The dirtiest growth hack I've built

I was part of the growth team at a consumer app a couple of years ago. We were struggling to hit our revenue targets and investors were getting impatient. The PM came up with an idea that was basically just stealing. We added a tiny pre-checked box on the final checkout page that enrolled users into a 499 per month premium tier. The text was light grey on a white background. If you didn't uncheck it, you got charged automatically.

The real trick was the cancellation flow. We made it impossible to cancel through the app. You had to send an email to a support id with a 7 day SLA, and by that time the next billing cycle would hit. Our recurring revenue shot up by almost 40% in two months. Leadership celebrated it in the all hands. We called it frictionless onboarding. I quit a few months later because I couldn't stomach reading the support tickets from older folks begging for their money back.