Meta Muse can help users find and cancel subscriptions — CNBC
In Menlo Park, United States, during the Meta Connect event, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the Muse Charm device. The personal AI agent Muse, which the company rolled out this month, can help users identify and cancel recurring paid subscriptions. As CNBC Top News reports, the tool can simplify the search for charges that consumers may have forgotten about or no longer use.
According to Mastercard and FT Strategies, 44% of U.S. consumers increased their spending on subscriptions in 2025. Average annual spending was $1,887, or about $157 per month. Bank of America data show that subscription spending rose by 7.7% year-on-year in July — faster than overall card spending.
The effect of forgotten payments
Stanford University economics professor Neale Mahoney, co-author of the study Selling Subscriptions, said consumers are about four times more likely to cancel a subscription when they are required to make a separate decision about it. Researchers estimate that companies can roughly double their revenue thanks to customer inertia and obstacles to canceling services.
Digital services, including credit history monitoring, may be most vulnerable to such oversight, as their charges can continue without the user noticing. At the same time, physical subscriptions, such as pet food subscriptions, are harder to overlook because of regular deliveries.
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Subscriptions and privacy
ScribeUp, a company that develops subscription management technology for banking apps, said its users began initiating subscription cancellations 1.8 times more often than a year earlier. The median user of the service has more than 12 recurring payments, while one in four has 20 or more. According to ScribeUp, the average canceled subscription costs $17.39 per month, and users save more than $300 per year on average.
Meta Muse has already faced restrictions: Amazon blocked the agent from making purchases on its website, saying it violated the terms of use. The use of AI to analyze financial data also raises privacy concerns. At the same time, according to Recurly, 43% of surveyed consumers said they are comfortable with artificial intelligence managing their subscriptions.
Recurly said that the option to pause a subscription before canceling it began to be used 337% more often, and three out of four customers who paused a service later returned. A Mastercard survey also showed that 74% of consumers are more willing to subscribe if cancellation is easy.
