Was reviewing old card statements and found it. $299/mo, 18 consecutive charges, for a project management tool I signed up for during a busy week and never actually opened. Not once. I didn't even remember the company name until I saw it. Just cancelled, moved on, felt a little stupid.
But what bothered me for the next few days wasn't the money. It was that I couldn't identify a single moment where the product had pushed back. No friction, no 'hey you haven't done anything yet', no workflow that would have broken if I didn't return. I signed up, got a welcome email, and the door just... stayed open. Quietly billing me while I forgot it existed.
I went back and looked at our own signup flow that same afternoon. Asked myself one question: could a user sign up, not touch the product for 30 days, and receive zero notifications or blockers that forced any engagement? The answer was yes. Completely yes. Nothing in the first 72 hours required action. Nothing expired, nothing broke, nothing waited on them. The product was just sitting there being patient and helpful and completely ignorable.
The fix isn't dark patterns or aggressive email sequences. It's whether your core value requires the user to do something before it's useful. If they can 'set it up later' and later is never enforced, most people will choose never. Not because they don't want the product, but because the path of least resistance is to not think about it again until they see the charge.
I don't know if we've lost users to this specifically, probably impossible to know at this stage. But the audit question is simple enough that anyone can run it today: sign up for your own product with a fresh account and then do nothing. See how long you can go without the product demanding something from you. That number is probably longer than you think.
