SAN FRANCISCO — In a development that economists are calling 'the logical endpoint of late-stage capitalism, probably,' UnSubscribr, the popular app that promises to 'cancel your gym membership so you don't have to make that phone call,' announced Tuesday the launch of UnSubscribr Plus — a $19.99-per-month service that cancels UnSubscribr itself if you forget to cancel it.
'We noticed people were signing up for UnSubscribr and then never using it,' said founder Marnie Ploot, speaking from the company's headquarters, a converted shipping container in the SOMA district that still smells faintly of whatever stinky things were shipped in it. 'So we built a product for that.'
The original UnSubscribr, launched in 2021, operates on a simple premise: for $9.99 a month, the service will handle the bureaucratic nightmare of canceling other subscription services — navigating phone trees, enduring hold music composed by what sounds like a depressed algorithm, and explaining to a retention specialist named Brad why you no longer need access to 47 Scandinavian crime dramas.
The app quickly gained traction among millennials and Gen Z consumers, many of whom reported that the emotional labor of canceling their aunt's Netflix account after she died was 'worse than the funeral.' UnSubscribr's user base grew to 4.2 million, each paying monthly to avoid the monthly payments they were already making.
But success, as Ploot explained, brought unforeseen complications.
'We started getting support tickets from users who had been paying for UnSubscribr for eighteen months without ever actually using it to cancel anything,' Ploot said. 'They'd signed up to cancel their Blue Apron, got distracted, and just... kept paying us. Some of them had even re-subscribed to Blue Apron. It was a loop.'
The solution, Ploot's team concluded, was not to remind users to cancel UnSubscribr — 'that would be patronizing' — but to build an additional layer of automation. UnSubscribr Plus monitors a user's UnSubscribr account and, if no cancellation requests have been made within a 90-day window, initiates termination of the UnSubscribr subscription itself.
'It's really quite elegant,' said Dr. Fenton Blorpp, professor of Behavioral Economics at the University of Chicago and author of Why Are You Like This: A Study in Avoidant Consumer Patterns. 'UnSubscribr identified a market inefficiency — people paying for a service they don't use — and rather than address the root cause, which is that modern life has broken the human capacity for basic administrative tasks, they monetized the inefficiency. It's like selling fire insurance to arsonists, if the arsonists were just very tired.'
UnSubscribr Plus also includes several premium features. For an additional $4.99, the 'Ghost Mode' add-on will not only cancel UnSubscribr but also send a breakup-style email to the user's other subscription services, explaining that 'it's not them, it's me, I've just got a lot going on right now.' The 'Nesting Doll' tier, priced at $34.99, creates a recursive cancellation chain that theoretically continues indefinitely, though Ploot admitted that during beta testing, one user's account 'collapsed into a singularity and we had to call a physicist.'
Industry reaction has been mixed.
'I don't know whether to be impressed or concerned,' said Greta Vorm, senior analyst at McKinsey & Company's Digital Consumer Practice. 'UnSubscribr Plus is either the most brilliant example of vertical integration I've seen this quarter, or it's a pyramid scheme where the product is your own forgetfulness. I've run the numbers three times and I genuinely can't tell.'
Consumer advocates have raised questions about the service's terms of service, which state that UnSubscribr Plus 'reserves the right to not cancel UnSubscribr if cancellation of UnSubscribr would result in the user having no remaining subscriptions to cancel, as this would constitute a existential threat to the user's identity as a person who is too busy for administrative tasks.'
When asked what happens if a user forgets to cancel UnSubscribr Plus, Ploot stared into the middle distance for eleven seconds and whispered, 'We have a guy.'
Pressed for details, she clarified that 'the guy' is a 64-year-old former claims adjuster named Dennis who works out of a strip mall in Fresno and handles 'tier-three cancellations.' Dennis, reached by phone, confirmed that he has been employed by UnSubscribr since 2022 and that his workload has 'increased geometrically.' He declined to specify what tier-three cancellation entails, but noted that he is 'not allowed to own a phone anymore' and that his supervisor is 'a very polite Python script.'
UnSubscribr's announcement comes amid a broader boom in the 'administrative outsourcing' sector, which includes apps that will call your parents for you, services that will apologize to your spouse on your behalf, and a controversial startup that offers to 'experience your midlife crisis so you don't have to,' which was shut down by the SEC in March after it turned out to be a single trenchcoat of suspicious height.
Ploot, for her part, remains optimistic about UnSubscribr Plus's prospects. The company is reportedly already developing UnSubscribr Plus Ultra, a $49.99 service that will cancel UnSubscribr Plus if you forget to cancel it, though early prototypes have caused several test users to 'phase out of observable reality.'
'The modern consumer wants convenience,' Ploot said. 'They want to pay someone to think about the things they don't want to think about. And if they stop wanting to think about paying that person? Well. That's what Plus is for.'
She then excused herself, explaining that she needed to 'go cancel my own UnSubscribr account before the all-hands meeting.'
When asked if she used UnSubscribr Plus to do so, Ploot did not respond. She was already walking away, scrolling through her phone.