I Tried to Cancel Three Wake-Up App Subscriptions in One Month

A note before this starts: no single person did all three of these things in one month. What follows is stitched together from a pile of App Store one-star reviews, a couple of Reddit subscription-complaint threads, and the pattern the FTC itself documented in a real lawsuit, compressed into one narrator’s month so the shape of the thing reads as one experience instead of forty scattered ones. Call the narrator me, because it’s easier to write that way, not because it’s a diary.

The app with no visible off switch

The first app has a cancel button the way a hotel has a fire exit: technically present, deliberately unadvertised. It lives inside a support chat, behind a bot that asks whether you’re “sure” three separate times, each time offering a discount that gets larger, like a vending machine slowly lowering its price as you keep standing in front of it not buying anything. Reaching an actual human took four days and one detailed complaint about a missed alarm, because the bot’s script apparently branches differently for “I want to cancel” than for “your product failed to do the one thing it’s for.”

The one where I called my bank instead

The second app I didn’t bother asking. I disputed the charge with my card issuer, on the theory that a company hard enough to reach could just get skipped. The bank explained, patiently, that I’d authorized the original charge, and a merchant delivering exactly the service it promised (charging me on the date I agreed it would) isn’t the kind of error the Fair Credit Billing Act exists to fix. Forgetting to cancel isn’t fraud. It just feels like it, at 11 p.m., re-reading a receipt for a service I hadn’t opened in five weeks.

The one that took eleven seconds

The third app had an actual cancel button, in Settings, where a cancel button belongs. Tap it, confirm, done, no chat, no counteroffer. It felt less like good design and more like an oversight, which says something uncomfortable about what I’d come to expect by app number three.

This pile of small indignities turns out to have a paper trail. The FTC sued Amazon in June 2023 over an internal flow the company had reportedly named itself, the “Iliad Flow,” a four-page, six-click, fifteen-option maze standing between a Prime subscriber and the exit. Amazon settled in September 2025 for $2.5 billion: a billion-dollar civil penalty, the rest refunded to roughly 35 million people. A 2019 Princeton crawl of 11,000 shopping sites, led by researcher Arunesh Mathur, found the same shape often enough that researchers had already given it a name, the roach motel: easy to check into, a separate ordeal to check out of. A federal rule meant to require an easy exit everywhere came within six days of taking effect in July 2025 before a court threw it out on procedural grounds, unrelated to whether the underlying idea was any good.

One thing that research doesn’t settle for me: standing in front of a cancel button that’s really a discount offer in a bot costume, I can’t tell whether the friction is a deliberate bet that losing me costs less than building an easy exit, or just a hundred small unexamined choices stacking into a maze nobody sat down and drew on purpose. Is there any way to tell those two apart from the customer’s side of the screen, or does it only ever look the same from in here?