Failing Fast at Subscriptions

What if you never gave them the chance to go a step too far?

May 13, 2025

When getting things done, or just doing things, failing fast is a great strategy for preventing unnecessary work. If something is going wrong, beating a hasty retreat can be the difference between living to fight another day and burning yourself out so badly that you can’t continue.

Thinking back at my recent financials, I realize that I’ve applied this same principle to the a very particular place: recurring monthly subscriptions.

To put it another way: I cancelled my subscriptions to Netflix and Disney+ despite being largely able to eat the continually rising costs.

Now, one of the reasons for cancelling my subscriptions for these services is due to being on the Canadian side of the—as I write this—currently ongoing trade war with the US. Though tariffs haven’t affected the prices of online services, I chose to stop putting my money into US corporations where I could.

I bring this all up because I saw a sentence (which I’ll paraphrase) that caused me to raise my eyebrows:

I’m still subscribed to Xbox Game Pass, though the price is right on the edge of what I’m willing to pay.

Then problem with this approach to your recurring subscriptions is that the increase of prices happens specifically to maximize customer comfort. The period after a price increase is uncomfortable for the customer, but with time comes familiarity with the new price, and eventually the customer learns to accept the new price so long as the service keeps delivering something they value. Of course, service degradation, depreciating value, and a loss of quality content are all factors which will lead to churned subscriptions, but the important factor to remember is that customers will stay on for long after they voice a desire to leave.

My advice, of course, is that subscribers should fail fast—they should balk quickly. If you feel like the next price increase will be one bridge too far, then you should cancel right now before the sudden price increase has left you wondering if it’s really all that bad, or that you don’t really want to lose The Office. So if you’re feeling like you should maybe consider cancelling soon, you should actually cancel now, before your attachment drives you to eating inevitable cost increases.

You might think to yourself that maybe you can just hold on and hope that the next price increase doesn’t come, but it always does. New content costs more money to license, which means revenue must go up just to make the same margins. Economics is hard, situations always change, and if the only way to keep customers is to give them new things, then costs go up and so too must the bottom line. This isn’t about corporate greed; It’s just the cost of staying afloat.

Ask yourself. Can you cancel this subscription now? If the answer isn’t a resounding “no”, then you should consider failing fast before you allow complacency to take over. There’s always another price hike just around the corner—so why wait?