A magazine subscription and a car's heated seats do not have much in common, except that both are now billed the same way: a recurring charge you agreed to once and will keep paying until you actively stop it. That billing structure, which regulators call a negative option (you are charged unless you opt out, rather than charged only when you opt in), used to be reserved for a narrow set of products where ongoing delivery made sense. It is now the default for software, grooming products, meal kits, and increasingly for features inside products you already bought outright.
The shift is not a story about what customers wanted. It is a story about what recurring revenue is worth to the businesses selling it, and about a decade in which the rules governing how easy it has to be to leave a subscription changed direction more than once, with the outcome still unsettled as of 2026.
What changed
You knew you were joining. Leaving was a desk conversation, not a buried toggle.
Investor math met hard-to-leave signup flows. Razors, software, and cars inherited the magazine's billing rhythm.
The scale of the shift shows up in the numbers. Zuora, whose billing platform processes payments for hundreds of subscription businesses, tracks growth across the sector in its annual Subscription Economy Index. In the 2025 edition, covering the twelve months ending December 2024, companies in the index grew revenue about 11 percent faster than the S&P 500 over the prior two years, and their combined subscriber count rose 25 percent over the same period. Sixty-eight percent of consumers surveyed said they had signed up for a new subscription service for the first time in 2024 alone.
Subscription businesses have consistently outgrown the broader market, which is the underlying reason investors and executives keep pushing more products toward recurring billing.
The 2025 Subscription Economy Index · accessed 2026-08-11 · Aggregated, anonymized billing data from Zuora's platform across 600+ subscription companies, compared against S&P 500 performance over the same two-year window.
That growth rate is the real engine behind the shift, more than any single company's strategy. Recurring revenue is easier to forecast than one-time sales, which makes a business less risky to lend to and more attractive to value at a premium when it is sold or taken public. A subscriber who renews also tends to generate more total revenue over time than someone who buys once, through renewals and upsells, without the business having to spend marketing money reacquiring them each time. None of that requires customers to prefer subscriptions. It only requires that recurring revenue be worth more per dollar to the company collecting it, which is a separate question from whether it is a better deal for the person paying.
The fight over how easy cancellation has to be
- 2024FTC finalizes the Click to Cancel rule
The amended Negative Option Rule required sellers to make cancellation at least as simple as signing up, and to get clear consent to the recurring charge before billing.
- 2025Eighth Circuit vacates the rule
A federal appeals court struck down the rule in full, ruling the FTC had skipped a legally required economic-impact analysis for rules with a large effect on the economy. This was a procedural defeat, not a ruling that the underlying practice was fine.
- 2026FTC opens a new comment period
Rather than simply reissuing the vacated rule, the FTC issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking seeking public input before drafting a new version, restarting the regulatory process from an earlier stage.
Federal Trade Commission and Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals filings, as reported by Consumer Finance Monitor.
The result of that back-and-forth is that, as of 2026, there is no federal rule specifically requiring cancellation to be as easy as signup. The FTC's general authority to police "unfair or deceptive practices" under Section 5 of the FTC Act still applies, and the agency has continued to bring individual enforcement actions against companies with especially difficult cancellation processes. But the broad, industry-wide rule that would have set a clear, enforceable standard is gone, pending whatever comes out of the FTC's 2026 rulemaking process, which has no set timeline.
That regulatory gap matters because it is exactly where the asymmetry between signing up and canceling tends to live. Signup is typically a single click, sometimes pre-filled and defaulted to the paid tier. Cancellation, in the absence of a rule requiring otherwise, can involve finding a hidden settings page, navigating a retention offer, or calling a phone line staffed during limited hours. None of that is illegal on its own. It becomes a consumer-protection problem specifically when the friction is disproportionate to the friction of signing up, which is the exact comparison the vacated rule was built around.
What actually changed
- 01
The underlying business case for subscriptions, predictable revenue, higher valuations, lower acquisition costs, has been true for over a decade and has not changed.
- 02
What changed is the range of products sold this way, from services that make sense as ongoing (software, media) to features bolted onto products you already own outright.
- 03
The regulatory rule meant to offset that shift by guaranteeing easy cancellation has been adopted, struck down, and is now being rewritten, with no rule currently in force nationally.
Questions
- 01Is it illegal for a company to make canceling harder than signing up?
Not under a specific federal rule at the moment, since the 2024 Click to Cancel rule was vacated in 2025. The FTC can still act against especially deceptive cancellation practices under its general unfair-practices authority, and some states have their own auto-renewal laws that are unaffected by the federal rule's status.
- 02Why did the subscription model spread beyond software and media into things like cars and appliances?
The same revenue logic applies regardless of category: a recurring charge for a feature (heated seats, extra storage, an unlock code) is valued more highly by investors than a one-time sale of the same feature, so manufacturers have extended the model to hardware features that were previously included in the purchase price.
