A pre-checked box will raise the number on the dashboard. It is worth being clear-eyed about where that number came from and what it costs elsewhere.

The accounting nobody does

• Support contacts from people who did not mean to subscribe.
• Chargebacks, which cost the fee plus the processing relationship.
• Churn at the first renewal, when the charge is noticed.
• Reviews describing the sign-up as deceptive, which suppress the top of the funnel permanently.

The conversion metric captures the gain and none of the losses, which is precisely why these patterns survive review meetings.

A usable test

Would you be comfortable explaining this flow to the user, out loud, while they used it? "We made cancelling hard so you would forget" fails that test immediately. Anything you would have to phrase carefully is worth reconsidering, and regulation in several markets has now caught up with the worst of these anyway.