Four+ trick pages to cancel your subscription.

I just tried to cancel a subscription upon client request. After clicking cancel:

1. First page, they would like you to contact support. There is a big red button for that and “continue cancelling” as a little tiny greyed out link below it.

2. Second page, they want you to review everything you will be losing. The big red button is now “Keep Subscription” and the greyed out one is “Continue Cancelling,” now in a different area than before

3. Third page, they want you to mark why you are cancelling and you cannot skip it. You must leave a comment if you select other. The big red button is now “Keep Subscription” and the greyed out one is “Continue Cancelling” on the right.

4. The fourth page, you must now agree to lose your subscription and all of the benefits, along with the very scary things that will happen to you and your website. The have now SWITCHED the buttons, where “Continue Cancelling is now bright red and on the LEFT, so you instinctively hit “Keep Subscription” and it boots you back to your profile with no confirmation of keeping or cancelling so you think you are done.

That’s when I lost it lol, and came here after completing the four stage process again. If you do successfully cancel, you will also receive no notification and will just be back to the home page, logged out.

The amount of cheap trick temporary revenue created by this 4-stage dark pattern must be worth it, but I’ve just had it with this. I will be cancelling Smash Balloon from all our sites and coding our own streamlined version moving forward. I would assume Ben your CEO does not know you have set up your cancellation process this way, because it is such a poor look on your company.

This plugin was fine, but expensive for one single social feed integration. Thank you.