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# Nobody Wants Your Subscription
- URL: https://www.reformedentrepreneur.com/nobody-wants-your-subscription/
- Published: 2026-09-04T10:00:44.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-04T10:00:44.000Z
- Description: John Oliver just spent 22 minutes of HBO airtime on subscription billing, and the studio audience cheered like a liberating army had rolled into town - turns out, subscription businesses are not popular and won't last without reform.
- Author: Ross Williams

John Oliver just spent 22 minutes of HBO airtime on subscription billing, and the studio audience cheered like a liberating army had rolled into town. I spent 22 years building the machine he was describing - so believe me when I tell you: he went easy on us. On TikTok cancellation breakdowns, remotely assassinated ink cartridges, and why the smartest operators are already quietly testing pay-as-you-go.

A few weeks ago I wrote about [the zombies](https://www.reformedentrepreneur.com/the-zombies-are-waking-up/) \- the £1.6bn of UK subscription revenue that exists only because leaving is harder than staying, and the January 2027 law that's about to hold a mirror up to it.

I thought that piece was bleak. Several of you told me it was bleak. One of you told me it was bleak *and* cancelled a gym membership halfway through reading it, which remains the best engagement metric I've ever received.

Then John Oliver did [a full 22-minute segment on subscriptions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wko-2c7lZL8&ref=reformedentrepreneur.com), and I realised I'd been holding back.

Watch it. Seriously - **if you run recurring revenue for a living**, watch it the way I watched it: with the specific discomfort of a man watching a comedy show describe his old job. Because here is the thing nobody in our industry wants to say out loud, so I'll go first:

> When a comedian can fill a main segment with your billing practices and get cheered for it, you are no longer a business model. You are a genre of villain.

Not "an industry with an image problem." Not "a sector facing headwinds." A villain genre. Somewhere between parking enforcement and whoever decided donuts needed a toppings bar - which Oliver also covered, and on which he is correct, and which I mention only to establish that this was a show with range.

I watched it the way I read the DMCC announcement: nodding along, faintly nostalgic, and in absolutely no position to be outraged. I didn't build HP's ink trap or Amazon's cancellation maze. But I built things in the same architectural tradition. I held the spanner. So what follows isn't an outsider sneering at an industry he doesn't understand. It's an insider sneering at an industry he understands far too well.

The second one should worry you more.

## Twenty-two minutes about you. Yes, you.

For those who won't click, here's what America's most trusted news comedian told several million people about us - the people running subscription businesses.

He starts with the sprawl. Subscriptions have stopped being a way to sell music and software and become a way to sell *everything*. Taco Bell tested a "Taco Lovers Pass" - $5 to $10 a month for a taco a day, which Oliver notes is also roughly what the coroner's report will be called. There's a monthly mystery box of animal bones whose unboxing video has to clarify, slightly too late in the sentence, that the skulls are not human. There are subscription smoke alarms. Subscription light bulbs. A subscription *cat litter box* \- a product for anyone who has ever watched their cat squat and thought: this moment needs a monthly fee attached to it.

Funny. Harmless, even. And then the segment stops being harmless, because then it gets to the cars.

Eight dollars a month for remote start on certain Toyotas. Twenty a month for BMW's enhanced cruise control. Up to $75 a month for hands-free driving - on top of the car payment. General Motors expects subscriptions to bring in as much as **$25 billion a year by 2030**, which would put a car company's recurring revenue in the same postcode as Netflix's. Netflix, at least, keeps making new things for the money. GM is charging you rent on features that are already bolted into a car you already bought. That's not a subscription. 

**That's a ransom with a loyalty scheme.**

## A printer with a landlord's temperament

The segment's standout villain is HP, and I want to walk through this one slowly because it's the purest expression of where the model has ended up.

HP sells printers with an ink subscription called Instant Ink. When the subscription lapses - you cancel, or a card expires - HP **remotely deactivates the cartridges in your printer**. Not future ink. The ink you have. Sitting in your machine. Physically present, chemically willing, administratively dead.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9a/9c/9a9c6704-9809-4b65-ae43-86647f7d871f/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-31-at-11.42.22.png)

A recreation of the moment an HP printer with working ink refuses to print a shipping label — but happily prints a page explaining that it can't print. Watch the real clip at [6:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wko-2c7lZL8&t=419s&ref=reformedentrepreneur.com).

Oliver plays a clip of a woman whose printer did exactly this. Her printer had ink. It had paper. It had a payments issue. The device on her desk had stopped being a product she owned and become a small plastic landlord conducting a rent dispute.

And in case you're tempted to file that under "regrettable edge case," HP's CEO has already explained the strategy to investors, in one of the most honest sentences our industry has ever produced: "We make more money per customer when they're in the subscription program."

There it is. No mission statement about delighting users. No slide about customer lifetime *value* meaning value *for the customer*. Just the quiet part, out loud, on an earnings call. I almost admire it. Almost. I've sat in rooms where that exact sentiment was dressed in forty slides of euphemism, and there's something clean about a man who skips the costume.

## Your washing machine is writing to head office

My favourite clip - and I mean "favourite" the way you mean it about a horror film - is a former Salesforce executive pitching appliance makers on the real prize. His pitch, roughly: Whirlpool and GE only talk to customers once every seven years, when they buy a machine. But a *smart* washing machine talks to head office constantly. It knows how often you wash. It can detect that you've just had a baby - the laundry data gives you away - and adjust your subscription accordingly.

Oliver's response is that **no company needs to know you've had a child**; that's what birth announcements are for, and they're addressed to family and friends rather than to whom it may concern at a major appliance manufacturer.

Mine is slightly different, because I've been in the meetings where this stuff gets born. Nobody in those rooms believes they're building a surveillance device. They believe they're building "engagement." It gets pitched by a perfectly nice man called Harry, with a slide titled "Deepening the Customer Relationship," and everyone nods, and eighteen months later your washing machine knows about the baby before your mother does.

> The road to the panopticon is paved with quarterly OKRs. Nobody plans the dystopia. They sprint towards it, two weeks at a time.

## Your churn has a ring light now

Here's the part of the segment **I'd force every subscription CEO** to watch with their eyelids held open.

Not the corporate stuff. The TikToks.

Oliver plays a run of them. A woman on the edge of tears asking why - of all the hard things in life - cancelling a subscription has to be one of them, before naming Paramount Plus directly, the way you name someone who owes you money. A man whose attempt to leave SiriusXM nearly broke his brain: the help page pointed him to an end-subscription button that does not exist, which I can only describe as the most architecturally honest thing on that website. A man trapped in a chatbot loop, repeating his one modest request - cancel it - with mounting despair, while the software responds with the serene menace of retention flows everywhere.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9a/9c/9a9c6704-9809-4b65-ae43-86647f7d871f/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-31-at-11.45.35.png)

The retention chatbot experience, recreated. The real montage — Paramount Plus, SiriusXM, and a man slowly losing a negotiation with software — starts at [2:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wko-2c7lZL8&t=173s&ref=reformedentrepreneur.com).

Then the confessions. The woman whose gym had been double-charging her for four months. The man who forgot six months of Apple TV. And the masterpiece: a man realising *live on camera* that he'd been paying for an e-fax service for years, pausing mid-sentence to confirm with the interviewer that yes, this discovery was really happening on national television. It was, mate. It's now happening in a blog post too. Your zombie subscription has posthumously out-performed most content marketing teams.

Now. If you run a subscription business, I need you to understand what you just read, because it's not an anecdote. It's a distribution channel.

TikTok's algorithm is a machine for finding experiences millions of people share, and it has ruled that *trying to escape your product* is one of them. Cancellation content is a genre now. It has tropes. It has an audience. It has better retention than you do. **Your customers used to churn quietly. Now they churn in 4K, with a ring light, to an audience of millions - and the algorithm does their distribution for free.**

In my day - and I say this with the full weight of a man [who gave undertakings to the CMA in 2017](https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/online-dating-services?ref=reformedentrepreneur.com), so I know precisely what era I'm confessing to - a brutal cancellation flow cost you one customer and earned you one bad memory.

**The same flow today produces *media*.**

You're not managing churn anymore. You're commissioning a documentary series about why nobody should give you a payment card, and it's renewing for another season whether you like it or not.

## The maze, now with subpoenas

I called the industry's cancellation architecture "the maze" last time and briefly worried the metaphor was unkind. I needn't have. The FTC got there first, and the FTC has discovery powers.

The charge sheet, per Oliver:

**LA Fitness** and its sister brands, per the FTC, made some members print long forms, dig out long-dead login credentials, turn up in person to see a specific manager who was never there, or send *certified mail* — certified mail! — to cancel a gym membership. Some members got their banks to block the payments and were allegedly charged anyway, under new account numbers. That's not retention. That's the bit in the horror film where the monster turns out to have been inside the house the whole time.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9a/9c/9a9c6704-9809-4b65-ae43-86647f7d871f/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-31-at-11.48.07.png)

Reconstructed from the FTC allegations described in the segment. The news clip is at [13:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wko-2c7lZL8&t=839s&ref=reformedentrepreneur.com).

**HelloFresh**, until recently, ran a flow that trained you like a lab rat: bright button to stay, grey button to leave. Click grey. Again. Again. And on the final screen - once your thumb had fully learned the pattern - the buttons quietly swapped, so the grey one now *un-cancelled* you. That isn't a dark pattern. That's a behavioural science dissertation with a conversion target.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9a/9c/9a9c6704-9809-4b65-ae43-86647f7d871f/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-31-at-11.51.05.png)

Three screens teach your thumb "grey means keep cancelling" — then the final screen puts a grey **undo my cancellation* button in the exact slot your thumb is already heading for. Oliver's walkthrough of the full gauntlet is at [15:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wko-2c7lZL8&t=910s&ref=reformedentrepreneur.com).

**Amazon** got into trouble twice over. On the way in, the FTC said it used dark patterns to trick people into Prime - including a checkout popup where the yellow button you'd been clicking all the way through suddenly became the *sign up for Prime* button, with the ordinary continue option demoted to small print. On the way out, it made cancelling Prime a four-page, six-click, fifteen-option odyssey that staff internally codenamed **Iliad**, after the sixteen-thousand-line poem about a war that lasted a decade.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9a/9c/9a9c6704-9809-4b65-ae43-86647f7d871f/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-31-at-11.50.01.png)

Left: the button your muscle memory trusts. Right: the same button, repurposed. Below: the exit journey staff named after an epic poem about a decade-long war. See [12:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wko-2c7lZL8&t=749s&ref=reformedentrepreneur.com) and [16:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wko-2c7lZL8&t=985s&ref=reformedentrepreneur.com).

Nobody names a cancellation flow after the Iliad because it's intuitive. You name it that because it's a slog designed to outlast the human spirit - though I'll grant it takes a certain confidence to insult your own customers in ancient Greek. A former employee admitted, per the FTC, that the confusion was deliberate; internal fixes were designed, tested, found to dent subscriber growth, and shelved. Amazon settled for **$2.5 billion** while denying it ever deceived anyone - a sentence you may read in whichever tone amuses you most.

**Adobe** buried its early-termination fee in fine print and tooltips, and one employee internally compared the fee to heroin. As a man who has personally run subscription P&Ls: when your own staff reach for narcotics metaphors to describe a revenue line, the strategy review has written itself. You don't need a consultant. You need a priest.

And look - I'd love to stand at a safe distance and tut. I can't. Dating built versions of these machines and I held the spanner. I know what a "save flow" looks like from the authoring side. I know the meeting where someone says "let's add one more retention step" and everyone agrees because the graph goes up and the customer isn't in the room. The customer is never in the room. **That's the entire design philosophy of the modern cancellation flow: it's what you build when you're certain the customer will never see the whiteboard.**

Well. The customer has a whiteboard now. It's called TikTok, and their graphs go up too.

## America asked for a button. It got a court ruling.

Oliver's proposed fix is almost insultingly small: click to cancel. If you can subscribe online, you can cancel online. One button. Lina Khan's FTC wrote exactly that rule - and days before it took effect, a federal appeals court voided it on procedural grounds. Read that again. **The rule that said cancelling should be as easy as subscribing was itself cancelled, via a process no ordinary person could hope to navigate.** The subscription economy's immune system is genuinely magnificent. I'd study it, if it weren't studying us.

So America now has a patchwork - California, Virginia, Louisiana, a New York City rule landing in October - and a folk remedy: Oliver notes people sometimes get the cancel button to appear by telling services they live in California. Sit with that. The single most effective consumer-protection technology in the United States is currently *pretending to be Californian*. An entire trillion-dollar economy held to account by a lie about postcode.

Which brings us home, briefly, for the smug paragraph my British readers have earned. Everything Oliver is begging for - honesty before signup, reminders before renewal, exits as easy as entrances - is roughly **what the DMCC delivers here from January 2027**, with the CMA holding fines of up to 10% of global turnover behind its back.

America watched the maze get documented on primetime television and couldn't ban it. **Britain is demolishing it by statute.** As I said last time: if your revenue would survive a standing order test, you should be celebrating this law. If it wouldn't, you're not a subscription business. You're pre-churned, with a delay on the paperwork.

But smugness isn't a strategy. So let's get to the question Ross-from-2015 would have hated me for asking.

## Nobody wants a subscription. They want the thing.

Here is the heresy, from a man who billed half a billion dollars of recurring revenue over 22 years:

> People never liked subscriptions. Not once. Not ever.

They liked the films. The workouts. The software. The matches, in my industry's case. The subscription was always *our* preference, never theirs - we liked it because recurring revenue is predictable, because markets pay a multiple on it, and because, as our friend at HP told his investors, the customer is simply worth more once they're locked in. Customer enthusiasm was never load-bearing. **The model was never "people love paying monthly." The model was "people forget monthly," and we all agreed not to look directly at it.**

For twenty years that didn't matter, because the customer had no leverage. Now they have three kinds arriving at once. Regulators demolishing the maze. TikTok filming the escape attempts. And - most quietly, most importantly - payment technology that has made one-off transactions frictionless.

The original justification for auto-renew was partly logistical: collecting money repeatedly was hard, so you took permission once and billed forever. That excuse is dead. A payment is now one thumb, one second. The only remaining reasons to insist on auto-renewal are the honest one - smoothing revenue for something people genuinely use continuously - and the other one. You know the other one. I *invented* bits of the other one.

## Test the day pass. I dare you.

So: does all this pave the way for pay-as-you-go? Yes. And the smart operators won't wait to be shoved.

**Daily and weekend passes.** The gym day. The streaming weekend. The software week. Priced at a premium over the pro-rata monthly rate - flexibility is worth money, charge for it - and with zero recurring hooks. Airlines don't make you subscribe to Tuesdays. And dating, my old manor, is the perfect test case: nobody *wants* a long-term relationship with a dating app. In dating, churn is the product working. A weekend pass aligns the business with the customer's actual goal for the first time in the category's history - which is presumably why almost nobody has dared to offer one.

**Non-recurring bundles.** Thirty days. Paid once. Ends unless the customer actively comes back. I know, I know - terrifying. It's also known as *selling something*, a practice with a long and respectable history. Your grandparents did it daily, without a single dunning email.

**Renewals as real decisions.** Keep the subscription where it genuinely fits - subscriptions aren't evil, only unearned ones are - but treat every renewal as a sale you have to close again. Send the reminder before the law makes you. Show last month's usage next to last month's price and let the customer do the arithmetic you'd rather they didn't. If that arithmetic frightens you, the arithmetic isn't the problem.

Now, the objection. I've heard it in every boardroom I've ever sat in, usually from the person holding the spreadsheet: *non-recurring revenue gets a lower multiple.* Correct. But here's the actuarial joke hiding in your SaaS metrics: **a chunk of your "recurring" revenue is already non-recurring. The customer just hasn't been told yet.**

**January 2027 is when they get the letter. Zombie MRR isn't an asset commanding a premium multiple - it's a liability wearing an asset's lanyard, and it will be re-rated the moment the reminder emails start landing.**

Pass revenue is smaller, uglier, and *real*. Every pound of it passed the standing order test at the till, because the purchase *was* the test. I'd rather own that than a cohort of e-fax men who simply haven't opened TikTok yet.

And the upside isn't defensive. A business confident enough to sell day passes is making a public claim: **our product is good enough that you'll come back on purpose.** That single claim is pricing power, marketing and product discipline in one move. A business that won't test a day pass is also making a claim. Your customers can hear both. So can John Oliver's researchers.

## The part where I tell you the uncomfortable bit

Oliver closes by saying that, a couple of cosmos in, he'd tell subscription companies to take all the energy they pour into building labyrinths and redirect it into making things people actually want to keep buying - before conceding, deadpan, that they're not ready for that conversation.

He's wrong about one word. *They.*

Some of us are ready. Some of us have been on both sides of the regulator and both sides of the P&L, and arrived - the long way round, via the CMA, via administration, via losing the lot - at the same place a comedy writers' room reached in a week: every trap, maze, grey button and remotely murdered ink cartridge in this industry exists to avoid one question. **Would they pay for this if they had to choose to?**

That question is the whole of ethical subscription economics. Everything that survives it is a business. Everything that doesn't is a countdown - to a statute, a settlement, or 22 minutes of primetime with your logo on screen and an audience cheering at your expense.

There should just be a button. Build it before the law builds it for you - or before a woman with immaculate nails and 40 million views builds it out of your reputation instead.

## The part where I sell you something

I run the standing order test on subscription P&Ls for a living now: which revenue is real, which is zombie, and what a pass-based tier would do to yours before January 2027 does it without asking. If you'd rather hear it from a reformed operator than a federal court, you know where I am.

Let's talk - while your customers still think the grey button works.

---

*Ross Williams spent 22 years building bootstrapped subscription businesses to $500m in lifetime billings, gave the CMA his homework in 2017, and now writes about ethical subscription economics at The Reformed Entrepreneur — which is free, requires no login, and can be cancelled by closing the tab.*