For years, subscription businesses have benefited from a simple fact of consumer behavior: people are much better at signing up than canceling.
They forget what they joined. They stop using services but keep paying. A $9 or $15 monthly charge can disappear into a credit card statement for months or even years.
With the rollout of Meta Muse this month, an AI personal agent that can handle tasks across many areas of personal life, it quickly became clear that subscription bloat was an easy target.
Muse can help consumers identify and cancel recurring subscriptions. While subscription-management services have existed for years, Muse brings that capability into a much broader personal assistant, potentially making forgotten recurring charges much easier to surface and cancel.
And the timing matters. Close to half (44%) of U.S. consumers increased their subscription spending in 2025, with average annual spending rising to $1,887, or about $157 a month, according to a report published by Mastercard and FT Strategies in April. Subscription spend rose 7.7% year-over-year in July, faster than overall card spending, according to Bank of America payments data, with entertainment and retail subscriptions accounting for about 43% of the total.
Neale Mahoney, an economics professor at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, has studied how much subscription businesses benefit when consumers fail to cancel.
"We found that when people are forced to decide, they are about four times more likely to cancel," Mahoney said, citing data from his 2025 American Economic Review paper "Selling Subscriptions," co-authored with Stanford economists Liran Einav and Ben Klopack.
That distinction matters in an AI agent world.
The Stanford researchers estimated that sellers can roughly double revenue because of consumer inertia, when people forget or put off canceling, and cancellation friction, when ending a subscription takes too much time or effort. AI personal agents could weaken both, Mahoney said. But not every subscription is equally vulnerable. A physical subscription, such as pet food, is hard to forget when the product keeps arriving at your door, he said, while a digital service, such as credit monitoring, can quietly keep billing long after a consumer stops thinking about it.
Ultimately, the AI personal agent's intervention with this consumer psychology could have implications far beyond the subscription and influence decision-making deep within the core financial services that banks take for granted today.
"Muse and similar agentic AI assistants could soon sweep household cash automatically into accounts paying 3.3% to 5.0%, instead of the 0.1% national average on checking accounts. If every household used AI agents to optimize the return on their cash balances, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which would be a problem for the entire financial system," Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok wrote in an analysis last week.
'More of life is becoming a recurring bill'
Consumers already were becoming more aggressive about cutting subscriptions.
ScribeUp, which builds subscription-management technology into banking apps for banks, credit unions, and fintech companies, says its members are now 1.8 times more likely to initiate a cancellation than they were a year ago.
"More of life is becoming a recurring bill. Those bills cost more every year, and it becomes increasingly difficult for consumers to keep track of everything they are paying for," said Jordan Mackler, the company's co-founder and CEO. He said that increase predates ScribeUp's newer AI capabilities and reflects a broader change in consumer behavior.
According to the company, the median ScribeUp user now has more than 12 recurring subscription payments, while 1 in 4 has 20 or more. In addition, the share of users with at least eight rose from 62% to 71% over the past year.
Price hikes can accelerate the exit. Mackler said cancellations at an individual merchant can jump as much as 50% when prices rise. Health and fitness subscriptions have seen the sharpest increase in cancellation activity, up 3.8 times year-over-year, followed by video streaming at 2.2 times, news and media at 2.1 times, and music streaming at 1.9 times, said Mackler.
Mackler said AI is increasing the number of subscriptions ScribeUp can help consumers manage. The company currently tracks roughly 200,000 unique recurring billers. Before adding its newer agentic capabilities this year, it could automate cancellations for only a few hundred major subscription companies.
The average canceled subscription costs $17.39 a month, and Mackler said ScribeUp saves users more than $300 a year on average on recurring bills they didn't realize they were paying for or no longer needed.
An end to the costly economics of forgetting?
Subscription companies are already dealing with significant customer turnover. The Mastercard report found average monthly churn — the percentage of subscribers who cancel or fail to renew in a given month — is 20%. But more than half of U.S. subscription businesses surveyed said at least 10% of their subscriber base was inactive, meaning those customers were still subscribed but were not actively using the service.
As consumers gain more control over recurring charges, subscription companies may need to compete harder to keep them.
Hitee Chandra Jha, principal product manager at Zendesk who specializes in product-led growth and customer retention, said companies may need to make value more visible before a customer reaches the cancellation screen.
For some companies, that could mean treating cancellation less as an all-or-nothing event. Jha said a streaming service whose customer has finished watching a series might be better off offering a pause rather than a desperate discount. A fitness-app user who has reached a goal could be moved to a maintenance tier or offered another path to stay engaged, she said.
Data from subscription-management company Recurly suggests that kind of flexibility can work. In its 2026 State of Subscriptions report, based on 76 million unique subscribers across more than 2,200 businesses, it found that the use of "pause before cancel" options jumped 337%, and three out of four customers who paused eventually returned.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions Muse as the "centerpiece" of an AI strategy that will be surrounded by still unproven consumer hardware, from augmented reality glasses to the Muse Charm keychain fob-like device, but it is a bet that the market has recently rewarded the company for making.
The AI has encountered pushback from Amazon, which blocked Muse from shopping on its site, saying the agent's access violated its terms of service. There are also significant concerns about privacy when giving an AI access to financial information. But 43% of consumers said they are comfortable with AI managing their subscriptions, according to the Recurly data.
"Treating cancellation as a transition, not just a loss, is what differentiates a mature retention strategy from a defensive one," Jha said. "The best defense against AI-assisted cancellation is not friction," she added.
Mastercard's research points in the same direction. Of the consumers surveyed, 74% said they are more likely to subscribe when cancellation is easy, while 70% said they are more likely to resubscribe. Another 34% said they would remain subscribed if they were given the option to pause rather than cancel.
Instead of spelling the end of subscription growth, AI could instead put more pressure on companies to find new ways to convince customers of value.
ScribeUp has seen that once users trust that the recurring charges on their accounts are the ones they actually chose, they become more comfortable with subscriptions overall and increase their total subscription spending.
"If consumers trust that they can easily see, manage, and cancel recurring charges, our data shows they are likely to expand their overall recurring spend and are more willing to try new services in the first place," Mackler said.
According to Mahoney, a healthier market should produce businesses that don't rely on ways to slow consumers down but give them more ways to stay on their own terms. "When people are trapped in subscriptions they don't want or can't get out of, market forces are limited, and companies don't have the incentives to have a high-quality product at a low price. They can just rely on a locked-in install base," he said.
Whether it is AI or the consumer taking action, when people stop paying for something they no longer want and spend that money elsewhere, "that's good for consumers, it's good for markets, and it's good for firms that are making products that people want," Mahoney said. "That's economics working the way it's supposed to work."