A five-level scale for measuring the gap between what a company says about user agency and what the user actually experiences.
Companies tell users that cancellation is easy. The user experience tells a different story. Companies tell users they honor data requests. The actual process is designed to make users give up. The Friction Score names the gap, measures it on a five-level scale, and publishes the result so the user knows what they are walking into before they start.
The methodology is domain-agnostic. It was developed for subscription cancellation and is currently being extended to personal data requests. It applies to any domain where a company's stated policy and the user's lived experience diverge in ways that benefit the company.
Five levels, anchored to user experience rather than company intent. Each level describes what the user actually has to do, not what the policy claims is possible.
The user can complete the action in one or two clicks from a logged-in state, without speaking to anyone, without explaining themselves, and without being routed through a retention flow.
The user can complete the action self-service, but the path is buried, requires more than two steps, or includes a single retention interstitial that can be dismissed.
The user must engage with a retention flow, answer questions about why they are leaving, or navigate multiple confirmation screens. The path remains self-service but the company has made it deliberately slower.
The user must contact the company directly through chat, phone, or email. Self-service is not available. The retention conversation is mandatory and the company controls the pace.
The company actively obstructs the action. Common patterns include phone-only cancellation with limited hours, retention agents trained to refuse, repeated authentication challenges, or paths that loop the user back to the start.
The first public implementation of the Friction Score. More than two hundred services scored for subscription cancellation, with dark pattern documentation alongside each entry. Open source, no data collection, free.
Visit Cancel Freely →The second implementation. Applies the Friction Score to personal data requests under GDPR, CCPA, CPRA, and similar regimes. The Data Request Friction Score adapts the five-level scale to the specific shape of data deletion and access workflows, and the site ships alongside copy-ready templates and jurisdiction-specific rights guides.
Visit DeleteFreely →The gap between stated policy and lived user experience is one of the most reliable places to look for where a company's interests have quietly diverged from its customers'. Most measurement frameworks for consumer protection score what companies claim. The Friction Score scores what users encounter. The two numbers are almost never the same, and the difference between them is the methodology's whole reason for existing.
The methodology is published openly. Anyone is free to apply it to a new domain, fork the scale, or build a directory of their own. Methodologies travel; implementations stay local. Both matter.
The Friction Score is one of several methodologies in the practice. The others, along with the implementations that prove them, live on the Practice page.
Questions, critiques, and proposed extensions are welcome. Write to nathan@thinkingmanagement.com.