It's a nuclear option and you need to justify it, but having made good-faith efforts to cancel will cover you, as any company starting legal action will also need to explain their side of events and why they ignored your good-faith effort to cancel. This will also bring any of their dark patterns to light in front of a court which they definitely wouldn't want, so in practice you are fine.
Cancellation isn't always a nightmare, even for companies with bad practices. But it's luck of the draw, and your luck can run out at any time, at least while government continues to stall on adequate consumer protections.
If they want to go that far, why not just charge you a cancellation fee? Making you wait is already a way of extracting a fee in the form of a proof-of-work; but, unlike an actual cancellation fee, a cancellation proof-of-work can't be spent.
They still have very misleading text on their contracts and their sales people will try to imply canceling has a cost attached. You could usually get the fees waived if you wasted enough of their support staff’s time.
Let’s not make this overly complicated, if it was important enough for them to charge you they should give you a way to cancel the only reason any company doesn’t is because they are f*ing customers.
If every other business has taught them that this is the only way to deal with things and that actually going through the "official" cancellation procedure is next to impossible (and an opportunity cost besides), I don't see how you can ask them to stop doing it.
It's apparently a strategy that works, and just because it's inconvenient for you doesn't make it their obligation to stop.
Yes, but if your customers have a lot of valuable data in your service, cancelling would make them loose that data. You can technically use this to extort money from your users. Not a viable business plan in the long run, for sure, but there are plenty of businesses that would try, I think.
I'm a little wary of doing that - presumably they'll start pushing back and getting on credit card shit lists is something that makes me feel even more helpless than not being able to cancel something.
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