The general imperative of any subscription service is to wring a monthly payment out of you from now until the apocalypse. That’s the whole game. It’s why there are entire services and advice columns devoted to helping you cancel. The business model gets an assist from human nature. Inertia is a monster; just ask the 1.5 million people who as of 2018 still paid for America Online dialup.
And then there’s Netflix, which this week took the radically sensible step of offering to cancel your subscription for you if you haven’t used it in a while.
In a corporate blog post Thursday, Netflix’s Eddy Wu laid out the company’s new plan, which sounds like it should be some kind of trap but is not. If you don’t watch anything on Netflix for a year after you join, the company will send you an email asking if you want to keep your membership. You’ll also get a message if you go two years without watching anything on Netflix at any point. If you write back to say, “Yes, please keep charging me for all these seasons of Riverdale I’m ignoring,” nothing changes. If you ask to cancel or don’t write back at all, Netflix automatically stops charging you. Change your mind within 10 months, and you can return to the service with all your settings intact, just as you left them when you deactivated.
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