The subscription economy has become a masterclass in asymmetrical friction. Signing up takes minutes; cancelling often requires navigating buried settings, contacting customer support, or finding outdated links that no longer work. It is a dynamic that costs Australians hundreds of dollars annually, and one that regulatory efforts abroad have failed to resolve.
Three in ten Australians admit they are losing up to $600 annually on duplicate services and apps they no longer use. Yet this is not accidental waste. The most common reason for overspending is forgetting to cancel a trial before auto-renewal, accounting for 38 per cent of cases. Another 32 per cent have paid for subscriptions they have forgotten about, and one in three have difficulty cancelling a subscription.
The real cost of convenience
The average monthly spend for an Australian household on video streaming alone has blown out to $50 for the final quarter of 2024, up from $43 the previous year. That is just one category. Australians spend an average of $21.63 per month on video platforms, $55.50 on gaming, and $16.98 on music services, totalling $259.61, $665.95, and $203.73 annually respectively.
The subscription model itself is not the problem. Convenience and flexibility have genuine value. The issue is that companies have engineered the customer experience to maximise inertia. Westpac research found customers are spending about $14 more each month than they think they are on subscriptions. Unawareness is not accidental; it is business strategy.
Regulatory promise, regulatory failure
The US Federal Trade Commission announced a final 'click-to-cancel' rule that would require sellers to make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up. The rule seemed straightforward: if a company can collect a payment with one click, it should allow cancellation the same way.
But the rule did not survive. The FTC's Click to Cancel Rule took effect in January 2025 but was recently voided by the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit after the court found that the FTC failed to follow proper rulemaking procedures. The regulatory effort lasted barely six months.
Australia has no equivalent protection. Since October 2024, more than 85,000 Westpac customers have used the bank's Savings Finder tool, an 18 per cent year-on-year increase, reflecting growing awareness that subscriptions need active management. But awareness is not enough when the system is designed to resist cancellation.
The path forward remains unclear
Neither government intervention nor corporate goodwill has solved the problem. Every major streaming service imposed some form of price rise on customers in 2024, following several increases in 2023. At the same time, nearly two-thirds of Australians report expenses rising faster than income, with 46 per cent of streaming users rotating services more often than last year to manage costs, and around half actively hunting discounts or subscribing for specific titles then cancelling afterwards.
Some consumers are adapting. Others are simply paying. Until regulation catches up with the subscription economy, the burden of managing these costs remains where companies prefer it: on individual households trying to keep track of services they no longer use.