·By Linran YU
A Free Event Should Not Have a Payment Button
When someone says yes to a free thing, let that yes finish before you ask for anything else.
Last week I signed up for a free morning coffee meetup. Free, according to the listing. Free, according to the organizer.
Two clicks later I was looking at a checkout page. My state, my zip code, a card field, and a large pay button. In smaller text: a seven-day trial, then $14.99 a month, renewing automatically until I cancel.
I had not asked for a subscription. I had asked for a seat at a coffee table.
I closed the page, went back, and found the real button.
That is not an accident. The checkout page sits exactly where the registration form should be, and somebody doing this for the first time cannot tell the difference. Many of them pay.
And when it works, it works once. The customer who finds a charge a week later does not remember the coffee. They remember the platform, and they tell people.
Count what you lose, not just what you convert
A trick like this shows up as conversions in a dashboard. It does not show the people who closed the tab and never came back, or the ones who now read every one of your pages expecting a catch.
Keep the yes clean
When someone says yes to a free thing, let that yes finish before you ask for anything else.
Registration first. The upsell, if you must have one, comes after, on its own page, clearly labeled as optional.
Say “optional” in the largest type on the page
If the offer is good, it survives being called optional.
If it only works when people mistake it for a requirement, it is not an offer.
It is not free for the big ones either
In September 2025 Amazon agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle an FTC case over how people were signed up for Prime and how hard it was to cancel: a $1 billion penalty, and $1.5 billion returned to about 35 million customers. The FTC quoted Amazon’s own employees describing the business of pushing subscriptions as “a bit of a shady world.”
Two years earlier Epic Games paid $245 million for charging Fortnite players for things they had not meant to buy. Refunds were still going out in 2025.
Both companies are still standing, and that is the whole point. They could pay. The penalty was a line item, the checkout page got rebuilt, the business carried on.
A large platform can pay the fine and rebuild the page. A shop with forty regulars cannot buy back the forty.