You needed one thing. One time. You found a tool, it said “free,” and you used it. Then, four months later, you’re looking at your bank statement and there’s a charge — $12.99 — from a company name you recognise but barely. You used it once. You thought it was free. You forgot to cancel, because there was nothing to remember to cancel from, because you didn’t realise you’d started a trial.
This is not forgetfulness. This is design.
The free trial is a piece of engineering. Not software engineering — behavioural engineering. Its purpose is to get your card details into a system during a moment of high intent — you need a thing, the thing is in front of you — and then to stay there, billing quietly, past the point when the intent fades. Joining requires one click. Cancelling requires finding the settings page, which is under “account,” which is under your name in the top-right corner, which requires scrolling down, which requires clicking “manage subscription,” which opens a panel that offers you a discount first, and then a pause, and then — if you get through all of that — a confirmation email to check, with a link that expires in 24 hours.
The asymmetry is the point. Friction on exit is a revenue strategy.
Adobe, to pick a name at random, makes several billion dollars a year from Creative Cloud. A significant portion of that revenue comes from users who are paying for software they use rarely or not at all, who haven’t cancelled because the cancellation experience is sufficiently annoying that the $54.99 per month feels like less work than the alternative. They are not wrong to feel this way. The alternative is genuinely more work. The work was put there on purpose.
The subscription model has become so dominant in software that it’s easy to forget it’s a choice, not a law. Software doesn’t have to be sold this way. For most of computing history, it wasn’t. You bought a program. You owned it. You could use it for ten years or ten minutes. The vendor received money once and had to earn the next sale by making something better. The incentives pointed toward quality and longevity rather than retention and lock-in.
The subscription model changed the incentive structure. Now the goal is not to make the best product but to make the most sticky one. Stickiness means features that are useful but also entangled — files stored in proprietary formats, workflows that depend on specific integrations, histories and preferences that don’t export cleanly. Stickiness means friction on the way out. Stickiness means billing trials to people who needed one export, one time, and didn’t realise what they were agreeing to.
This is not limited to PDF tools. It’s the texture of the modern software industry. But PDF tools are a good example because the underlying job to be done is genuinely simple — compress this, merge that, convert this other thing — and the subscription wrapper around that simple job is so obviously disproportionate. You are paying $9.99 a month to compress the occasional PDF. The compression algorithm is open source. The compute required is minimal. The subscription exists because the subscription is the business, and the PDF tool is just a reason to start one.
There is a different kind of tool. One that does one thing, one time, with no account required, no card details, no trial period, and no email to confirm. You open it. You use it. You close it. It has no reason to keep you — no server costs to recoup, no retention targets to hit, no investors expecting monthly recurring revenue. It just does the job.
fwip is free in your browser. No account. No trial. No card. Try it →