Discussion
New blogpost:
"New UK rules for consumer subscription contracts"
One for people who run businesses who sell subscriptions to consumers in the UK.
The detail is quite complicated, even if the principles are simple enough, and it has taken me most of my day so far to get my head around this... enjoy!
https://decoded.legal/blog/2026/11/new-uk-rules-for-consumer-subscription-contracts/
> Utilities, Insurance, *gaming*??? What makes these any different from any other service?
Sector-specific regulation, which already exceeded the requirements of general consumer law.
@neil when you say exceeded, does that mean that insurance companies must also allow termination of auto-renewals?
Some do, and I try to use them but some still don't offer the choice at sign-up and require a phone call (once contracted) to change to non auto renew.
Insurance isn't an industry I'm familiar with as a lawyer, but as a consumer, I've turned off auto-renewals on the insurance products that I have. Whether that's a regulatory requirement, or just sensible commercial practice though, I do not know.
I'd hope that services like Patreon and OnlyFans will already have this sorted, so that people using those services to offer subscriptions will not need to worry.
For people running their own subscription services / platforms, this is likely to take a bit more thinking.
@neil I can't find any documentation to suggest that Stripe Billing - a paid-for subscription management platform - will be implementing any functionality to meet the new legislation.
A good comparison (albeit from a business with a vested interest in selling their solution to fill that gap): https://renewful.co.uk/guides/stripe-uk-subscription-rules
I would be interested in whether Stripe continues to offer Billing in the UK, if it can't be used compliantly (or whether they intend to make it compliant)
@neil Thanks Neil. Very interesting. How does that affect subscription software licensing. If the software is self hosted by the user and not the seller are they still offering a service? Is this just for consumers or does it also affect B2B subscriptions?
Consumers only.
One would need to look into the detail of any particular service model but I suspect that the policy behind it applies to regular repeating payments for licensing.
@neil Thank you for the post.
At first blush it looks great until the part about exclusions. I followed the link to the act hoping to find reasoning, but was disappointed (not surprised).
I find the scale and scope of exclusions incomprehensible tbh. Utilities, Insurance, *gaming*??? What makes these any different from any other service?
Confused, as ever :-)