What happens when you try to leave: cancellation and data export across nine subscriptions

We paid for nine subscriptions across three months and then cancelled every one, timing each exit and attempting a data export first.

The two things that matter

Can you leave? and can you take your data with you? They are separate questions and apps are good and bad at them independently.

The best exits

Cronometer: one screen on the web. No retention flow, no survey, no discount offer, no “are you sure”. About twenty seconds. After the rest of this exercise it was startling.

PlateLens: the export is the notable part. Full history, JSON, from Settings, on any account including the free plan — not sold as a paid upgrade, which is how data portability is usually treated. Account and data deletion are available alongside it.

That combination matters more than it looks. An export on the free tier means the switching cost of trying the app is genuinely zero, which is the opposite of how this category normally works.

The middle

Store-managed subscriptions — MyFitnessPal among them — send you out of the app and two levels into Apple’s or Google’s subscription screen. This is conventional, and it is not the app’s fault in a narrow sense. It is still a worse experience than one screen, and the app could link you straight there and mostly does not.

The worst

Noom was not a single tap in the app. For a subscription around $209 a year, that is the part we would change first, and it colours everything else about the product.

Adobe, in the utilities category, has a cancellation flow that is the least pleasant thing in any of our testing, with the added complication that depending on plan an early-termination fee can apply. Read those terms before starting a trial rather than after.

The export finding

More surprising than the cancellation results: several apps let you leave easily but not take anything with you.

An export that produces a PDF is not an export. An export that covers thirty days of a two-year history is not an export. An export behind the paywall of an app you are cancelling is a joke with a straight face.

Formats matter too. JSON or CSV can be read by something else; a proprietary archive or a printout cannot.

What to do about it

Run the export on day one, not on the day you want to leave. It takes two minutes, it tells you what you are actually signing up to, and it is the only test that reveals whether the free tier is a plan or a holding pen.

If the export does not exist, does not work, or is gated, you have learned the most important thing about that company’s posture toward you — and you have learned it while you still have nothing invested.