2026-08-10 · 17 min read

What happens to my subscriptions when I die (and who pays)

What happens to my subscriptions when I die: nothing stops on its own. What each provider requires, why cancelling the card fails, and who owes the charges.

Nothing stops. Every recurring charge keeps renewing until a living person contacts each company one at a time and proves they have standing — no provider is told you died, and the only standing inactivity backstops that exist (Google and Microsoft) take two years to fire. Cancelling the card is not the kill switch people expect: card networks push replacement numbers to merchants automatically, and for anyone running a business a dead card takes the domain, the site and the email down with it.

Do any subscriptions stop on their own?#

Almost none. Google is explicit that removing the app changes nothing: when you uninstall the app, your subscription won't cancel — the charge continues until someone cancels inside Play's subscriptions screen, and even then it runs to the end of the paid period.

Two big providers publish a standing inactivity policy, and both are slow:

Microsoft states that Microsoft accounts expire after two (2) years of inactivity, with Outlook.com and OneDrive frozen after one year and files deleted shortly after.
Google reserves the right to delete an inactive Google Account and its activity and data if you're inactive across Google for at least two years.

Netflix is sometimes cited as a third, but it was a one-time cleanup rather than a system: in May 2020 it began asking members who hadn't watched anything for 12 months to confirm they wanted to keep the membership, cancelling automatically if nobody responded. Those accounts were under 0.5% of its member base — a few hundred thousand people. Nothing about it is a plan you can rely on.

Note also that these are account deletion policies, not billing policies. An account that is being paid for is not inactive in the sense that matters. Assume every charge renews until stopped by hand.

Why doesn't the provider know the account holder has gone silent?#

Because most of them are structurally barred from finding out. Death records in the U.S. sit behind the Social Security Administration's Limited Access Death Master File, and access is restricted by 15 CFR Part 1110 to persons certified as having "a legitimate fraud prevention interest, or … a legitimate business purpose pursuant to a law, governmental rule, regulation, or fiduciary duty." A streaming service is not on that list. The certification program itself was created under Section 203 of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013, and each subscription sits behind an application process and real money — a $2,930 annual certification processing fee, plus a $247 attestation fee every three years.

So the sequence is always the same: a human contacts the company, the company asks for documents, and only then does anything change.

What does each provider actually require?#

Provider	What they need from you	What you get	What you don't get
Apple	A Legacy Contact access key set up in advance, or a court order naming you as rightful inheritor (alternative documentation accepted in jurisdictions including France, Germany, Japan, Australia and New Zealand)	Account access via the digital legacy process	A Legacy Contact cannot access movies, music, books or subscriptions bought with the Apple Account, nor anything in iCloud Keychain — payment information, passwords, passkeys
Google	A request reviewed case by case; three outcomes only — close the account, request funds, or obtain data	Data, or closure	"We cannot provide passwords or other login details"
Netflix	The email address or phone number on the account, plus the full payment information currently used	Cancellation	Nothing else — the help page does not ask for a death certificate
Spotify	The general support contact; Spotify publishes no dedicated bereavement article	Closure, reversible for 7 days via emailed link	A documented process
Amazon	Documentation showing you are the legal representative of the estate, photo ID, and the email or phone on the account, sent to its bereavement support team	Account closure and changes	Self-service
Microsoft	"A valid subpoena or court order" — except in Germany and China, which accept a death certificate plus supporting papers (a certificate of inheritance, Erbschein, in Germany; proof of family relationship in China)	Possibly nothing — "Microsoft may be unable to provide the account content"	Any guarantee, even with the court order

Two traps in that table. First, Google's closure is a one-way door: once closed, Google is unable to process any request to turn over the contents of the account at a later date, so pull the data before you close anything. Second, Spotify separates the two actions you probably think are one — cancelling Premium doesn't close the account, it means your Premium stays until your next billing date, then your account switches to free. The charge stops; the account stays.

Apple's court order has to say specific things: the name and Apple Account of the deceased, the name of the next of kin requesting access, that the decedent was the user of all accounts associated with the Apple Account, that the requester is the legal personal representative or heir, and that Apple is ordered to assist. Vague probate paperwork gets rejected.

Can I just cancel the card and be done?#

No, and this is where most advice quietly fails. Under Regulation Z § 1026.11, upon reasonable notice of the consumer's death a card issuer may decline future transactions and terminate the account — meaning the card stops only once someone tells the issuer. The same rule requires issuers to give an estate administrator the account balance in a timely manner (within 30 days of the request is deemed timely) and, after that request, to stop imposing fees such as late, annual or over-the-limit fees and stop increasing any APR.

But a cancelled card is not a stopped subscription. Card networks and issuers run account updaters, and Stripe says it works with card networks and automatically attempts to update saved card details whenever a customer receives a new card — explicitly including cards replaced because they expired or were reported lost or stolen, and firing a payment_method.automatically_updated event when it happens. It isn't universal: Stripe notes the feature requires issuers to participate with the network, that it is "widely supported in the United States," and that international support varies by country. But you cannot assume a replaced card breaks the billing. Recurring billing is built to survive it.

For charges pulled straight from a bank account, the path is different: revoke authorization with the company, then give the bank a stop payment order. Under Regulation E § 1005.10, the consumer may order a stop orally or in writing at least three business days before the scheduled transfer — with the catch that an institution may require written confirmation, and an oral order stops being binding after 14 days if that confirmation never arrives. The CFPB publishes fill-in sample letters for exactly this — a revocation letter to the company, a notice to your bank, a stop payment order, and an unauthorized-transfer notice.

Who is on the hook for the charges?#

The estate, usually — not the family. The FTC's 2011 policy statement on collecting debts of the deceased proceeds from the position that family members typically are not obligated to pay a deceased relative's debts from their own assets, and warns collectors against creating the misleading impression that someone is personally liable. The CFPB puts the outcome plainly: if there is no money or property left in the estate, or the estate can't pay, the debt will generally not be paid.

The exceptions are narrow and worth knowing: co-signers, joint account holders, surviving spouses in states whose law requires them to pay a particular type of debt, executors or administrators required by state law to pay a bill out of jointly-owned property, and surviving spouses in community property states — which the CFPB lists as Alaska (only if a special agreement was signed), Arizona, California, Idaho, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin. Being an authorized user on the card is not the same as being a joint holder: "being an authorized user generally does not obligate you to pay the debt."

On cancellation rights: there is still no federal click-to-cancel guarantee. On July 8, 2025 the Eighth Circuit vacated the FTC's amended Negative Option Rule on procedural grounds, days before its compliance date. The FTC restarted the effort — on March 11, 2026 it issued an advance notice of proposed rulemaking asking whether and how to amend the rule, with comments due April 13, 2026 — but an ANPRM is the beginning of a rulemaking, not a rule. Meanwhile sellers still answer to the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act, and the FTC still brings ROSCA cases: in September 2025 it settled with Chegg for $7.5 million over hard cancellation and failure to honor cancellation requests. Useful pressure. Not a one-click exit you can count on.

How do I find all of them?#

Four places, in this order:

Card and bank statements, 13 months back. Annual renewals only show up once, so a 90-day window misses them.
Apple. App Store subscriptions live in one list — on iPhone, open Settings, tap the account name at the top, then Subscriptions, where each can be cancelled or switched. There is no third-party route: cancelling requires signing in to the account that owns it, or an Apple-approved legal request.
Google Play. The Payments and subscriptions screen holds the Android side, where each can be cancelled, paused or changed.
The registrar and host dashboards. These never appear on an app store list and are the ones that matter most.

One easy miss: with Family Sharing and Purchase Sharing turned on, the organizer pays for the family's purchases unless an adult member uses their own payment method — and Apple charges a member's own Apple Account balance before falling through to the family organizer's primary payment method. When the organizer's card goes, billing breaks for several people at once. The same tangle shows up across email, photos and cloud storage when an account holder goes unreachable.

Which subscriptions must not be cancelled?#

If the person ran anything online, some renewals are load-bearing. Cancel them and you do not save money — you destroy an asset.

The domain is the clearest case. ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy requires that for registrations deleted within eight days of expiration, the existing DNS resolution path specified by the registrant must be interrupted by the registrar from expiration until deletion, to the extent the registry permits. The website going dark is not a bug; it is the policy working. Registrars must send at least two renewal reminders, approximately one month and approximately one week before expiration — to the registrant email in the contact record, which may be the exact mailbox nobody can open. After deletion the domain enters a 30-day Redemption Grace Period, during which the registry disables DNS resolution and prohibits transfers, then five days of PendingDelete, after which it is released for anyone to register.

Getting the domain to a survivor is slower than letting it lapse is fast. GoDaddy will only release a deceased holder's account to the estate administrator and requires all four of a completed access request form, legal documentation naming the administrator, a death certificate and photo ID — "otherwise your request will not be considered" — and allows itself up to 72 hours just for initial correspondence. Meanwhile the renewal has to keep being paid.

Google Workspace fails the same way, one layer up. When the super administrator can't get in and there's no other admin, the recovery path runs through proving you own the domain: "You'll need to add a CNAME record or TXT record to your DNS record at your domain host." That only works if the registrar account is still alive and reachable. Lose the registrar and you lose the recovery route for the email too.

How do I triage every recurring charge?#

Sort each line item into one of three buckets before touching anything.

Bucket	What belongs there	Action
Cancel	Streaming, music, games, news, fitness, cloud storage nothing depends on	Cancel at the source, not at the card
Transfer	Domain, DNS, hosting, business email, Stripe, anything with customers attached	Keep paying, then move ownership properly
Keep paying until handed over	Anything in the transfer bucket while paperwork is in flight	Fund the card; treat renewals as an estate expense

Transfers are policy-governed, not favors. Domain moves run through ICANN's Transfer Policy and the registrar's own verification, which is why the GoDaddy checklist above exists — expect documents, not a phone call. Stripe allows the owner to transfer ownership to a user with the Administrator or Super Administrator role, and if the current owner can't access the account you can request the transfer through Stripe Support, subject to identity and relationship verification — with a hard exception: "For Stripe accounts in Brazil, the transfer of ownership is not allowed in case of individual or sole proprietorship accounts (linked to a CPF)." There is also a separate path for moving an account to a different legal entity after a sale.

What should the executor do in the first week?#

Work this list in order. The sequencing matters more than the speed: two of these steps are irreversible if taken out of turn.

Pull 13 months of statements for every card and bank account, and mark every repeating merchant descriptor — annual renewals appear exactly once in that window.
Look up the domain's expiry date in WHOIS before anything else. If it lands inside the next 90 days, pay the renewal now; the ERRP interruption takes the site down on the expiry date, not at the end of the grace period.
Request the Google data export before requesting closure. Google will not reopen the contents of a closed account at a later date.
Identify the Apple Family Sharing organizer. If it was the deceased, one dead card breaks purchases and iCloud storage for up to five other people at once.
Give the card issuer written notice of death and request the balance in writing. Regulation Z § 1026.11 deems a response within 30 days timely and stops new fees and APR increases after the request.
For ACH pulls, send the revocation letter to the merchant first, then the stop payment order to the bank at least three business days before the next debit date — and follow any oral order with written confirmation inside 14 days, or it lapses under Regulation E § 1005.10.
Leave the transfer-bucket card funded until every registrar, host and payment processor has confirmed the new owner in writing.

What settles this in advance?#

Two things, and only one of them is a will.

The legal frame is the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, enacted in nearly every state, which extends executor and trustee powers to digital assets held by online custodians. Inside it sits the definition of an "online tool": an electronic service provided by a custodian that lets the user, in an agreement distinct from the terms of service, direct the disclosure or non-disclosure of digital assets to a third person. Where the act is in force, a direction left in one of these tools takes priority over a will. Google's Inactive Account Manager — which lets you designate up to 10 people to receive your data after a chosen period of inactivity — is the textbook example, and Apple's Legacy Contact works the same way. Both are configured from the account's own settings screen: no lawyer, no notary, no filing fee.

The other thing is a written inventory, because no online tool covers the registrar. Write down, for each recurring charge: what it is, what it renews on, which card pays it, who else has admin, and what breaks if it lapses. That last column is the one nobody has and everybody needs — it is what turns a list of charges into instructions.

That inventory is what Proceedly is built to hold: a check-in that, when it goes unanswered past a grace window, hands your encrypted plan to the people who depend on you. It carries the instructions and where the keys live — never the passwords themselves.

Frequently asked questions#

Will the subscriptions stop if nobody pays the card?#

Payments fail, but the account usually doesn't close — it goes past due, and the merchant retries. And if the card was replaced rather than closed, an account updater may quietly re-point the subscription at the new card: Stripe automatically attempts to update saved card details when a customer receives a new one, including replacements for lost or stolen cards, so billing can resume as if nothing happened.

Do I need a death certificate to cancel Netflix?#

Netflix's help page asks only for the email address or phone number on the account and the full payment information currently used. Apple and Amazon want estate documentation and photo ID; Microsoft asks for a subpoena or court order.

Can I get the passwords from Google or Apple?#

No. Google states directly that it cannot provide passwords or other login details, and an Apple Legacy Contact is blocked from everything in iCloud Keychain — payment information, passwords and passkeys — as well as purchased media and subscriptions.

Am I personally liable for a relative's subscription charges?#

Generally not, unless you co-signed, held the account jointly, or fall into one of the CFPB's listed exceptions, including the community property rules for surviving spouses. Being an authorized user does not make you liable.

What if I close the Spotify account by mistake?#

You have a week. Spotify emails a reactivation link usable within 7 days; after that the account cannot be reactivated and the deletion process begins.

How long do I have before an expired domain is gone for good?#

Roughly 35 days after deletion — a 30-day Redemption Grace Period plus 5 days of PendingDelete — during which DNS stays disabled and the site stays dark. After that it is released and anyone can register it.