ON SUBSCRIPTIONS
No subscription required
One payment. No renewal. No next month. We are selling you the last thing you will ever have to buy, and we would like to explain why that is now a radical position.
- $700M
- through one operation’s payment accounts in twelve months, per the FTC
- 6 days
- between the federal click-to-cancel rule being struck down and the date it would have taken effect
- $525
- the first-violation fine in New York City from 1 October 2026
01
Everything is rented now
You do not own your music. You rent it.
You do not own your films. You rent them.
You do not own your software. You rent it, it gets worse every year, and you rent it anyway.
BMW charged a monthly fee for heated seats. In the car. That you bought. The seats were already installed. The wire was already run. You were paying rent on a switch.
Somewhere in the last fifteen years, buy stopped meaning you owned a thing. It started meaning you had begun paying for it.
02
They have names for it
That is the part people miss. These are not accidents somebody named later. They are techniques. They have names. They are taught. People are promoted for them.
The roach motel. Easy to get in. Try getting out. Signing up is one click. Cancelling is nine screens, an exit survey, and a phone line answering nine to five Central, where a man named Kyle is authorised to offer you forty per cent off.
Kyle is not an obstacle in the process. Kyle is the process.
The trial that is not one. Free for thirty days. Then $89.99 a year, forever, disclosed in grey eleven-pixel type, below the fold, behind a link.
Zombie billing. The charge that keeps arriving after you cancelled. They named that one too. They named it, wrote it down, and kept doing it.
03
The receipts
This is not a vibe. This is a docket.
In June 2026 the FTC sued an operation called Genesis Tech. Fifteen corporations. Eight people. The portfolio: fitness apps, an ADHD self-help course, two PDF editors, fashion advice, and horoscopes.
About a quarter of a billion dollars between 2023 and 2025. Roughly $700 million moved through its PayPal accounts in a single twelve-month stretch.
The FTC alleges they advertised things as free or one-time, buried the renewal in fine print, charged people twice for the same product, added products nobody ordered, and kept charging cards after confirming the cancellation.
Sit with the horoscopes for a second. Someone built a retention funnel for astrology. Someone A/B tested the cancel button on a horoscope. Somebody’s bonus depended on how many people failed to escape their star sign.
04
The rule that got cancelled
Now the good part.
There was going to be a federal rule. Click to cancel. One idea: leaving should be as easy as arriving. Wildly popular. Obvious.
It was struck down on 8 July 2025. Six days before it took effect.
Not on the merits. On procedure. The agency had skipped a required economic analysis.
Read that again. The rule that would have forced companies to stop hiding the exit was itself cancelled, quietly, on a technicality, six days out, over paperwork.
Put that in a script and they would send it back. Too obvious. Nobody would buy it.
05
New York went ahead anyway
The city did it locally instead. From 1 October 2026, if you sell a subscription in New York City, you have to let people cancel the same way they signed up.
First violation, $525. Second, $1,050. Third, $3,500.
Which is progress. It also puts a price on the exit door. Somewhere in a conference room right now, someone is dividing $525 by their churn rate to see whether honesty pencils out.
06
So here is where we are
We are a conceptual art church. We sell a ticket to Heaven for $7.77. A ticket to Hell is $6.66. It is printed, sealed and posted to your door. Your name goes into a public record with a hash chain anyone can recompute.
You pay once. There is no month two.
By the standards of the modern American checkout, that makes a novelty afterlife ticket, sold by an art project, the most honest transaction you will make this week.
We would like it noted that this is not a high bar. We did not clear it. We simply declined to dig.
You pay once. There is no month two.
WHAT YOU DO NOT GET
- No renewal
- No auto-renew
- No trial that becomes a plan
- No “we’ve updated our Terms”
- No retention specialist
- No cancellation flow, because there is nothing to cancel
One payment. Then silence. Forever.
Proceeds support the missions of the Church of Conceptual Art.
THE EXPENSIVE ONE
$777.00 is the cheap option
The Fast Pass Upgrade is a physical object. A framed shadow box — the credential, a cut key, the certificate, a plaque — assembled by hand and posted to your door. Heaven is $777.00. Hell is $666.00. Both gates, $1,443.00.
That is the most expensive thing on this website. We would like to set it next to a number you already live with.
The average American pays $273 a month for subscriptions. Eighty-nine per cent of people underestimate that figure, and the average person guesses less than a third of it. Forty-two per cent are currently being charged for something they have forgotten they bought.
So the most expensive thing we sell costs less than three months of what you are already paying for things you cannot name.
$273 a month — the average American’s monthly subscription bill.
Ten years from now
We are asking for one payment, for admission to eternity. It is the shortest commitment in your bank statement.
See the Fast Pass Upgrade →You have been unsubscribing your whole life. This is the last one.
SOURCES
- FTC sues to stop sprawling enterprise operating unlawful subscription schemesFederal Trade Commission, June 2026
- Eighth Circuit vacates the FTC’s click-to-cancel rule days before the compliance deadlineLatham & Watkins, July 2025
- Americans are spending more on subscriptions and are less aware of their spendingWest Monroe
- Landmark click-to-cancel consumer protection rulesOffice of the Mayor, City of New York, July 2026
KEEP GOING