Automatic Subscription Renewals

May 15, 2026

Sometimes I’m asked why I don’t do automatic subscription renewals for omg.lol, or if I could please start offering that option. I generally try to be super flexible and open-minded about feature requests, but this is one area where I don’t think I’ll make any changes. My decision to not offer automatic renewals or recurring billing is a deliberate one, and it’s guided by a personal philosophy with some strong feelings behind it.

I believe that whenever we part with any amount of our hard-earned money, that should be the result of an intentional choice made at the time the money changes hands. We should spend with our eyes wide open, with full awareness of what we’re buying, the terms of the sale, and what we’re getting in exchange. When a company has your billing information on file and charges your card or debits your bank account just because some time has passed, that’s often the result of a choice you made as much as a full year prior. Or, in some cases, you may not even remember making that choice at all—a subscription you didn’t even realize was a subscription just renews itself, and now you have less money. That’s never a good feeling.

For many, though, this can still be a true convenience. For others, it can be an unpleasant surprise. I’m not taking a position that recurring billing is inherently good or bad or right or wrong; I just feel that it’s not compatible with my own belief that all of our spending should be intentional. And that’s why I won’t do it.

When your year of omg.lol is up and it’s time to renew, I want that to be something that you choose to do, based on your perception of the value of the service now, not from the time you signed up. You should decide whether I’ve earned your continued patronage, and whether the service is even still useful to you or needed, and purchase another year—or not!—accordingly. Defaulting to the assumption that you intend to renew feels presumptuous to me. I don’t like that.

So, yeah, that’s how I feel about that, and I hope it makes sense. I’m sure there are some folks who are maybe somewhat annoyed that omg.lol’s billing doesn’t run on autopilot, but I’m equally sure that there are folks who are grateful that they weren’t auto-charged. This isn’t the kind of policy that’s ever going to work for everyone, but the choice I’ve made definitely works with my own principles.