If you can sign up for something with one tap, you should be able to quit it with one tap. New York City just made that the law, and it took a city to do what Washington couldn’t.
As of October 1, businesses in the city that sell subscriptions and auto-renewals have to let you cancel the same way you signed up. Joined on a website? You cancel on the website. Signed up in an app? Same app. Companies that take sign-ups through several channels have to offer cancellation through all of them. First violation is $525, the second is $1,050, and the third and every one after that costs $3,500, plus the company can owe you refunds for charges it kept making after you first tried to leave.
I’m usually the guy who rolls his eyes at new rules. Most of them exist so somebody can stand at a podium and announce they did something. But I run every regulation through one test: does it fix the problem it says it fixes, or is it a press release? This one passes. Anyone who has spent 40 minutes on hold to cancel a gym membership knows the problem is real, and the fix is about as narrow as a fix gets.
The part I like most is what it doesn’t do. Nobody is banning subscriptions or telling companies what to charge. Nobody is saying you can’t make a pitch when someone tries to leave, either. The city softened that piece before the final version, so a save offer is fine as long as it doesn’t slow down or block the cancellation. Offer me three months at half price and I might take it. Hide the exit door and I’m gone for good.
Here’s what bugs me. There was a federal version of this. The FTC wrote a click-to-cancel rule, and in July 2025 the Eighth Circuit threw it out days before it was supposed to take effect. So now the country’s biggest consumer market has no national standard, and New York is stitching one together a city at a time. If you’re a company that doesn’t want 50 different rulebooks, here’s a cheap fix: make cancellation easy everywhere and the rulebooks stop mattering.
The city says it got more than 100 complaints about cancelling subscriptions in 2025, which honestly sounds low for a city of that size. The Roosevelt Institute estimates the rule could save adult New Yorkers up to $162.5 million a year. That’s an estimate, and I’d treat it like one. But even if it’s half that, it’s real money coming out of the pockets of people who forgot they were paying for something.
Is it perfect? No. Enforcement will decide whether this has teeth, and a $525 fine is a rounding error for the biggest companies unless the violations pile up. But the principle is the right one. Free markets work when customers can actually leave, and a subscription you can’t cancel is a hostage situation with a billing cycle.
My two cents: if your business model only works because quitting is a pain, you don’t have a business model, you have a trap.