Subscriptions – there's no getting around them. If you want to access the biggest and best streaming services in the world right now (and countless other services besides), you're going to have to sign up for an account and subscribe, and as we all know, that can bring with it some financial jeopardy.
After all, without pointing fingers or naming specific names, we've probably all been burned before by subscription auto-renewals, leaving you high and dry by the time you realise what's happened. Now, though, the UK is promising to do something about it.
The government has just announced that it's going to bring in laws forcing companies to make subscriptions easier to cancel, bringing in some standardisation to how you can expect to exit these agreements. It's also going to, crucially, ensure that there's a two-week cooldown period after an annual subscription auto-renews, in which you'll be able to cancel it and get a refund, and the same will apply after a free trial, too.
The full list of requirements is as follows, per the government:
- Clear, simple information before signing up to any subscription
- Reminders before free or discounted trials end, or 12month+ contracts automatically renew
- Straightforward cancellations, including online exits for online sign ups
- A new 14-day cooling off period, after a free or discounted trial ends, or when a contract renews for 12 months or longer
While some streaming services do make it fairly easy to cancel your subscription (with Netflix, in fact, being pretty good on this front), there are others that make things a little more complicated.
We've also all been subjected to the "why not stay with this discount" or "are you sure" pages that can be a little manipulative, and it sounds like those are also going to come in for some scrutiny.
So, this could mean that all the big streaming services have to change their policies to align with the new laws when they're announced in detail, ahead of an apparent deadline in early 2027, and there's no downside to that for customers.
That said, it's probably outside of streaming that the biggest impact will be felt – there are some huge names in the software world that make cancelling your subscriptions a genuine challenge. Adobe has a pretty bad reputation on this front, and it'll likely be one of the companies more affected by the change if and when it happens.
With that 2027 threshold still quite a long way away, though, you're going to have to stick to traditional methods for now, to keep on top of your subscriptions. That might be a date circled in the diary, a reminder on your phone, or (if you're lucky) a service that already makes it easy to cancel, and therefore won't have to update much when the new rules come into play.
