Subscriptions should be simple

When I don’t want to use a service anymore, unsubscribing should be dead simple. Tell me all about what I miss and make it easy to hop on the wagon again but whatever you do, don’t make it hard to unsubscribe. I don’t know why people do it, but some services give you a very hard time trying to unsubscribe. Everything from email confirmation to emailing them that you want to unsubscribe.

This is not the way. Don’t build your business around making it hard for people to unsubscribe. Subscriptions should be simple.

This makes sense right? We all put serious effort into converting visitors to users but not that much about giving them a simple way to leave us.

When building Klart.co I put some serious though into this and came up with basically two simple states (really about ~8 logical states for expired, valid, cancelled, active, trial etc). The states were: active or cancelled + the date until expiration. Why? Because this is what I as a user care about. I ask two questions when I’m thinking about my subscription for a service:

1. How long time have I paid for?
2. Am I going to pay for next month?

And these are the ones I optimized Klart’s subscriptions for.

Enough talk. This is what it looks like:

This post wouldn’t be complete with a GIF, so here you go

What do you think? Can I make anything better? Hit me up on Twitter @drikerf and let’s talk :)