I decided to close a site I was running on Super.so, a service that easily publishes high-performance websites from Notion, and tried to cancel my subscription.
However, no matter how much I searched through account settings and billing information pages, I couldn’t find any “Cancel” or “Unsubscribe” button. How on earth…? When I searched the help pages, I discovered a surprising fact.
To cancel a Super.so subscription, you need to initiate a chat with support.
The official help states the following:
Cancelling Your Subscription Altogether
If you decide to cancel your subscription with Super, we’re here to assist. Please follow these steps:
- Open Help Chat: In your Super Dashboard, open the Help Chat.
- Navigate to Billing: Once the Help Chat is open, select ‘Billing’ followed by ‘Cancel’ to initiate the cancellation process.
- Share Your Experience: We value your feedback and are always looking to improve. During the cancellation process, please kindly share your thoughts on why you’re cancelling so we can learn from your experience and make improvements to our service.
From a software engineer’s perspective, two intentions can be considered for this design:
Intentionally Lowering Cancellation Rates (Churn Rate Suppression) This can be seen as a type of “dark pattern” that complicates the process and encourages users to reconsider cancellation. By changing what could be a one-button process to one that requires human communication via chat, it increases psychological barriers and effort, aiming to reduce cancellation rates. While this might lead to short-term metric improvements, it risks creating distrust among users and damaging long-term brand image.
Collecting Direct Feedback from Users Reading the official help text, this intention seems stronger. The idea is to directly gather the most important feedback—“why are you canceling?”—through chat. There’s certainly potential to collect higher quality, raw feedback than through survey forms. This might reflect a sincere attitude of genuinely wanting to improve the service.
Regardless of intent, requiring chat communication to cancel a subscription creates a poor user experience. In modern web services, users expect to be able to complete account management tasks independently, and forcing human interaction creates unnecessary friction.
If the goal is to collect feedback, it would be better to offer it as an option after providing a simple cancellation button. For example: “Cancel Subscription” → “Would you mind sharing why you’re leaving? (Optional)”
This UX design ultimately reflects the service provider’s priorities over user convenience. While it might improve short-term business metrics, it could harm user trust and brand reputation in the long run.
As developers creating services, we should always ask ourselves: “Does this design truly benefit the user?” Even when there’s pressure to improve business metrics, we shouldn’t forget the importance of maintaining user trust.
Good UX isn’t just about immediate conversions or retention rates—it’s about building long-term relationships with users. When users feel respected and valued, they’re more likely to return or recommend the service to others.
This Super.so example reminds us that how we handle “goodbye” is just as important as how we handle “hello” in the user journey.
That’s all from the Gemba.