For many years, the subscription business has benefited from a simple fact in consumer behavior: people are better at signing up than they are at canceling.

They will forget what they ordered. The service is no longer being used, but they continue to pay for it. Monthly deductions of $9 or $15 may continue unnoticed on their credit card bills for months, even years.

With Meta launching Muse this month, this AI personal agent that can handle tasks in multiple areas of personal life quickly became apparent as a target that was easy to tackle, with its bloated subscription model.

Muse can help consumers identify and cancel duplicate subscriptions. Although subscription management services have existed for many years, Muse has incorporated this capability into a broader range of personal assistants, which may make it easier to discover and cancel forgotten recurring charges.

And timing is also very important. According to a report released in April by Mastercard and FT Strategies, nearly half of American consumers (44%) increased their subscription spending in 2025, with an average annual expenditure rising to $1,887, which is approximately $157 per month. Payment data from Bank of America shows that subscription spending in July increased by 7.7% year-on-year, faster than overall card spending, with entertainment and retail subscriptions accounting for about 43% of the total.

Neale Mahoney, a professor of economics at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy, has been researching how much benefit subscription-based companies can gain when consumers do not cancel their subscriptions.

"We found that when people are forced to make decisions, the likelihood of them canceling is about four times higher," said Mahoney. He referred to data from a paper titled "Selling Subscriptions" co-authored by him with Stanford economists Liran Einav and Ben Klopack, which was published in The American Economic Review in 2025.

In the AI proxy world, this distinction is very important.

Stanford researchers estimate that sellers can roughly double their revenue due to consumer inertia: part of this is because people forget or delay canceling subscriptions, and another part is due to the friction involved in canceling, which is too time-consuming or cumbersome. Mahoney states that AI personal agents may mitigate these two factors. However, not all subscriptions are equally vulnerable. He says that for physical subscriptions such as pet food, it’s difficult to forget them if the product continues to be delivered to one’s door; whereas for digital services like credit monitoring, charges may continue to be deducted quietly even if consumers no longer think of them.

In the end, the intervention of AI's personal agents in this consumer psychology may have an impact that goes far beyond subscription services; it could also penetrate into the core financial service decisions that banks have now come to take for granted.

Apollo's chief economist, Torsten Slok, wrote in an analysis last week: " Muse and similar proxy AI assistants may soon automatically transfer household cash to accounts with yields ranging from 3.3% to 5.0%, rather than the national average of 0.1% for demand deposits. If every family uses AI agents to optimize the returns on their cash balances, banks could lose a large portion of their cheap deposits on which they rely for lending, which would become a problem for the entire financial system."

"More and more things in life have turned into recurring bills."

Consumers have begun to cut down on subscriptions more actively.

ScribeUp provides subscription management technology for banks, credit cooperatives, and fintech companies to integrate it into their banking applications. The company states that the likelihood of users initiating cancellations now is 1.8 times that of the same period last year.

"More and more things in life have turned into recurring bills. These bills are getting more expensive every year, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for consumers to track exactly why they are paying for them," said Jordan Mackler, co-founder and CEO of the company. He noted that this trend of increase predates ScribeUp's more recent AI feature, reflecting broader changes in consumer behavior.

According to the company, ScribeUp users now have an average of more than 12 recurring subscription payments, and one-quarter of the users have 20 or more. In addition, the proportion of users with at least 8 subscriptions has increased from 62% to 71% over the past year.

Price increases will accelerate customer loss. Mackler states that the cancellation rate of a single merchant can soar by up to 50% when prices rise. He mentioned that the cancellation activity for health and fitness subscriptions increased the most, by 3.8 times year-on-year, followed by video streaming services with 2.2 times, news and media with 2.1 times, and music streaming with 1.9 times.

Mackler says that AI is increasing the number of subscriptions that ScribeUp can help consumers manage. The company currently tracks approximately 200,000 unique merchants with periodic charges. Before adding the updated proxy capabilities this year, it could only automatically cancel subscriptions for a few hundred large subscription companies.

The average monthly cost of canceled subscriptions is $17.39. Mackler states that ScribeUp can save users over $300 per year on average, with this money coming from recurring bills that users were not aware they were still paying for or no longer needed.

Will the forgotten economics of high costs come to an end?

Subscribed companies are already dealing with significant customer churn. A report from Mastercard finds that the average monthly churn rate – that is, the proportion of subscribers who cancel or do not renew their subscription in a given month – is 20%. However, among the American subscribed companies surveyed, more than half indicated that at least 10% of their subscriber base is inactive, which means that although these customers are still subscribed, they are not actively using the service.

As consumers gain more control over periodic charges, subscription companies may need to compete more vigorously in order to retain them.

Zendesk, the Chief Product Manager responsible for driving product growth and customer retention, stated that the company may need to make the value more clearly visible before customers reach the cancellation page. Hitee Chandra Jha

For some companies, this may mean considering cancellation as an option beyond a black-and-white scenario. Jha says that if a customer of a streaming service has already finished watching a series, it might be better to offer a pause feature rather than drastic discounts. She also mentions that users of fitness apps who have achieved their fitness goals could be directed to maintenance packages, or offered another path to continue participating.

Data from the subscription management company Recurly indicates that this flexibility is effective. According to its "2026 Subscription Status Report," which is based on 76 million independent subscribers from over 2,200 enterprises, there was a 337% increase in the use of the "pause first, then cancel" option. Among those who paused their subscriptions and later returned, three-quarters of them continued to subscribe.

Meta The Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg considers Muse to be the "core" of their AI strategy, and it will be accompanied by unverified consumer-grade hardware, ranging from augmented reality glasses to Muse Charm devices that resemble keychains. However, this is a bet that the market has recently rewarded due to the company's investment.

This AI has also encountered opposition from Amazon, which prevented Muse from making purchases on its website, claiming that access through this proxy violated its service terms. At the same time, allowing AI to access financial information has raised significant privacy concerns. However, according to data from Recurly, 43% of consumers stated that they would be willing to allow AI to manage their subscriptions.

Jha said, "To view cancellation as a transition rather than just a loss is the difference between a mature retention strategy and a defensive strategy." She added, "The best defense against AI-assisted cancellations is not to create friction."

Research on Mastercard also points in the same direction. Among the surveyed consumers, 74% stated that if cancellation were easy, they would prefer to subscribe; 70% said they would be more likely to subscribe again. Additionally, 34% indicated that they would continue subscribing if they could pause instead of canceling.

AI may not put an end to the growth in subscriptions; on the contrary, it could put even greater pressure on companies, forcing them to find new ways to prove their value.

ScribeUp It has been observed that once users believe that the recurring charges in their accounts are indeed of their own choice, they become more confident in subscribing to services as a whole and are willing to increase their total subscription spending.

"If consumers believe they can easily view, manage, and cancel recurring charges, our data shows that they are more likely to increase their overall recurring spending and are also more willing to try new services from the start," says Mackler.

Mahoney believes that a healthier market should produce companies that do not rely on methods to slow down consumers, but rather offer them more ways to stay according to their own wishes. "When people are trapped in subscriptions they don't want or are unable to exit from, market forces are limited, and companies have no incentive to provide high-quality, low-cost products. They can only rely on a locked-in user base," he said.

Whether it's AI taking action or consumers themselves making decisions, when people stop paying for things they no longer want and spend that money elsewhere, "that's good for consumers, good for the market, and good for those companies that produce the products people really want," says Mahoney. "That's how economics is supposed to work."