NYC made canceling as easy as signing up

New York City has required cancellation to be as easy as signup since October 1.

The easy response is a bare cancel button, and it quietly throws away saves you could keep. Below, what belongs on the cancel screen instead, plus where oral GLP-1 scripts stand and the next state law on the calendar.

Fierce Pharma's Oral GLP-1 Tracker, updated October 16, put Foundayo at 60,151 weekly prescriptions, up about 4%.

The Wegovy pill sat at about 173,500, down about 3% and below the roughly 184,000 it reached in the September 25 update. The figures are IQVIA data as read by Citi and Jefferies.

In May, Lilly said telehealth platforms drove about 35% of Foundayo's launch volume, and Citi has warned that IQVIA may undercount telehealth scripts.

If the public data under-reads your channel, your own oral cohort is the only complete count. Tag those patients by product and start date this week, so you can read their day 30 and day 60 retention against your injectable patients.

The city's consumer protection department adopted it on July 10. It requires cancellation to be as simple as enrollment, through the same avenues the business used to sign the customer up.

Penalties run from $525 for a first violation to $3,500 for a third or later one, and each deceptive statement can count as its own violation. The city can also seek restitution of charges made after a customer's first cancellation attempt.

Skadden's summary lists exemptions for banks, credit unions and a few insurance-related sellers, and mentions no healthcare carve-out. Neither that summary nor the city's page says whether a save offer is allowed, so have counsel look at yours.

If patients sign up online, an online cancel path is the baseline. A phone-only exit is the first thing to fix.

Per a Kelley Drye summary dated July 14, it requires renewal terms near the acceptance request, affirmative consent, and a cancellation mechanism that is "cost-effective, timely, and easy-to-use" and not "designed to deter cancellation."

Online cancellation is not required, penalties reach $500 per violation, and a violation cured within 30 days of written notice carries no penalty. Businesses under 50 employees or $5 million in annual gross revenue are exempt, though the summary notes conflicting provisions on that point.

Building once to the stricter online standard is cheaper than building twice. If you sit near the exemption line, that is a question for counsel.

New York City now requires cancellation to be as easy as signup. The answer is not a harder cancel button, and it is not a bare one either.

The reflex comes in two versions.

Bury the cancel path and hope, or strip it down to one unconditional button and call the job done.

Phone-only cancellation and click mazes do suppress some cancellations.

They also cost you the restart. Directionally, 40 to 50% of patients who stop a GLP-1 restart within a year, and a patient who could not leave cleanly does not come back.

That pool is too big to trade for a few extra months of billing.

One button, with the reason survey emailed afterwards, breaks two things.

The reason arrives too late to route the first recovery message, so it goes out generic at the one moment personalization matters. And the patient never sees what they often wanted, which is a pause, a shipment delay, a longer refill interval or a word with the care team.

With none of those on screen, everyone presses cancel, including patients who were not really leaving.

Pause, delay and care-team contact sit next to cancel as real choices, not fine print.

Capture the reason right there, at the moment of cancellation, from a fixed list of five to seven options.

A structured field is something a flow can route on. Free text is readable by a person and useless to automation.

Then match the response to the reason:

One leak to close. Cancellations that arrive by phone, text or support chat never touch the portal field, so give support a documented way to log them into the same one.

Without that, your reason data over-represents the patients who clicked through and under-represents the ones who wanted to talk, who are usually the recoverable ones.

Whether a given save step holds up under the city rule depends on how it is built, and the summaries we read do not settle it. Have counsel review the screen before it ships.

The takeaway: Compliance fixes the path. The save has to live on the cancel screen itself, because a cancel button on its own saves no one.

When a plan change or upgrade completes inside a portal you do not control, every unmarked screen between the click and the outcome is a drop-off. Rewriting the CTA will not lift a ceiling set by the number of screens.

Deep-link to the exact screen wherever a stable URL exists. Where the path has several steps, embed a looping GIF of about five seconds showing the clicks, which beats numbered text for an interface the patient has never seen.

Ask for guest access to the portal at onboarding, before the flow is being built.

Count the screens between "cancel" and "confirmed," and write down which of these appear: pause, shipment delay, care-team contact, a reason picker.

Then check where the reason goes. If it lands in an email survey or a support note instead of a structured field your ESP can read, that is the first fix.

The walkthrough takes under an hour, and the field request is something you can send your portal vendor this week.

If retention is your biggest revenue leak, that’s what we fix. growthtrigger.xyz

Reply to this with your biggest retention challenge. I read and respond to every single one.