Paying for things has never been easier. Tap your phone, click a button, scan your face – transaction done in under three seconds. No fumbling for cash, no entering card details, no thinking required.
Convenient, right? Frictionless. Modern.
Also expensive as hell, it turns out.
I’ve spent the past few weeks digging through government reports, consumer protection data, and behavioral economics research trying to work out what this “convenience” actually costs British consumers. The numbers are mental. We’re talking billions lost annually – not to criminals (though that’s happening too), but to our own buying habits enabled by payment systems designed to make spending money feel like nothing at all.
Here’s what I found.
The Subscription Black Hole: £1.6 Billion Down the Drain
Let’s start with the most straightforward cost: subscriptions you’re paying for but not using.
According to the Department for Business and Trade and the Competition and Markets Authority, UK consumers waste £1.6 billion per year on unwanted subscriptions. Not “subscriptions we don’t like anymore” – subscriptions we genuinely don’t want and forgot we had.
The scale is bonkers:
- 10 million active subscriptions in the UK right now are unwanted
- 26% of UK adults (over 13 million people) have at least one subscription they don’t want
- Average person wastes £61-69 annually on forgotten services
That’s not a typo. £1.6 billion collectively flushed away because cancelling Netflix was slightly too much effort or we forgot about that gym membership auto-renewal.
How the Traps Work
I went through the CMA’s research on this and there are three main ways companies trap you into paying for stuff you don’t want.
Trap 1: The Free Trial Rollover
You sign up for a “free” 7-day trial. Apple Pay autofills everything. One tap, you’re in.
What you don’t notice: that free trial automatically converts to a £9.99/month subscription unless you manually cancel before day 7. No confirmation, no “do you want to continue?” prompt. It just starts billing you.
The CMA estimates 3.6 million unwanted subscriptions exist purely because people forgot to cancel free trials before they rolled into paid plans.
Personal example: I found three of these on my own statements while researching this. Adobe Creative Cloud (haven’t used it in 18 months), a meditation app I tried once, and a recipe box service I signed up for during lockdown. £37 per month combined, gone, for services I completely forgot existed.
Trap 2: Annual Auto-Renewals
You buy something for a year – VPN, Antivirus, Amazon Prime. Twelve months later, it auto-renews. No warning, no reminder, just a surprise £79.99 charge on your bank statement.
And interestingly enough, about 1.3 million unwanted subscriptions come from annual renewals that people forgot they signed up for a year earlier.
Why that works is very simple: You signed up in January 2024 and then forgot about it, entirely — so when it renews in January 2025, you don’t even remember what the charge is for anymore. More often than not, by the time you figure it out, the money has disappeared and it’s likely too late to get a refund.
Trap 3: Dark Patterns (Making Cancellation Hell)
This one’s deliberate. Companies make signing up brain-dead easy but cancelling deliberately difficult.
Examples I’ve seen personally:
- Signed up online in 30 seconds, but have to call a phone number during business hours to cancel
- Cancel button hidden under four sub-menus and greyed out until you scroll past their “are you sure?” guilt trip
- “Pause” vs “Cancel” deliberately confusing – you think you’ve cancelled but you’ve just paused for a month
The government noticed this too. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (which went fully live in 2025) now mandates that cancelling must be as easy as signing up. If you joined with one click, you must be able to cancel with one click.
But enforcement is patchy, and plenty of companies still make it a pain in the arse.
Where the Money Goes
Streaming services account for 51% of forgotten subscriptions. Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+ – everyone’s got at least two they forgot about.
Gyms are brutal. The average Brit wastes £210 per year on unused gym memberships. That’s £17.50 per month for a place you haven’t visited since February.
Then there are the weird ones – beauty boxes, meal kits, software you signed up for at work and forgot to cancel when you changed jobs. It all adds up.
The One-Click Psychology Tax: £41.4 Billion in Impulse Spending
Right, now we get into the properly large numbers.
UK consumers spend £41.4 billion annually on impulse purchases – things they didn’t plan to buy, didn’t need, and often regret immediately after buying.
The average person spends £605 per year on impulse buys. That’s £50 per month on random crap you saw online and bought without thinking.
88% of UK adults make at least one impulse purchase every month.
This isn’t new. Impulse buying has existed forever – supermarkets put chocolate bars at the checkout for this exact reason. But digital payments have turbocharged it to an absurd degree.
How Your Brain Gets Hijacked
There’s proper academic research on this, mostly from behavioral economists like Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely.
The concept is called “the pain of paying.”
When you give up physical cash, your brain registers a tiny negative emotional response. Look at it go away from your hand, guys. It feels like a loss. That tiny pain is just enough to give you pause and think about whether you really want the thing.
Credit cards dull this pain because you’re not seeing money disappear — you’re merely giving up a piece of plastic that gets returned to you. Studies have shown that people tend to spend up to around 100% more when they use cards than cash.
One-click payments — Apple Pay, PayPal, Amazon 1-Click — remove the pain of paying altogether.
You tap a button. The product is ordered. No input of card details, no PIN, no effort whatsoever. Your brain is getting that dopamine hit from the “seeking” part of your search (hunting for the item), but it never activates to tell you that now you’ve spent money until days later when you check your bank account balance.
The Neuroscience Bit (Brief, I Promise)
Dopamine is released by your brain when you expect a reward rather than when you get one. For this reason, even though it seems fantastic to click “Buy Now,” the item that arrives two days later is frequently disappointing.
This is well exploited by one-click purchasing. The click, not the goods, is what gives you the dopamine rush. The “cost” component of the equation doesn’t become apparent until much later, when it’s too late to reverse, while the pleasure reaction happens instantly.
Because the real thing never lives up to the brain chemistry of hitting the buy button, people strive to replicate the anticipation dopamine boost, which is why unboxing videos exist.
The “Friction” Economy
The entire e-commerce industry runs on removing friction from payments.
High friction: Walk to a shop, find the item, queue at the till, count cash, get change. (Lots of time to reconsider.)
Zero friction: See item on Instagram, double-tap, Face ID confirms, purchased. (Zero time to reconsider.)
There’s research showing that adding just 1.5 seconds of delay to a payment confirmation screen reduces impulse purchases by over 20%.
That’s why Amazon, eBay, and every online retailer on earth spend millions optimizing checkout speed. Every millisecond of delay gives your rational brain a chance to wake up and ask “do I actually need this?”
One-click payments keep your rational brain asleep.
The Fraud Tax: £1.17 Billion Stolen (And We All Pay for It)
Now let’s talk about actual crime.
In 2024, £1.17 billion was stolen from UK consumers and businesses through payment fraud. That’s the official figure from UK Finance. The real number’s probably higher because only about 14% of fraud gets reported.
This breaks into two categories:
Unauthorised Card Fraud: £572.6 Million
This is “classic” fraud – someone steals your card details and buys stuff online without your permission.
The biggest chunk is Remote Purchase Fraud (also called Card Not Present fraud). Criminals get your card number – usually from a data breach – and use it to buy things online before you notice.
£470 million was lost to this in 2024.
Here’s the twisted bit: one-click checkouts and saved payment details make this easier for criminals. They can test stolen card numbers across dozens of sites in minutes because there’s no friction. No CAPTCHA, no address verification, just rapid-fire purchase attempts until they find one that works.
The irony is thick – the same frictionless systems that make legitimate shopping “convenient” also make fraud trivially easy.
Who pays? In 98% of cases, the bank refunds you. But that cost doesn’t vanish – it’s baked into banking fees, interest rates, and merchant charges. We all pay for it indirectly through higher prices.
Authorised Push Payment (APP) Fraud: £450.7 Million
This is the nasty one. This is where scammers trick you into sending money yourself.
Examples:
- Romance scams (meet someone online, they ask for money, they disappear)
- Fake investment schemes (put £5k into this crypto opportunity, it’s gone)
- Purchase scams (buy concert tickets online, seller vanishes, no tickets exist)
71% of APP fraud cases are purchase scams – paying for something online that never arrives.
Average losses are brutal:
- Investment scams: £14,000+ per victim
- Romance scams: £8,000+ per victim
The crazy thing is that you lost this money until October 2024. Banks would remark, “You authorized the payment, tough luck.”
The Payment Systems Regulator made new rules that modified this. Starting in October 2024, banks will have to pay back APP fraud victims up to £85,000 in most cases. The transmitting and receiving banks will each pay half of the cost.
But this cost doesn’t go away. Fees and charges pass it on. Fraud costs everyone, even if they aren’t victims.
The “Fraud Tax” Hidden in Prices
Because retailers and banks lose over £1 billion annually to fraud, they build this cost into their pricing.
Estimates suggest every UK household pays a “fraud tax” of roughly £50-100 per year hidden in higher prices for goods and banking services.
You’re subsidizing criminals without knowing it.
What Your Payment Data Is Actually Worth
While we’re tallying costs, let’s talk about what happens to your payment information when you save it with retailers.
Your data has two price tags: what it costs to buy on the open market, and what companies extract from it in revenue.
The Open Market Price (What Data Brokers Pay)
To a data broker, your personal profile is cheap because it’s sold in bulk:
- Basic contact info: £0.04-0.12 per person
- Behavioral profile (purchase history, browsing habits, estimated income): £0.24-0.75 per person
- Premium targeting (high net worth or specific medical conditions): £1+ per person
Your entire digital footprint costs about 50p.
The Extracted Value (What Companies Earn)
But here’s where it gets interesting. While your data costs peanuts to acquire, companies make serious money from it.
Meta (Facebook/Instagram): Earns approximately £90 per user per year in Europe through targeted advertising. In the US, it’s over £200 per user.
Google: Similar numbers – £80-120 per user annually from ad targeting.
The gap between cost (50p) and value (£90+) is enormous. You’re the product being sold, and the markup is about 18,000%.
The Scandals
A few companies got caught being particularly brazen about this.
Avast (2020): The antivirus company was recording every click, search, and purchase made by users of their “free” software. They sold this data through a subsidiary called Jumpshot to companies like Pepsi, Home Depot, and McKinsey.
The data included GPS coordinates, YouTube videos watched, LinkedIn profiles visited – everything. When Motherboard exposed this in 2020, the CEO had to publicly apologize and shut down Jumpshot, which cost the company about 5% of its revenue.
23andMe (2024-2025): As the DNA testing company careened toward bankruptcy, panic set in about whether they’d sell 15 million people’s genetic data to pharmaceutical companies or insurers. The company’s value dropped from £6 billion to £48 million. The CEO’s trying to take it private to “protect” the data, but trust is shredded.
Mastercard and Visa: They don’t sell your name and card number directly, but they do sell “anonymized” transaction data. Hedge funds buy this to see trends before official earnings reports – for example, knowing Starbucks sales are up 5% this month before the quarterly results come out.
The issue is whether this data is genuinely anonymous or if it can be reverse-engineered to identify individuals. Regulators keep asking this question; the companies keep insisting it’s fine.
When “Inconvenience” Actually Saves You Money
So we’ve established that convenient payments cost UK consumers:
- £1.6 billion in subscription traps
- £41.4 billion in impulse purchases
- £1.17 billion in fraud losses
- £50-100 per household annually in hidden fraud costs
- £90+ per year in personal data value extracted by tech companies
That’s a lot of money leaving your pocket because spending it became too easy.
Which brings us to an odd conclusion: sometimes friction is good.
The Case for Prepaid Payment Systems
There’s a reason why prepaid payment vouchers still exist in 2026, and it’s not just for people without bank accounts.
Systems like Paysafecard – prepaid vouchers you buy with cash and use online without linking any bank details – deliberately reintroduce friction into digital payments.
Here’s what friction does:
- Stops subscription traps. If you buy Paysafecard credit for a specific purchase, there’s no card on file to auto-renew subscriptions. When the credit runs out, the subscription dies. You’re not getting charged £9.99/month for something you forgot about because there’s nothing to charge.
- Kills impulse buying. To make a purchase, you have to physically go buy a voucher or load credit first. That’s enough friction to make your rational brain wake up and ask “do I actually need this?” The answer’s often no.
- Eliminates card fraud. No card details stored = nothing for criminals to steal. If your voucher code gets compromised, the damage is limited to whatever’s left on that specific voucher, not your entire bank account.
- Protects your data. Because you’re not handing over personal financial information, there’s no payment history for companies to track, sell, or leak in a data breach.
- Forces budgeting. You load £50 onto a voucher, that’s your entertainment budget for the month. When it’s gone, it’s gone. No overdrafts, no debt, no “I’ll deal with it next month” rationalization.
It’s the digital equivalent of putting cash in an envelope marked “fun money” and only spending what’s in the envelope.
The Psychology Reversal
Do you remember the idea of “pain of paying”? It comes back with prepaid systems.
When you buy Paysafecard credit, you can feel the money leaving your wallet right away—real cash going to the store owner. When you use that credit online, your brain remembers that you have “paid” for this budget.
It brings back the mental friction that one-click payments were meant to get rid of.
Who This Actually Helps
I’m not suggesting everyone switch to prepaid vouchers for everything. That’d be daft. Direct debits for bills, contactless for the Tube – these things work fine.
But for specific categories where impulse spending or subscription traps are a problem, the intentional inconvenience saves money:
- Online gaming and entertainment: Prevents overspending on in-game purchases or stacking subscriptions
- Gambling and casino sites: Enforces a hard budget limit
- Shopping at unfamiliar retailers: Avoids handing card details to sites you don’t fully trust
- International purchases: No foreign transaction fees or exchange rate surprises
For people who’ve found themselves £600 deep in impulse purchases by November, reintroducing friction through prepaid methods makes financial sense.
The Verdict: Convenience Costs More Than You Think
The shift to frictionless payments wasn’t done for your benefit. It was done to make you spend more money, more often, with less conscious thought.
And it worked. Brilliantly.
UK consumers now:
- Waste £1.6 billion on subscriptions they forgot to cancel
- Blow £41.4 billion on impulse purchases they didn’t plan
- Lose £1.17 billion to fraud enabled by easy payment systems
- Generate £90+ per person annually in data value for tech companies
The “convenience” of one-click buying costs the average British household somewhere between £600-800 per year when you add it all up.
That’s not counting the fraud tax baked into prices or the data extraction happening in the background.
The Trade-Off
You don’t have to quit using your debit card and only use cash. That won’t be achievable in 2026.
But it’s worth asking: what parts of your shopping would be better off with more friction instead of less?
You might want to stop maintaining your payment details if you’re losing a lot of money on subscriptions you don’t use. Instead, make renewals a conscious choice instead of an automatic drain.
If you have £600 worth of impulse buys laying about your home, maybe taking a few extra seconds to enter your card information by hand or using prepaid credit that requires a trip to the store would save you money in the long run.
The people who sell you products want you to think that paying is easy. That’s how the whole thing works. Push a button, dopamine activates, the merchandise is ordered, and the smart brain never wakes up.
Sometimes the problem is the feature, not the bug.
The question is whether you’re willing to deal with a little trouble for a few hundred pounds a year in your bank account instead of Amazon’s.
