Why Subscriptions Became the Default Way to Buy Almost Anything

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.

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 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.