Your forgetfulness should not be a business model

Consider a simple sequence. You need a tool for a project, so you try it. The project ends. Life moves on. The payment continues. When you finally notice, leaving takes a search through settings, another offer, another question and another screen.

The service has acquired a second job: making you supervise your relationship with it.

At Fair Ninja, our position is clear. Knowingly building a business around forgotten cancellations is evil. Deliberately making cancellation difficult is evil. A person’s exhaustion, distraction or lack of time should never be treated as permission to take advantage of them.

The interface helps produce the decision

A company chooses the order of the screens, the prominence of the buttons and how difficult it is to say no. Those choices can change what people do.

In a 2021 experiment, Jamie Luguri and Lior Jacob Strahilevitz presented American participants with a fictional service through different interfaces. Counting people who abandoned the choice stage as rejecting the offer, acceptance was 11.3% in the control condition, 25.4% with mild dark patterns and 37.2% with aggressive dark patterns. Nobody was actually charged. These are experimental acceptance rates, not a universal multiplier for real sales. 1

The ethical implication matters. A completed click is not enough to tell us whether the interaction respected the person’s wishes. We also need to ask what information they saw, what alternatives they understood and what obstacles were put in their way.

A company cannot design confusion into a decision and then use the resulting decision as its only evidence that the customer wanted the outcome.

Doing nothing can be extremely valuable to the seller

In Selling Subscriptions, published in the American Economic Review in 2025, Liran Einav, Ben Klopack and Neale Mahoney studied payment data for ten US subscription services. Months in which payment cards were replaced, requiring active renewal, were associated with substantially more cancellations. 2

The authors model two possible explanations: inattention and the costs of making a change. In their inattention model, inertia raises simulated revenues by an average of 87% relative to fully attentive customers, holding the initial subscriber base fixed. This is a model-based counterfactual, not a count of payments proven to have been forgotten. The data do not cleanly separate inattention from switching costs. 2

What we take from this is straightforward: continued payment does not always mean a fresh, considered decision that a service is still worth its price.

There is a moral choice here. A business can help a customer understand what they are paying for. It can also notice that confusion is profitable and decide to preserve it.

We condemn that second choice.

The exit must work

This is also a practical issue with real consequences. In September 2025, a court-approved settlement in the FTC’s case against Amazon required $1.5 billion in consumer monetary relief and a $1 billion civil penalty. The stipulated order required simple cancellation mechanisms, clear signup disclosures and an explicit option to decline the offer. 3

A cancellation route that technically exists can still fail the person trying to use it. A hidden door is not made fair by the fact that somebody eventually found it.

When someone has decided to leave, the product should help them carry out that decision. We believe their wish deserves more weight than the company’s wish to retain another payment.

Profit does not erase responsibility

People are allowed to forget things. They are allowed to be overwhelmed. They are allowed to devote their attention to a child, an illness, a deadline or a quiet evening instead of an account settings page.

A company that knowingly turns these ordinary limitations into a revenue strategy is making a choice about another person’s life. Calling that strategy efficient does not make it decent.

The same applies when the justification is survival. A difficult market does not make the customer’s fatigue yours to exploit. If a business only works when people misunderstand the offer or struggle to stop paying, the business has a problem that should not be transferred to its customers.

The relationship we want to build

Fair Ninja starts from a different responsibility: make something useful, explain its price and respect the person’s decision.

Our model combines free local apps with optional paid services. Cloud sync is priced at 1¢ a day, or 30¢ for 30 days: the server maintenance cost. Chips live in one shared wallet across our apps, and you decide when to top up.

These choices are part of a larger commitment. Your work should remain yours. Your time should belong to your life. Your relationship with a tool should not require permanent vigilance.

We want you to stay because the tool helps you. We want the experience of leaving to respect you just as much as the experience of arriving.

A customer who cannot get out is not the same as a customer who wants to stay.

Sources

1. Jamie Luguri and Lior Jacob Strahilevitz, Shining a Light on Dark Patterns, Journal of Legal Analysis 13(1), 2021, pp. 43–109. Published paper. Acceptance figures use the second rate column in Table 2, which counts dropouts as rejecting the offer.

2. Liran Einav, Ben Klopack and Neale Mahoney, Selling Subscriptions, American Economic Review 115(5), May 2025, pp. 1650–1671. Published paper. See the card-replacement analysis and Table 2.

3. US District Court, Western District of Washington, FTC v. Amazon.com, Stipulated Final Order, 25 September 2025. Court order. The amounts and requirements above describe the settlement order, not an admission of every allegation.