Questions,
answered straight.

A collective. You tell us which subscriptions you're on and the point at which you'd rather walk than keep paying. When a service crosses that line, we help everyone who drew it walk at the same time: one visible, countable bloc instead of a scattering of individuals nobody notices.

It's what happens to a service once it has you locked in: the screws tighten. Prices creep up, quality slides, the features you liked move behind a higher tier. Not because the product got more expensive to run, but because squeezing extra profit out of people who won't leave is easier than earning it. They're betting the hassle of leaving is worth more to you than the thing itself. The word was coined by writer Cory Doctorow. The pattern is older than the word.

Look, these are just my opinions, man. Reasonable people can disagree, and every one of these companies would tell you a nicer story. But:

• Imgur, once a scrappy image host the whole internet ran on, coasted on little real investment while piling on sketchy, low-rent ads and rolling out capricious AI moderation that nukes posts and accounts with no rhyme or reason.
• Netflix spent a decade teaching you to share a password, then cracked down on it, launched an ads tier, and kept nudging prices up.
• Reddit priced its API so high it killed the third-party apps people actually liked, right before it went public.

See the shape of it? You paid the same or more, and quietly got less.

You can, and you should if a service isn't worth it. But your single cancellation doesn't change anyone's behavior. It's a rounding error in a quarterly report. A company only changes course when the churn is big enough and sudden enough to show up on a chart. That takes coordination. That's the entire reason we exist.

The trigger you set: the condition that means you're out. To start, that's a price increase past a threshold you choose, say, "more than 10% in a year." Don't want to babysit it? Pick "let OurTerms decide," and we'll apply a sensible default line for that service on your behalf.

We notify you first. No surprises. Then, depending on what you chose: either you cancel or downgrade yourself and tell us you held the line, or, if you authorized us to act, we submit a cancellation request to the service as your disclosed agent, timed to land alongside everyone else's in the bloc. We also publish the numbers: how many walked, and how the service responded.

No law requires a company to accept a cancellation submitted by your agent. We fully expect many of them to refuse, stall, or bury it behind a phone tree and a "we couldn't verify your identity."

That's not a hole in the plan. It is the plan. A company that makes it this hard to leave is telling you exactly how much it values keeping you over serving you. When a service stonewalls thousands of documented, authorized cancellations, that refusal becomes the story. And it's a story regulators and reporters happen to be very interested in right now.

So: we can't promise your subscription gets cancelled. What we can do is make sure you're not walking out alone, and that a company slamming the door on a crowd this size has to do it in public.

We understand. Nobody's saying give it up forever. Maybe you go a month without, for the greater good. Maybe you just drop to a cheaper tier and keep watching. Or maybe you go find some alternative that we here at OurTerms would adamantly, absolutely advise against (y'arrgh).

The whole thing only works if they believe the bloc will act. So: will you?

Your call, and you pick it when you sign up:

• Let OurTerms do it (the default). You appoint us as your limited agent for the services you list, to cancel, downgrade, or reverse a request on your behalf when your red line is crossed.
• Do it yourself. You pledge to cancel or downgrade with your own hands when the bloc moves, and hold the line with everyone else.

Either way you can revoke anytime, per service or entirely, in one click. Hard limits we hold ourselves to: we never log in as you, never use your password (because we'll never ask for it), never touch the service's systems, and never claim to be you. We identify ourselves as your agent, openly.

No. OurTerms is not a law firm and nothing we say or send is legal advice. If you've authorized us to, we act as your authorized agent to pass along a cancellation you're entitled to make yourself. If you haven't, you're the one acting and we're just here for the bloc. Either way, if you need advice about your rights, talk to a lawyer.

As little as does the job: your email, the services you list, the red lines you set, and your signed authorization or pledge (which, being an electronic signature, records a timestamp and the IP you signed from, that's what makes it valid). We don't want your streaming passwords and will never ask for them.

It's encrypted, served over HTTPS only, and you can turn on authenticator 2FA if you want the extra lock (optional). And if you ever delete your account, everything goes with it, wiped like you were never here.

No. Never have, never will. There are no ads and no data brokers in this. The entire premise is that we sit on your side of the table, not theirs. Your data pays for nothing here.

Anytime, immediately, one click, for a single service or your whole account. Revoking stops us acting on your behalf from that moment on. Delete the account and every trace of you is erased, like you were never here.

Yes. And here's the part worth reading twice: we won't so much as ask for your credit card until the collective passes 100,000 members. Which means you'll get to see whether this actually works before you're ever on the hook for a cent, and you can walk before paying a dime. After 100k it's $5 a year, or $50 once for life. But we hope you'll stick around, comrade.

I'm fed up. That's the honest answer. Same auto-renewals, same creeping prices, same "your call is important to us," same feeling of being quietly milked because leaving is a pain. I'd rather build the thing that pushes back than keep paying and grumbling. If it grows, $5 a year down the line keeps the lights on. It was never going to make anyone rich.

OurTerms is a project of OpsChamp LLC. Reach us at hello@ourterms.org.