The State of Subscription Waste 2026
The Vendor Friction Index. We read the published pricing page for 30 tools and walked 13 vendor cancellation flows, then wrote down every price tier, every renewal mechanic we found, and every step it takes to leave.
What this measures — and what it does not
Sample. 30 tools for pricing and renewal mechanics; 13 for cancellation flows. Chosen because they recur on the business bank statements we see, not sampled randomly — treat this as a census of common tools, not a representative sample of the market.
Source. Published vendor pricing pages, checked on May 20, 2026. Cancellation flows and vendor help docs were walked between May 19, 2026 and June 2, 2026. List prices only — negotiated and enterprise pricing is invisible to us.
Judgment. Severity and difficulty ratings are our editorial assessment, not a vendor claim. Each renewal mechanic gets one primary classification even where two could apply.
Not measured. We publish no count of how many different names a vendor bills under. We keep statement-matching patterns for each tool, but most of them contain another pattern outright — ADOBE, ADOBE INC and ADOBE SYSTEMSare all in the list, and all match the same charge — so they describe our matcher’s coverage, not vendor behavior. Counting the real thing would need bank-statement data, and this report contains none.
No customer data, and no money figures. This report contains no data from any Spendrein customer. It is built entirely from public vendor documentation, and it cannot read our database. It also publishes no estimate of what any of this costs — the data describes billing mechanics, not spend, and we are not going to model a number and let it get quoted as measured.
What it cost. The making-of covers what reading these pages by hand involved and which of our own findings we had to retract on the way.
Headline findings
20%
29 of 143 published tiers attach a condition that changes what you pay, such as a term commitment, a seat minimum, metered overage, a one-off fee, or a separately sold add-on.
92
Recorded across 30 vendors, spanning 16 kinds — such as an annual commitment that looks monthly, or provisioned resources nobody owns.
71
Across 13 flows we walked — 26 rated high, on consequences like files locked, recordings deleted, or billing that carries on.
Which renewal mechanics show up most
Every mechanic below is one we recorded from a vendor’s published pricing and help pages, or from how their billing model plays out in practice. The count is vendors exhibiting it at least once, out of 30.
- Add-ons and sibling products billed separately12 of 30
- Seats still billing after the person left12 of 30
- Annual commitment that looks monthly10 of 30
- Provisioned resources nobody owns8 of 30
- Whole-plan upgrade to unlock one feature8 of 30
- Metered usage above the included allowance8 of 30
- Price tier creeps with a count nobody prunes6 of 30
- Renews at peak seat count, not current5 of 30
- Personal plans bought around the team plan5 of 30
- Prepaid commitment misaligned with usage4 of 30
- Duplicate workspaces billed in parallel2 of 30
- A free role silently becomes billable2 of 30
- One-off onboarding or implementation fee1 of 30
- Price rises on auto-renewal1 of 30
- Seats sold in blocks you overshoot1 of 30
- Trial seats converting to paid1 of 30
What it takes to leave
54 steps across 13 vendors — median 4, worst 6.
71 in total — median 5 per vendor, peaking at 8.
26 high · 29 medium · 16 low
Every vendor we checked
| Tool | Category | Tiers | Price conditions | Cancelling |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adobe Creative Cloud | Design / creative | 5 | 2 | Hard |
| Anthropic / Claude | AI / API | 6 | 1 | Easy |
| Asana | Project management | 5 | 0 | Not walked yet |
| AWS (Amazon Web Services) | Cloud / infrastructure | 4 | 2 | Not walked yet |
| Calendly | Scheduling | 4 | 0 | Easy |
| Canva | Design / creative | 4 | 0 | Not walked yet |
| Cloudflare | Cloud / CDN | 5 | 1 | Not walked yet |
| Databricks | Data / analytics | 4 | 2 | Not walked yet |
| Datadog | Observability / monitoring | 6 | 1 | Not walked yet |
| Dropbox | Productivity / storage | 5 | 1 | Easy |
| Figma | Design | 6 | 2 | Medium |
| GitHub | Dev tools / version control | 5 | 2 | Not walked yet |
| Google Workspace | Productivity / email | 4 | 0 | Not walked yet |
| HubSpot | CRM / marketing | 6 | 3 | Not walked yet |
| Intercom | Customer support / messaging | 5 | 2 | Not walked yet |
| Jira (Atlassian) | Project management / dev tools | 5 | 2 | Not walked yet |
| Linear | Project management / dev tools | 4 | 0 | Easy |
| Loom | Communication / async video | 4 | 1 | Not walked yet |
| Mailchimp | Email marketing | 4 | 0 | Not walked yet |
| Microsoft 365 | Productivity / email | 6 | 0 | Not walked yet |
| monday.com | Project management | 5 | 0 | Not walked yet |
| Notion | Productivity / docs | 4 | 0 | Easy |
| ChatGPT / OpenAI | AI / API | 5 | 1 | Easy |
| Salesforce | CRM | 6 | 1 | Not walked yet |
| Sentry | Observability / errors | 5 | 1 | Not walked yet |
| Slack | Communication / messaging | 3 | 1 | Easy |
| Vercel | Dev tools / hosting | 4 | 1 | Not walked yet |
| Webflow | Design / no-code | 5 | 1 | Not walked yet |
| Zendesk | Customer support | 5 | 0 | Not walked yet |
| Zoom | Communication / video | 4 | 1 | Easy |
A dash means we have not walked that vendor’s cancellation flow yet — it is not a score of zero. 10 of the 30 vendors listed above have one; 13 flows are documented in total, the rest for vendors outside this table. A price condition count of 0 is different: it means we read every tier and none carried one.
Cite it, or take the raw data
Spendrein, "The State of Subscription Waste 2026: the Vendor Friction Index," August 10, 2026, https://spendrein.com/research/state-of-subscription-waste.
Published under CC BY 4.0 — reuse it with attribution. The full per-vendor table is available as a CSV. One row per vendor, 10 columns:
- tool
- The vendor's product name.
- slug
- Our identifier for the vendor. Resolves to spendrein.com/glossary/{slug}.
- category
- Our editorial grouping for the vendor, not a vendor claim.
- price_tiers
- Published price tiers we catalogued from the vendor's pricing page.
- price_conditions
- How many of those tiers attach a condition that changes what you pay — a term commitment, a seat minimum, metered overage, a one-off fee, or a separately sold add-on. Not a count of tiers carrying any footnote.
- renewal_pattern_kinds
- Semicolon-separated kinds from our 16-kind renewal taxonomy that we recorded for this vendor. One vendor can exhibit several.
- pricing_verified
- The date we read this vendor's published pricing page.
- cancellation_difficulty
- Our editorial rating of the cancellation flow — easy, medium, or hard. Blank where we have not walked the flow.
- cancellation_steps
- Steps in the flow we walked. Blank, never zero, where we have not walked it.
- cancellation_gotchas
- Traps we recorded in that flow. Blank, never zero, where we have not walked it.
Find these patterns in your own statement
This index describes what vendors do in general. Spendrein reads your bank statement and tells you which of these are happening to you — matching charges from the same vendor even when the statement line is worded differently from one month to the next.
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