to obtain a consumer’s express informed consent to the negative option feature before charging the consumer
• Failing to provide a simple mechanism to cancel the negative option feature and immediately halt charges.