“Hiding the cancel button — it's terrible, and anybody that does it should really reevaluate what they're doing. It violates that trust: you asked people to let you charge their bank account every month, and then you go ahead and betray that trust.”

Hiding the cancel button betrays the trust that earned the subscription in the first place

The subscription model is built on a trust exchange: the user accepts auto-renewal in return for genuine ongoing value. Dark-pattern cancellation flows break that exchange and generate refund requests, chargebacks, and negative reviews that cost more than the churned revenue they tried to retain. Easy cancellation signals confidence in the product and reduces guilt-driven cancellations.