Opinion: Why is leaving so hard?

One thing that has annoyed me for a long time is why applications and systems make it so hard to disconnect yourself from a tenant that you don’t control. Here are two examples:

Stripe Connect

The first one that’s frustrated me lately is Stripe. Setting up your own account is straightforward, and leaving isn’t too hard.

But they have a service called Stripe Connect. In this case, the account is basically set up for you by a vendor you are dealing with, essentially on your behalf.

If you want to close a Stripe Connect account that’s visible to you when you log in, you must get the vendor to remove it.

I had one of these set up by a vendor who went broke a couple of years ago. I can’t delete the account, and when I talk to Stripe, they tell me that I need to get that vendor to remove the account. But the vendor has gone broke; their website has been removed; and none of their email addresses work any more.

How exactly am I meant to do that?

So their support told me that the account is basically stuck there forever, unless the vendor who isn’t there any more, removes it. That’s ridiculous.

Microsoft Teams

Over the years, Teams has been beyond annoying. If you’ve used it for any length of time, it’s likely that you’ve been invited (usually temporarily) to a number of other tenants. This happens frequently when you do consulting work.

I have a whole bunch of organizations that I’m (in theory) still a member of. So how do I leave those organizations?

The Teams people tell you to go to your Organizations list in Settings, find the ones you don’t want, and to click Leave.

I wish it was that simple!

But every one that I try to leave, takes me to a page where it tries to log me on to that organization first. In most cases, that’s never going to work. Usually by now, my account is disabled or locked, or whatever they’ve decided to do.

The alternative is to get the people at the organization to remove you. But in many cases, the contacts that I dealt with at the organization no longer work there. And doing that one by one, for a bunch of organizations, is seriously painful.

Why does this have to be so hard?

It’s simply ridiculous that I can’t just decide for myself which organizations I still need to be a part of, and leave when that’s no longer required.

It all reeks of a design from someone who has a single account in a single organization and who’s never really thought about the practical side of how this would work.

If you are building applications, please don’t do this to your customers.

2025-05-15