NYC's "Click to Cancel" rule is now in effect
nyc.govThis will have no impact on Adobe's shenanigans. They offer click-to-cancel, but then charge a cancellation fee equal to what you would have paid for the rest of the one-year term. Their clever justification is that you received a significant discount for committing to a year, so you still owe them for the remaining months if you cancel early. I didn't even realize I had signed up for a one-year commitment. I'm not sure where they buried that clause.
I expect more businesses will transition to this strategy to counter NYC's new rule. They won't necessarily lower the price, but you will have to sign up for a one-year term, then they will hit you with a massive cancellation fee if you "click to cancel".
Worth keeping an eye on ArtCraft (https://getartcraft.com/apps).
They're building a free, open-source Adobe Creative Suite alternative entirely in Rust. It runs super fast with minimal overhead, works completely offline, and aims for near 1:1 feature parity with Adobe products like Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and After Effects. It also supports command-based actions, making it easy to integrate into AI agents and automated workflows. They have Microsoft Office alternatives too.
Their Photoshop clone, PhotoCraft (https://github.com/storytold/photocraft), has around 47k GitHub stars right now.
How does this compare to Affinity Products? (I know I can ask "AI" but I'm asking you, though no pressure to respond).
Canva now owns Affinity. So regardless of the answer to that question, more options are nice. I have 0 faith that Canva will be good stewards of Affinitys original mission, despite making all of the Affinity products free (for now)
Why wouldn't they point their LLM tools at forks of gimp and inkscape (for raster and vector work), which already have many of the necessary features?
Those projects come with existing culture and ways of working which isn't compatible with how to do things with AI.
Forks don’t.
LLMs have already ingested that code as training data.
Btw its likely still possible to change subscription with Adobe to different one and then cancel it free of charge due to new 14-days window. Not sure if it works right now, but worked like charm before.
That falls under deceptive advertising.
> you received a significant discount for committing to a year, so you still owe them for the remaining months if you cancel early. I didn't even realize I had signed up for a one-year commitment
Does this law apply retroactively?
You wouldn't have a claim under the "straightforward cancellation process" part–same way this law doesn't enable one to walk away from a long-term lease for shits and giggles. But you may under the "clearly explain subscription terms to you" bit.
If you buy an annual subscription of course you have to pay for the whole year. They offer a monthly subscription for people who don't want to lock in for such a long time.
If you actually ask them and push a little they’ll forgo that fee. Disclaimer: Adobe is the worst and can’t wait to see them crumble. If Intuit could also go…
I found FreeTaxUsa and Claude to be a wonderful combination this year
Second this. FreeTaxUSA is great. Better interface, lower cost (truly free for federal, no catch). And coding harnesses are very good at handling taxes as well as a cross-check.
> discount for committing to a year
It's worse than that. They don't even offer a monthly subscription contract - it's purely annual, but they advertise and promote monthly with fine print.
Yes they do, but they hide it. On the plans page,[0] if you click "see all plans", a true monthly subscription option appears. But the prices are unreasonably large to force you into the "annual, billed monthly" trick. For example, the full creative suite (Creative Cloud Pro) is $35 "a month" with the annual contract, or... $105 on a monthly contract!
Looks like this may be a recent change after they were ordered to pay $150M for deceptive practices.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/894555/adobe-75-million-doj-se...
They always had it, I'm checking my email receipts from 2011~2013
They've always billed monthly, but the thing they got in trouble for was that it was attached to a 1-year commit where customers were getting hit with early termination fees pro-rated to the rest of the contract. If they did offer this it was hidden deep in the sign-up flow enough that they lost a lawsuit over it.
I'm looking at adobe.com in the wayback machine for 2015 and while the CSS is missing, the <select> dropdown right on the /plans page include:
* Annual plan, paid monthly
* Annual plan, prepaid
* Monthly plan
And this is how I remember it back when, I signed up for a short gig where I only needed it for 3 months and went for the monthly plan, and then when the gig became a contract I switched to the annual paid monthly.
I think what changed is now the plans page says upfront "early termination fees apply" right next to the price.
They have always had a monthly subscription.
I hate to defend Adobe but it literally says "Annually, paid monthly" right under the price.
They should for sure list the annual price and the monthly price but it's not "burried".
So it's not really a cancellation fee, but is that how they message it?
If I see: "Annual Subscription - $120/year, billed $10/month" I assume I'm paying $120 even if I cancel after 6 months.
But, if I cancel after 6 months, and the message to me is "$60 cancellation fee", I'm very confused - I thought I was paying the remaining $60 I owe them...? The amount may be the same but it's confusing nonetheless.
Wait, so you'll pay the $60, and then, will you lose access?
Any time I've had a similar subscription, you retain access for the full period.
The messaging has usually been something like: "Annual subscription cancelled at the end of current period. Access ends on 12/31/2026" (even if today is 6/1/2026)
That's why the "cancellation fee" comment is weird to me - there's no need to message that way, since "pay the rest of the committed period" seems to be a common (and at least to me, very understandable) way to handle this.
Even with monthly services, I don't think I've ever had an immediate loss of access - it's there until the end of the billing cycle. As it should be, IMO. The only exception would be if I force-deleted my account as well as that's a very explicit "I'm done-done" signal to the service provider.
Probably? There are services that are relatively nice and will let you use your membership until the last day (even for trials!), but there's also others that are non-refundable and will just yank your access.
Hm so you're saying all the SaaS runners should put "Lifetime, paid monthly" in small print under their price? Bam, goodbye churn.
The cancellation fee is usually the part that's buried.
Maybe years ago, but today it very plainly says:
>Fee applies of half your remaining annual commitment if you cancel after Nov 01
and for the prepaid option
>No refund if you cancel after Nov 01
https://www.adobe.com/#mini-plans-web-cta-creative-cloud-car...
> They should for sure list the annual price and the monthly price but it's not "burried".
Buried prices are the next frontier of consumer protection. I've gotten burned by looking up a store product online and then when attempting to purchase finding that unless you ordered it through the site for in-store pickup, you get a higher price. Car dealerships were the same the last time I bought one. And while I appreciate Tesla's challenge in expressing TCO, subtracting average fuel costs from the price of a car smells bad in the same way.
Seems intentionally manipulative.
With LLMs in the picture there’s no excuse for signing a contract without reading it because it was too long or hard to understand. Adobe makes its terms pretty clear. You are entering a one year commitment.
It seems like a good rule, and I am eager to see what NYC’s enforcement is going to look like. I have historically been disappointed (as a life-long resident) by the discontinuity between the city’s eagerness to legislate and its recalcitrance around enforcement, particularly when public interest in any given topic fades.
(Compare the city’s historic problems around preventing illegal de-stabilization of rental units, inability to prevent the NYPD from parking on sidewalks, and so forth.)
NYPD parking on sidewalks is more of a "who watches the watchmen" problem unfortunately.
It doesn't have to be! Parking enforcement wasn't always within the NYPD's remit. Until 1996, NYCDOT was responsible for parking enforcement.
Sadly, even if this were the case, there is no mechanism for one NYC city agency to fine another one.
This is why the sidewalks next to city parks take forever to get shoveled after a big snow storm.
I would settle for a bit of towing, or even just fining the individual cops who park their personal cars on the sidewalk. Parking of city-owned vehicles is also a problem, but the former seems easier to enforce per your point.
Not to mention completely opaque tinted windshields and windows, and intentionally defaced or corroded license plates..
Corruption is part of the job description, for the NYPD.
> the discontinuity between the city’s eagerness to legislate and its recalcitrance around enforcement
For consumer-corporate disputes, learning to leverage New York's regulatory state is a bit of a superpower. Basically, sending in a written complaint with the regulator copied and then having them open a regulatory-investigatory file is real leverage because even if you're full of shit, it's going to burn legal dollars on the other side. That, in turn, makes a letter to the company threatening regulatory escalation as the next step land seriously.
Not a NYC-only problem though. There are tons of federal, state, and local laws that go under-enforced or unenforced. Legislators love the performance art of writing these kinds of popular laws, but law enforcement often doesn't care enough to enforce most of them. In this case, the website says the penalty is "starting at $525" which is basically nothing to a corporation, and nothing to the police/government. So you can file a complaint but it will probably go to /dev/null. After a year of this people will give up on even filing complaints.
What needs to happen for rules like this is: 1. the complaint should be easy/automatic to validate and rule on, 2. hard for the company to appeal and stonewall, and 3. the fine money should go to the person who filed the complaint as a bounty to motivate people to look for violators.
Naturally. I mean only that NYC is an instance of this.
(It's worth noting that the city does sometimes enforce new regulations well, and in a way that the public is aware of. For example, businesses in the city are required to accept hard cash as payment, and the penalties for not doing so can be significant. Friends have told me that the city is very proactive about responding to those complaints. Anecdotally, the city has also become much better about responding to some forms of illegal parking and idling over the past few years. It certainly helps when the incentives are aligned, i.e. the cost of the enforcement program is supported by the fines collected.)
525 bucks per cancellation sounds like a lot to me tbh
I've also been disappointed by the lack of enforcement, and it's not necessarily for violations with little harm.
Failing to provide salary transparency in job postings is another common one with zero enforcement.
It's not clear why enforcement would be needed necessarily.
Assuming that you pay with a credit card, I would assume you could dispute the charge on the basis that they're violating the law and win any faceoff immediately on that basis.
If the business simply doesn't offer click-to-cancel, so you haven't actually canceled your subscription, how could you successfully claim the payment was made fraudulently? The law doesn't mandate that you can unilaterally exit any agreement, it mandates that businesses have to offer an easy way for you to do so.
The example of a yearly subscription paid monthly should make this obvious. You can't exit this arrangement after 6 months and expect to simply not pay the remaining 6 months, as the contract was for a whole year. All this law does is force the business to make it easy for you to cancel any auto-renew for a second year. But if the business doesn't do that and you dispute a payment, how hard do you expect your bank to work to figure out if this payment was for a part of the original contract, or for an auto-renewal you should have been able to easily canceled, but haven't?
Surely we agree that paying with cash or a debit card should entitle you to equal treatment under the city's rules and laws.
Look out for the "Digital Fairness Act", which will be tabled by the European Commission in November. It is expected to include the same "Click to Cancel" principle continent-wide.
Source: I'm an EU digital policy analyst in Brussels.
In the US, tabled means something is not going forward. Am I correct that it means the opposite there?
Yes tabled means the opposite on either side of the Atlantic. Has caused me a lot of confusion over the years. Personally as a Brit I just can’t see the logic in the US meaning
Table the motion. (discuss); Table the discussion. (postpone)
Continue the story. (keep reading); Continue the trial. (suspend)
Drop the album. (release); Drop the charges. (abandon)
Sanction an event. (approve); Sanction a country. (penalize)
Cleave to principles. (stick); Cleave wood. (split)
Clip keys to belt. (attach); Clip the hedges. (cut off)
Dust shelves. (remove); Dust pastries with sugar. (add)
Hold fast. (fixed in place); Walk fast. (moving quickly)
Make oversight. (omission); Provide oversight. (scrutiny)
Peruse the ancient manuscript. (read in detail); Peruse the magazine. (look through casually)
The alarm went off. (activated); Turn the alarm off. (deactivated)
Mostly correct but peruse only means read in detail. Any other intended meaning is mistaken.
Funny, I noted that one but in the opposite direction. In North America I've never heard it used in anything but a casual sense. An unserious activity.
Both Merriam-Webster and Cambridge dictionaries disagree.
Head to either side of the street. (one or the other); Plant trees on either side of the street. (both)
It's yet to be found. (not found); Yet it's found. (found)
They're all but forgotten. (nearly); They're known but to God. (only)
As an American, I can't see the logic in having the relationship between a proposal (which is an idea that may be embodied in documentation) and a table (which is a thing that we rest our beer upon) as having any importance at all -- regardless of which way it goes.
It seems like plain speech could be used, but this profoundly-irrational jargon was selected instead.
I think in the UK sense 'tabled' is borne out of a pretty literal meaning - based on the proposal literally being brought to the table where the committee are meeting to assess (and potentially vote) on its viability.
Yeah, perhaps. But the table also has all kinds of other things on and around it. Random papers of varying importance, microphones, Representative Smith's porn phone with the privacy filter, and maybe a ham sandwich.
A table (if there even is one present at all) seems like about the least important part of a group discussion of an idea.
The US sense came about from the sense of "I'm setting this on the table while we discuss other things". The meaning then evolved a bit of sarcasm with "while we do other things", starting to mean "forever". I do agree that the UK meaning makes more sense though.
I guess US `tabled` means put in a writing table drawer, hidden and soon to forgotten.
This looks really great, thank you for your work! However, "Entry into force" really is expected only around 2030? I'm not even sure most people will be consuming the internet using a browser then. It's sad to see that a process like this, which is very much needed, starts at 2020 and ends 10 years later. Clearly not your fault, but I'm just a little shocked.
According to https://digitalfairnessact.com/what-is-the-digital-fairness-... fucking cookie banners will be a lot better. OMG
Damn this looks too good to be real, where's the provision to make any kind of encryption illegal ?
It looks good reading it like this but I am always scared about the unintended effects. Like the ... cookie banners. Dynamic pricing absolutely has to go this is so unethical
I made that website!
I looked at the page you linked and could not see any reference to cookie banners.
Where does that page mention anything about cookie banners? I couldnt find it
Probably this bit:
> “Dark patterns” (also called deceptive or manipulative design) are interface choices that steer users towards decisions they would not otherwise make, for example:
> Making the “accept all” option bright and prominent, but hiding “reject” or “manage settings”
Not a direct reference, but it's clear exactly what it's getting at.
Wouldn't call it a big win though. If it's not established as a browser level setting instead of some shitty per-website banner that expires every 3 weeks as the site adjusts its ad serving system once again? We're still in cookie law hell.
> Making the “accept all” option bright and prominent, but hiding “reject” or “manage settings”
Isn't this already illegal? By law the websites are required to make full opt out single click. They just don't care.
Yes.
Honestly all these kinds of laws should take an example out of EU261 (the flight compensation regulation) book. Set statutory damages and allow private right of action. Air carriers certainly have started to follow law much harder than many other industries after people realized they could fairly easily get compensation when carriers didn't fulfill their obligations.
Interessatingly according to https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/digitale-welt/onli...
games will be regulated and cant be easily shut down. Lets see what "Stop killing games" will say.
edit: According above website had too optimistic interpretation. Anyway it looks like Stop Killing Game transforms into pro-consumer video games association. And thats overdue and yet very interesting and missing.
Its incredible how much changes Mandani is doing to benefit the citizens. I start to wonder what the prior mayors was even doing.
The right is making him out to be the literal anti-Christ. Which is a strong signal that he will actually be effective at making positive change.
> start to wonder what the prior mayors was even doing
The last productive mayor New York had was Bloomberg. Then we had a leftist idiot (who did, granted, pass universal pre-K). Then we had a reactionary centrist muppet (who did, granted, pass some decent pro-development policies). So over a decade of bad executives coming to power with one or two good ideas that they implemented in their first year and then became pests.
Why stop at mayors? How about legislators... city, state, and federal, hell, what about governors and presidents?
Several states have click to cancel laws including New York state.
Mamdani simply has better PR.
Cuomo is a morally-bankrupt man. But he was an effective governor in many respects.
No, he was clearly always a corporate shill his entire time as governor. He tried to get NYC to pay for half the subway without giving us increased power of how it's run [1].
Then he lied about the COVID numbers so he could write a shitty book about how great of a governor he was around that time. That seems decidedly ineffective to me, unless the goal was to kill people I guess. He sucked, we're good to be rid of him.
He sucked. He probably still does.
[1] If the city actually ran the MTA I suspect it would be competent.
He kept the budget on time, played an equal role in getting the 2nd Avenue subway opened and presided over economic growth. He fumbled with COVID and was being a rapist in the background, which is unforgivable, but it’s not unreasonable to say he had positive impacts, even if I’m not sure whether he was net positive.
> the city actually ran the MTA I suspect it would be competent
I’m cautiously doubtful. We lost control for a reason. And the current MTA is pretty well run, especially if you include commuter rail in the mix.
It was still under his role that the MTA became the strange slush fund that it is today.
I guess I don't concede that he did anything competently, or at least more competently than any other politician would be.
> that the MTA became the strange slush fund that it is today
Do you have a source or dataset that shows this delineation? (Not challenging you, genuinely curious.)
paywalled: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
Non-paywalled: https://web.archive.org/web/20180103141201/https://www.nytim...
> The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.
> “Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.”
To be fair, a lot of the bullshit slush-fundiness of the MTA predates Cuomo. Still, this article was 2017, six years after his tenure started and since the MTA is the states responsibility, it was his responsibility.
ETA:
That particular anecdote appears to be from 2010, so admittedly before Cuomo took power. I still think it's fair to blame him for the subway not significantly improving in the nearly ten years he was in office.
> this article was 2017, six years after his tenure started
I will totally agree with you that Cuomo—nor Hochul—did anything around improving the MTA’s fiscal efficiency. I’m just not convinced he even accelerates that.
Sure, I'm not sure he made it "worse", just think it's fine to blame him for making no significant effort (as far as I can tell) to fix it in the ten years he was in office.
But that's kind of what I'm getting at; I don't concede that he was effective.
It might seem this way because he is showing off his wins on different channels. In terms of passing policy its not different than other mayors. Maybe you think the policy is good and the other mayors policy was bad and thats the gap.
I'm old enough to remember that everyone said the same thing about Giuliani when he was mayor. Now everyone hates him
Did he put up though? Do you have multiple examples of pro-consumer wins he had early in his tenure?
This was actually started federally under Biden, but thrown out as soon as Trump came in
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/10/...
So many other similar examples, like Bank Overdraft Fee Caps, Credit card late fees, personal data safeguards, and so much more.
It’s incredible how much virtue signaling this is. He has no power to enforce it - I’d just ignore him anyway, nothing he can do about it.
Yeah, much better just to sit around and do nothing. Wouldn’t want randos on the internet to accuse you of virtue signaling.
Fines to the non-compliant businesses and forcing them to refund are two major ways he will enforce this.
I thought Yandex was taken out
did it make you _feel good_ though?
California has had this for a while, and it's a pretty good feature. Until then it was a nightmare to unsubscribe from newspapers like the WSJ or the NYT. Now (well, for a few years now) it's trivial. Hopefully this will be federally available in the next few years.
> A person making an automatic renewal or continuous service offer to a consumer must provide the consumer with the option to cancel at any time using a simple cancellation mechanism that is as easy to use as the mechanism that the consumer used to provide consent and that is through the same medium that the consumer used to provide consent
So if a startup lets someone sign up using Stripe, for example, does this mean that they need to have a way to unsubscribe that is as easy as Stripe? Lots of companies have a way to unsubscribe electronically, but it requires logging in to your account, going into settings, saying you want to unsub, and possibly declining various offers to stay.
Surely at some point a company could cross the line of "a simple cancellation mechanism that is as easy to use as the mechanism the consumer used to provide consent". But where is the line exactly? Surely you don't have to have a big red cancel button on every page of your platform, but at the same time surely it can't be hidden 8 levels down in the settings.
Some examples would be helpful to let businesses and consumers know what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.
There's a funny thing when people don't like something where they can intentionally misunderstand it or impart artificial complexity onto it painting a picture like the rule is hard to comply with. I suppose to variation of a straw man argument. I honestly don't think this is one is hard to understand at all. If you can sign up through the web you should be able to cancel through the web. If you can sign up through the phone you should be able to cancel through the phone. Companies knowingly an intentionally make it harder to cancel than to sign up for obvious reasons that have nothing to do with doing right by the consumer. This is a very good law and it should be adopted everywhere.
And if you didn't have to click through a bunch of offers to subscribe, you shouldn't have to to cancel.
so in order to unsubscribe from go daddy, you must also opt out of the 9.99/mo virus scanning?
This is actually a hilarious point. Some companies might end up making the sign up process more complicated in order to make clear that their cancellation process is equally "simple"/"easy". I guess godaddy is ahead of the curve on this one.
The HN guidelines ask us to "assume good faith", and I try to do so here. Comments like yours take a good faith question like mine and treat it as if it's being asked by someone who is "intentionally misunderstand[ing]" it.
You say:
> I honestly don't think this is one is hard to understand at all. If you can sign up through the web you should be able to cancel through the web.
If that's all they were trying to do, they would just say that it has to be the same medium. But they don't stop there. They say you have to have a "simple cancellation mechanism" and it has to be "as easy to use as the mechanism that the consumer used to provide consent". Then they layer on the same-medium requirement that you think is the only actual requirement.
I've read a lot of rules, laws and regulations in my day (lawyer), so I know that when there are 3 distinct requirements, then you can't just meet one of them and think you're in compliance.
So what language would you use to require parity between making and breaking the consumer relationship? You can always construct situations where a rule is genuinely ambiguous, construct situations where the counter-party is held to an unreasonable standard, or the company is risk-averse and overreacts, or they hate it so much they engage in malicious compliance, etc. Many error-modes. But that is true for every law, which is why you have case law, and why laws get revised. This happens with every law, because they are ALL ultimately ambiguous, and they can ALL be used by malefactors, and they must change in application over time with society, technology and all the rest.
What bothers me most is that these companies are actively deviating from the ordinary, obvious, symmetrical path in order to fleece customers. So to comply with the law is really to stop going out of their way to commit petty, pervasive, stochastic fraud against their customers. That is, it doesn't require positive action so much as negative action. Which makes it even less objectionable.
The other day I went to cancel Comcast. And you know what? I first logged into my acount. From there I could literally do everything instantly - sign up, add services, upgrade, everything - but I couldn't cancel. There was no button, no link, no wording. I had to Google it. And it was a phone number hidden on their website that was business hours only. And I called it and spent ~10 minutes cancelling my service. Comcast had to ideate, design, implement, staff, build organization around this behavior. Its transparently wrong, it's too common, and it's a practice that should be stopped.
I think the most helpful thing is not to add language to the regulation, but to add 4-6 examples that illustrate what is considered to be ok or not ok.
The lack of examples/specificity makes it easier for the government to capriciously enforce this law against companies they disfavor. I'm surprised that on a startup-friendly forum, most of the comments are from folks who are worried about malicious companies, not malicious enforcement.
I totally hear you on Comcast. I've filed FCC complaints against them several times. But these rules apply equally to very small companies, who may not have the resources to make sure that they're in compliance with the spirit and letter of every rule in 50 states and 100 countries.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair
Maybe those people who’ve spent so much time A/B testing where to put the signup buttons can use those skills to figure out where to put the cancel buttons so that they are as easy to find.
Worse. We are going to see signup flows that are initially simple but take the user through several steps to do it but not in a way to make them abandon the process.
I think the point of the law is - the same medium. If you signed up online, you should be able to cancel subscription also online.
I wish it were that simple. The language I quoted gives two additional requirements, however, and no examples for what does/doesn't meet them.
Heres what you should do to be safe. On the user's settings/profile/whatever user page you have, add a cancel button. When the user clicks it say "are you sure? Yes/no". If the user clicks yes, cancel the account.
No extra hoops at all.
I've seen people count clicks and complain that is not as easy as signup.
To signup they just went to foo.com and there was list of plans with links to their sign up pages right there, so click one of those, fill out the one page form, click submit.
To cancel, they have to go to foo.com, click the login link, full in the login form, click to submit, then on their home page click on the profile icon to get the profile menu, click account in that menu, and then click the cancel button on the account page.
That's 2 clicks to sign up and 5 to cancel--6 if the cancel button asks if you are sure.
This is exactly my point. It's never going to be as easy to cancel as to sign up because signing up just requires entering cc details. Canceling requires authentication to an account to ensure that the one being canceled belongs to you, and of course finding the settings and the place where the subscription is modified. That's always going to be more clicks than landing on startup.com's website, clicking sign up now, and entering your cc details.
To sign up: click sign up, enter a email and password to create an account, probably verify your email, enter your payment.
To cancel: enter your email and password, cancel.
What am I missing?
> ...and possibly declining various offers to stay
Unless there were several efforts to get you to think twice before subscribing, clearly trying to get you to think twice before unsubscribing is not as easy to use.
I suspect that something as simple as 2-3 emails prior to renewal, each with a one-click (no auth needed) clear, unobscured "unsubscribe" button would be sufficient.
Where does it say they have to send even 1 email prior to renewal, let alone 2-3? That would be spam in my book. I'm pretty sure companies like Netflix don't do that, and I'm sure Cursor doesn't. That doesn't mean the requirement doesn't exist or isn't added by this law...but it would fundamentally change things.
next we need to end captive portals. Don't tell me there's an invoice, fucking send it to me!
"There's a new [some thing] that needs your attention" where the only email content is a log-in button needs to genuinely die.
Right? I understand maybe there are concerns about security, but at least let me opt in. Email delivery != email notification. I should be able to receive, digitally or not, mail from you, to my inbox!!!
I don’t think anyone will have trouble figuring out a good way to comply with this. It’s not clear exactly where the line is, so just don’t go near it. Make it easy to cancel, job done. If a company wants to push the boundaries by making it as difficult to cancel as the rule allows, they’re running the risk of being on the wrong side of the line and suffering the consequences, and that’s their choice.
The only reason any company would have trouble complying with this rule is if they want to abuse customers to keep them from canceling when they want to cancel. The amount of sympathy I have towards such companies requires advanced scientific notation to quantify.
But where is the line exactly?
This is what courts are for. There is no exact line because many situations are different.
Surely you don't have to have a big red cancel button on every page of your platform
Why not?
Some examples would be helpful
The text you quoted is clear enough to me, and it's probably clear to any reasonable person (most rules are written this way). If you're worried about gaming the system to find the exact process that just on the "legal" side of things, you probably aren't reasonable.
The last thing I'd want is to have to end up in court in NY to figure out what is or is not in compliance with this law. They should include examples, like many regulations do. We don't need more lawsuits for laws that could have been clarified in the first place.
Put a nice simple cancel button easily visible in your account settings and you’ll be fine. Don’t overcomplicate it.
Ya, a reasonable interpretation would likely mean that where you sign in and manage your accounts and payments you have the means to discontinue further service. Anyone trying to push these boundaries will likley find themselves on the wrong side of the law.
well we have done it before, cookie banners. Notwithstanding that a users software running on their system (ostensibly a web client), chooses to store cookies, which are not in fact edible... now we have to suffer through it.
> This is what courts are for. There is no exact line because many situations are different.
So now you’ve opened a bunch of businesses up to liability from an upset customer who files a complaint, even if they are making a good faith effort to follow this law.
That is why clear and specific details should be in the law, not vague hand wavy things that require lawyers and judges to interpret.
Making it more specific only invites malicious compliance. If businesses TRULY make a good faith effort, they’ve got nothing to worry about.
What does malicious compliance mean to you? I've heard it used, but never in a way that makes sense in this context. If they had examples, it would be clearer what the intent was, and businesses would be able to be held the appropriate standard. As it stands, I can't figure out if many of the businesses I deal with are in compliance, and anyone who claims to know is naive, or simply hasn't read the rule closely.
In my country the rule is "unsubscribe the same way you subscribed". So no bullshit with having to write a literal physical letter through the mail (yes really this happened) or having to call a callcenter in India and having to explain why you want to your stop subscription.
While I think this is a good idea, we already have so many different regions to comply with, now we're adding cities....
To avoid the overhead, we could simply adopt pro-consumer practices across the board? Easier than segmenting users and deciding which cancellation mechanisms are available to them based on region.
When folks subscribe, we make it a point to highlight the fact that the app would always have a big red button they could tap at will to either get a full refund (within 30 days) or stop the subscription payments (if after).
Not sure if it was the only cause, but in a month since then, conversion rates 2x'd (~100/mo to ~250/mo), while % of cancel/refund requests have stayed the same.
Pro-consumer practices are not inherently compliant practices
In this case it very much is. If you have an online sign up but a by mail or phone cancellation process, you went through extra work purely to fuck over the consumer. Complying with this law is just not going the extra effort to scam people.
Nothing from stopping them from making it this easy to cancel for everyone. We all see cookie banners due to the EU's rules.
EU is pushing browser settings instead of cookie banners. Maybe after 10+ years of trial and error consumers will actually get something viable.
Then again, the lobbying and resistance from Chrome must be unreal because it would be pretty huge blow for them to enable such setting.
Commission still wants to keep it for media companies and Council wants to keep it for everyone. Parliament's final stance is still unclear.
Alternatively, let people cancel easily everywhere. If you think it’s worth the extra revenue to geofence easy cancellations, then—well, you do you, but you are making a business judgment that the additional development cost is justified. This is different from VAT/sales tax etc., where it is in fact impossible to comply everywhere without discriminating by jurisdiction.
Worse by following NYC laws and putting everyone else in a different harder to get away from bucket you may be setting yourself up for future legal problems. You now have a chain of documentation on your evil practices rather than them just being a norm you may have verbally agreed on before.
As far as added complexity goes, a rule for a city the size of NYC doesn’t seem like that far of a bridge to cross.
Indeed. NYC's population is greater than that of a bunch of whole countries, like Denmark, Singapore, or New Zealand (to name just several).
It's a really big chunk.
You managed to find something to complain about this story?
It’s an easy rule to comply with and nothing stops you from complying with it everywhere.
We will see a patchwork regime, where companies make it easy to cancel if you’re in NYC or another jurisdiction with similar rules, but difficult otherwise. When you see this, you must remember that the easiest thing would have been to make it easy for everyone to cancel regardless of location. That would be perfectly legal and it would be the cheapest option to build. If a company didn’t do that it’s because they made a deliberate choice to spend more money just so they could continue screwing some people over.
its hard being a dick
> While I think this is a good idea, we already have so many different regions to comply with, now we're adding cities....
Lina Khan's FTC passed a rule to make click-to-cancel nationwide in 2024.
It was killed on procedural grounds by the highly conservative Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The take-away from how it was killed boils down to "we (companies) know that we'd lose more than $100 million dollars if people could reasonably unsubscribe rather than deal with our dark patterns".
The old FTC would have been able to fix the procedural problem, but then Trump took office and gutted the FTC and destroyed all the good work it was doing.
Since the federal government is failing us, I support local governments doing the right thing. If enough do, companies will eventually be forced into compliance nationally because it won't be worth the complexity to have hundreds of regional carve-outs.
You can't seriously think this makes you sound like a sympathetic party, right? "Oh no, we have to maintain two codepaths now: the pro-social one for places with functional governments, and the slimy anti-consumer fuck-you one for everywhere else. Won't anyone think of our plight?"
just remember, any amount of churn rate reduction your dark patterns earn you will be paid for many times over in the afterlife
cvs.com doesn't allow me to delete my account unless I provide an address in certain states.
So I provided a fake address in California, and it was done.
Unfortunately that's how things work these days sometimes.
NYTimes still doesn’t have a single click to cancel! Gotten better now. Hope they learn.
I spent hours trying to cancel some services with legalzoom last month, they clearly go through every shady tactics in the book to prevent you from cancelling, these companies are horrendous and this needs to be enacted as a national law
Does this apply to all New York Times customers since they are in New York? They are a horrible offender when it comes to canceling.
New York Times in shambles over this one
Nine states (incl. CA) already require click to cancel. This is largely a non-event
But now, as a New Yorker, I can complain. And we love to complain.
Why not the State of NY instead of just the city?
IL has had click-to-cancel since 2022. (Actually 2000, but updated in 2022, with continuous amendments being put forward all the time.)
The rule is mostly, although not entirely, a restatement of existing New York State law requiring cancellation to be easy (https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/GBS/527-A).
I like this rule. I feel like most of the apps I use are relatively easy to unsubscribe from, but it seems like it should be a requirement.
This is a very bad thing and very, very scary. Very anti-capitalist. My KPIs that go into my annual review are going to be thrashed, and without the raise I was expecting, I am unlikely to be able to continue to afford my second family. This is literally going to take food out of their mouths. I do not deserve this.
You can only submit my snail mail or Fax.
So close yet so far
There's a big blue button on the homepage that says "File a complaint" - I presume that goes through the web.
I think it's obnoxious that you can't send a cancellation request through your credit card company's website.
Just find the charge, click the "I want to cancel the service that caused this charge". The merchant has to either cancel or reply with a message clearly explaining why they can't do that (i.e. you agreed to a 12-month minimum).
Whoever is collecting the money has all the information needed to make the cancellation request. No website logins, passwords, self-addressed stamped envelope, etc.
Apple has done this for subscriptions that collect money through the iTunes store. It's awesome.
AmEx should do this because unlike all the other cards they control the whole stack.
Wait but you can right? I've definitely stop paying services in the past like that. They usually send you to collection, and then one day they just stop sending you mail.
Previous discussion on the announcement:
New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices
What? A city can have jurisdiction over these things?
I guess this is Mamdami's claim to the similar of "but at least Hitler liked dogs!"
For anyone worried about complying with a different rule in every jurisdiction: the practical answer for a small SaaS is to build once to the strictest version and stop thinking about it. Cancel from the same account page where people pay, in no more steps than signing up took, no retention offer they have to click past, and a confirmation email that states the end date. Most billing providers' hosted customer portals already do this out of the box, so it's usually less work than the dark-pattern flow it replaces. The cases that get hard are the ones where signup was online but cancellation was deliberately routed to phone or chat.
What's the justification for the phone or chat cancellation anyway? I get why they do it to make more money but it seems like it would be kind of nakedly extractive to explain the policy to anyone.
I don't think they really try to hide the fact that they do it because it reduces attrition, they just act like that isn't wildly immoral.
When are NY and California going to secede and join the EU?
I imagine both states would end up with single-payer healthcare pretty quickly, and both already have GDP greater than all but 3 EU countries... what exactly would the EU bring to the table?
Additionally, French fries are already abundant in CA and NY
One abstract idea is to convert every digital event into a hook. The hook then goes into a local LLM that has a rule to figure out what to do with it. I use DDG or mozilla email aliases as much as I can. All my emails go to a local email client and for the non-spam classified mails I have a few rules(**) I am toying with right now:
1. If non-money sub, categorize its content and create a P1 watch event and a set of follow up actions.
2. If its a money/trial sub, create a P0 watch event and its own set of followup actions.
All watch events are queued for me by priority where i ask on the weekend: "Tell me P0 events", it then asks me what action. The ergonomic factor here is I the human can tune this valve on the information hose. There is also a dashboard for P0 notifications and an android push notification that notifies me of P0 events, but they aren't "consumed" until i decide. There are tons of places this can be useful: make progress on non-work related todos, systematic investment, writing year-end reviews.
None of this is rocket science.
**Local service webhooks are the key: Every web-hook has some kind of decision maker in it - an LLM + deterministic logic.