Four States Already Regulate How You Cancel a Subscription. A Fifth Joins in 2027.
If your business charges anyone on a recurring basis, a membership, a maintenance plan, a monthly retainer, software access, storage, anything that renews without the customer re-ordering, the rules on what you have to disclose and how easy you have to make cancellation just tightened in several states, and they keep tightening.
California's amended Automatic Renewal Law (AB 2863) took effect July 1, 2025, and requires that cancellation be exactly as easy as sign-up. If a customer enrolled online, they cancel online, with no phone call, no retention offer standing in the way, no extra steps. Massachusetts followed with regulations effective September 2, 2025, that go further: businesses must disclose the exact calendar date by which a customer has to cancel to avoid the next charge, not just "30 days before renewal." Minnesota and Virginia have their own versions already in force. Illinois is next, with HB 228 taking effect in January 2027, requiring clear disclosure of every mandatory fee and the factors that determine a customer's total price before they pay.
The part most owners miss: it's about where your customer lives, not where your business is
State consumer protection and attorney general rules like these are typically written to protect that state's residents, which means a landscaping company, software tool, or coaching program based in North Carolina can still be reached by Massachusetts' or California's rules the moment it bills a customer who lives there. You do not have to be a national subscription brand for this to apply. A single out-of-state client on a recurring maintenance plan or retainer is enough to put you inside the scope of a law you have never read.
Why this is bigger than gyms and streaming services
The regulators' own examples, gym memberships, streaming apps, magazine subscriptions, make it sound like a consumer-app problem. In practice the same principles, upfront fee disclosure and easy cancellation, are showing up in enforcement against recurring B2B and professional-service billing too. If you run a monthly retainer, a maintenance contract, a SaaS add-on, or any plan that auto-renews unless someone acts, the honest question is whether a customer could find your cancellation process in under a minute without calling anyone, and whether your invoice says the full price including fees before they agree to pay it.
What to actually do about it
You don't need a compliance department to get ahead of this. Three things cover most of it:
- Put the full price, including any recurring or mandatory fees, in writing before the customer agrees to the first charge, not buried in a contract addendum.
- Make cancellation available through the same channel as sign-up. If someone can start a plan by email or a web form, they need to be able to end it the same way.
- Send a renewal reminder with the actual date the customer needs to act by, especially for anything approaching a one-year contract where silence auto-renews it.
The hard part for most small businesses is not the policy, it's remembering to do it consistently across every client file, every renewal date, every state. That's the kind of recurring, easy-to-forget tracking an AI agent is well suited to: it can watch your contracts and billing records, flag a renewal coming up without a reminder sent, or draft the cancellation confirmation a customer asked for, and put it in front of you to approve. The agent reads and proposes. A person on your team still decides what goes out.
See how that works on the how it works page, or read the source material yourself.
Sources: California's AB 2863 automatic renewal update (Davis Wright Tremaine), Massachusetts junk fee and auto-renewal regulations (National Law Review), and the 2026 junk fees roundup covering Illinois HB 228 (Kelley Drye).