Every default has two effects: the take-up it produces now, and the behavior of the people it enrolled. A good default produces customers who act like they chose. A bad one produces customers who act like they were caught.

Three questions

1. The plain questionIf you asked customers in one sentence, “Do you want this?”, would most say yes? A default that wins the plain question removes a click. A default that loses it collects people by accident.
2. The surpriseWill anyone be surprised later, by a charge, a box on the doorstep or a text? Surprise is the signal that consent wasn’t real, and it’s what turns into tickets and disputes.
3. The way backIs undoing it as easy as accepting it was? A default that takes one tap to accept and six to reverse is a trap, whatever the first two answers say.

Most defaults pass the first question for some customers and fail it for others. The fix is to present both options clearly, or to preselect and make the terms and the way back impossible to miss.

What the newspaper learned

The best evidence on this comes from a field experiment run with a large European newspaper and reported in a January 2026 working paper by Klaus Miller, Navdeep Sahni and Avner Strulov-Shlain. Over a million readers were offered trial subscriptions of two or four weeks, free or at €0.99. Some trials renewed into a paid subscription automatically. Others ended unless the reader chose to continue Published.

The auto-renewing trial did what everyone expects in the short run: more paying subscribers right after the trial. But fewer readers started a trial when it auto-renewed. The authors’ summary: auto-renewal “benefits the firm in the short-term,” but “lowers subscriptions take-up by 35% and total subscribers by 23% over 20 months” Published. Many readers were inert, the paper finds, “yet most anticipate and account for their inertia.”

Customers price in your defaults. The ones who expect to be caught don’t start.

It’s a working paper, not yet peer reviewed, and one newspaper isn’t every brand. But your customers have seen plenty of auto-renewing trials. When they suspect a default is set against them, some decline the whole offer.

Revenue from forgetting

Liran Einav, Benjamin Klopack and Neale Mahoney used payment-card data to show that cancellations jump in months when a card is replaced and the subscription must be actively renewed. Their models estimate these frictions “roughly double seller revenues on average, holding fixed initial subscribers” Published.

Put the two side by side. Inertia is worth a lot to the seller, which is why bad defaults exist. Customers know it, which is why bad defaults cost more over time than they show at launch. Revenue that depends on customers not noticing is borrowed from next year’s growth, and in 2025 a regulator called in one very large loan (chapter 9).

A default that passes

Say a coffee brand preselects “every 3 weeks” because its one-time buyers reorder at a median of 22 days, and shows the price, next shipment date and “skip or cancel any time” beside the button. Most customers would pick it, nobody is surprised, and moving the date is one tap. That default earns its take-up.

Now say it preselects “every 2 weeks” to lift revenue per customer, with the terms in a tooltip. It fails all three questions. The second bag arrives while the first is half full, and “I have too much” becomes the top cancel reason.

Do this

• Put your list of preselected choices through the three questions. Mark each one pass or fail. For every fail, decide this week: remove the preselection, or keep it and fix the terms and the way back.