Roach motel

The name comes from the pest trap advertised as the place roaches check into and never check out of, and it describes an asymmetry rather than a screen. Signing up is a single button on the page you were already reading, prefilled, one tap on a saved card. Leaving is somewhere else: three levels into an account menu, behind a retention offer, behind a survey, and finally behind a phone number staffed on weekday afternoons. No step is a lie. Each one is defensible on its own, which is exactly how the pattern survives review. What gives it away is the comparison: the same company that built a one-click entrance decided the exit needed four screens and a queue.

It sits under the dark pattern umbrella as the type Harry Brignull’s catalogue at deceptive.design calls hard to cancel, and it travels with a companion. Forced continuity is the free trial that silently becomes a paid subscription; the roach motel is what makes that renewal hard to stop once it has started. Together they turn an experiment into an annuity. The retention offer deserves its own note, because it is the part teams defend hardest: an offer presented once, on the way out, is a legitimate business move. An offer that must be declined twice, then survey answered, then confirmed on the telephone, is a toll booth wearing a discount.

The measurement most often quoted in its defence is churn, and churn is exactly the number the pattern is designed to corrupt. A cancellation that a person could not complete is recorded as a retained subscriber, so the friction improves the metric whether or not it changed anyone’s mind, and the true cost lands somewhere the dashboard cannot see: chargebacks, card cancellations, one-star reviews written in the voice of someone who spent forty minutes on hold. The complaint that follows is rarely about the money. It is about having been made to fight.

Regulators arrived at the same conclusion. The US Federal Trade Commission has run enforcement actions over subscriptions that were simple to start and difficult to stop, and its click to cancel rulemaking is built on a single symmetry test: cancelling has to be at least as easy as signing up, in the same medium the sign-up happened in. California and several EU consumer rules say a version of the same thing. The design rule is easier to remember than the statute. Put the cancel control on the account screen where a person would look for it, let one click do it, confirm on screen rather than by email, and make any offer you want to make after the cancellation is already safe.