Why is subscription management so painful?

You would think as we have moved to everything-as-a-service, subscription management and admin would have become easier. Not so, it would  appear.

I get a renewal on my Spot Satellite messenger service. Cannot find the “do not renew” switch on my account so I send customer service a message. They comply – a bit too eagerly. Service is cut off weeks before the paid term ends.

I subscribe to 20-25 magazines at any given time as part of my sourcing for the innovation blog. I take advantage of special offers, discontinue some, renew others. All of them want to auto-renew to your credit card and make it painful to cut off. Many make getting to their digital versions difficult. Others have very different paper and digital versions. I try very hard to give them credit with links to exact article or photo page, but man do some make it tough.

Intuit which sells accounting software like Quickbooks to many small businesses would have the process down pat, you  would think. I buy some payroll and other renewals via Amazon (Intuit makes it cheaper to do so) and should be able just input a product key. Usually, it requires a call to their customer center and some amount of maneuvering. I tried to upgrade this week directly through their site and they have  debited our charge card three times leading me to again contact customer service.

World of Warcraft kept charging our card for 2 years after we cancelled. Amex would kindly refund each charge but the vendor refused to listen to me or Amex. Their system  just would not accept a cancellation.

Seriously, why is subscription management so difficult in our age of rapidly growing  Saas, PaaS and IaaS?