Spotify’s February bills just landed at $12.99 for an individual plan, a dollar more than in January. That’s the newest line in a year of streaming price hikes, and it lands in a spring when the federal “click to cancel” rule you may have heard about doesn’t exist. A subscription audit this year has two jobs: finding the charges that crept up, and knowing what rights you actually have when you try to cancel them.
Most audit guides stop at “list everything, cancel what you don’t use.” That’s fine as far as it goes. What they skip is the part that decides whether cancelling is a two-minute job or a three-week argument, and how much the services you keep have quietly grown.
The federal click-to-cancel rule is gone, but your rights didn’t go with it
The FTC had finalized an update to its Negative Option Rule that would have required companies to make cancelling as easy as signing up, and it was set to take effect July 14, 2025. Six days before that, on July 8, 2025, a three-judge panel of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the rule. The court didn’t rule on whether easy cancellation is a good idea. It found the FTC had skipped a required preliminary regulatory analysis, even though an administrative law judge had flagged that the rule’s economic effect might top $100 million a year.
So as of this March there is no single federal rule that says “cancel online in one click.” Plenty of people read the headlines and assumed that meant no protection at all. That’s wrong. The older federal law, the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act (ROSCA), is still on the books, and the FTC spent the fall of 2025 using it hard.
ROSCA still has teeth, and Amazon just paid $2.5 billion to prove it
ROSCA covers anything sold online with a “negative option,” meaning a charge that keeps recurring until you say stop. It requires three things: the seller has to clearly disclose the material terms, get your express informed consent before billing you, and give you a simple way to stop the charges. That last requirement is the one that matters during an audit.
The FTC’s biggest test of it came on September 25, 2025, when it announced a $2.5 billion settlement with Amazon over Prime enrollment and cancellation. The deal includes a $1 billion civil penalty and $1.5 billion in consumer redress, and the FTC estimated about 35 million people were affected. The court had already ruled that Prime counted as a negative option under ROSCA, and the cancellation flow at issue made customers reaffirm their decision three times. Amazon now has to offer an easy cancellation process using the same method people used to sign up.
Ten days earlier, the FTC settled with homework help company Chegg for $7.5 million. The agency alleged the cancel option was buried several clicks deep and that nearly 200,000 people were charged after asking to cancel since October 2020. That kind of overcharging is exactly what a careful audit catches.
The practical takeaway: if a company you signed up with online makes cancelling a maze, it’s exposed under federal law even without the vacated rule. A dated complaint to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, plus a dispute with your card issuer, puts real pressure on a company that keeps billing you.
California’s amended law gives you a price-hike warning most people ignore
State law fills in where the federal rule fell apart, and California’s amended law shows how much a state can require. Amendments to the state’s automatic renewal law took effect July 1, 2025, for contracts entered, amended or extended on or after that date.
Three pieces of it help you directly. First, a business that hits you with a retention discount when you cancel online has to show a prominent “click to cancel” link at the same time, so the offer can’t stand in for the exit. On the phone, they have to tell you that you can cancel by simply saying “cancel.” Second, you’re owed an annual reminder that states what you’re paying for, how often you’re charged, how much, and how to cancel. Third, if the price goes up, the business has to give clear notice no less than 7 and no more than 30 days before the new fee kicks in, along with cancellation instructions.
That notice window is the most useful thing in the law for an audit, and it’s the one people throw away. The email titled “An update to your plan” is your legal heads-up. Treat it as a deadline. California isn’t the only state with an automatic renewal law, so if you live elsewhere, your state attorney general’s site is the place to check what notice you’re owed.
Price-hike drift costs more than the service you forgot
Forgotten subscriptions get all the attention. A 2025 CNET survey conducted with YouGov found Americans spend about $90 a month on subscriptions, around $1,080 a year, and roughly $17 a month of that goes to services they rarely or never use. Cancelling those is the easy win. The harder leak to see is the price creep on the services you actually watch, because nothing about the app changes when the bill does.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ January 2026 Consumer Price Index, released February 13, shows the index for subscription and rental of video and video games up 29.4% from January 2025. Overall prices rose 2.4% over the same stretch. The category that holds your streaming video subscriptions inflated about 12 times faster than prices in general.
Put real prices on a common four-service stack and the CPI number stops being abstract. Netflix raised its Standard plan in January 2025, Disney+ raised its ad-free plan on October 21, 2025, HBO Max raised its Standard plan for existing subscribers on November 20, 2025, and Spotify’s Individual increase hit February 2026 bills.
| Service | Old monthly | New monthly | New annual cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Netflix Standard | $15.49 | $17.99 | $215.88 |
| Disney+ (no ads) | $15.99 | $18.99 | $227.88 |
| HBO Max Standard | $16.99 | $18.49 | $221.88 |
| Spotify Individual | $11.99 | $12.99 | $155.88 |
Add the monthly prices and the stack went from $60.46 to $68.46, an $8 jump. Multiply each total by 12 and the annual cost went from $725.52 to $821.52, so you’re paying $96 more a year (13.2%) for exactly the same four apps. Nobody asked you. Disney+ alone rose 18.8%, and Netflix 16.1%. Keep the stack untouched for five years at today’s prices and it costs $4,107.60, and the past year says today’s prices won’t hold.
How to run a subscription audit that holds up when a company stalls
Your statements are your evidence, so start there. Pull the last three months of card and bank statements so quarterly and annual charges show up, then check your App Store, Google Play and PayPal recurring payments, which can show up on a statement under Apple, Google or PayPal instead of the service’s name. Next to each charge, write two numbers: what you paid when you signed up and what you pay now. If the second is higher and you can’t find the notice email, ask the company when it sent one. In California, it was required to.
When you cancel, screenshot the confirmation page or write down the confirmation number, the date and the agent’s name. Then watch the next statement. If a charge shows up anyway, you have a dated record showing you asked to stop, which is what makes a chargeback or an FTC complaint stick. This is also why I’d cancel through the same channel you signed up with: that’s the standard the FTC got written into the Amazon order, and it gives you the cleanest paper trail.
If you already track spending each month, fold this into that routine instead of treating it as a one-off spring chore; regularly reviewing your budget is where a $1.50 increase actually gets noticed.
Rotation beats loyalty, now that cancelling is cheaper to prove
Knowing your cancellation rights makes rotating services low risk. Say you keep Spotify all year and take the three video services one at a time, four months each. Spotify costs $155.88 for the year. Four months each of Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max at current prices adds $221.88. Your total is $377.76 instead of $821.52, a saving of $443.76, and you still watch everything worth watching on each platform during its turn.
That strategy only works if cancelling is painless and restarting is quick, which is exactly what ROSCA and laws like California’s are built to protect. The vacated federal rule would have made it easier. Its absence doesn’t make it impossible. It just means you keep your own records.
A subscription audit this spring should catch the forgotten gym app, but the bigger target is the automatic 13% raise your streaming stack gave itself. Read the price-change emails, cancel in the channel you signed up in, keep the confirmation, and let each service earn its four months.
