How to Cancel Medium (2026)

Medium is one of the easier subscriptions to cancel. No retention screens, no phone calls, no hidden buttons. Three clicks from your settings page and it's done.

How to cancel

1. Go to medium.com and sign in
2. Click your profile picture (top right) and select Settings
3. Click the Membership and payment tab
4. Click Cancel membership
5. Confirm when prompted

That's it. No multi-page guilt trip.

If you subscribed through the App Store or Google Play

Medium won't be able to cancel for you if Apple or Google handles your billing.

iPhone/iPad: Settings > your name > Subscriptions > Medium > Cancel Subscription

Google Play: Play Store > profile icon > Payments & subscriptions > Subscriptions > Medium > Cancel

Current pricing

Medium bills in USD. There's no AUD-specific pricing.

The Friend of Medium tier gives a larger share of your subscription fee to writers you read. If you're not a writer yourself and don't care about the gold badge, the standard $5/month membership is the one most people have.

If you're a Medium writer

Cancelling your membership does not delete your published articles. Your stories stay live, your profile stays active, and people can still read your public posts. The only thing that changes is your access to paywalled content and your eligibility for the Partner Program.

If you want to keep writing on Medium but stop paying, you can. You just won't be able to read other people's member-only posts, and your own stories won't earn money through the Partner Program.

If you want to fully leave Medium and remove your content, that's a separate step. Go to Settings > Account > Deactivate account or Delete account. Deactivating hides your profile and stories but lets you come back. Deleting is permanent.

Reading Medium without paying

Medium lets non-members read a limited number of paywalled articles per month (it's changed over the years, currently around 3). Beyond that, a few workarounds exist:

• Open links in a private/incognito window. Medium's paywall is tied to your browser session. This doesn't always work, but it often does for individual articles.
• Use RSS feeds. Adding a Medium publication's feed to an RSS reader (like Feedly or Inoreader) sometimes gives you the full article text.
• Read the cached version. Searching for the article title on Google and clicking the cached result can bypass the paywall. Similarly, archive.org sometimes has copies.
• Substack and direct blogs. Many writers who publish on Medium also publish the same content on their own Substack newsletters or personal blogs, often for free.

None of these are guaranteed, and Medium has been tightening its paywall over time. But for occasional reading, you can probably avoid the subscription.

Is Medium worth $5/month?

It depends entirely on how much you read. If you find yourself hitting the paywall more than once or twice a week, the maths works out. If you signed up for one article six months ago and forgot about it, that's $30 USD (~$48 AUD) you've spent on content you can probably find elsewhere.

The broader issue with Medium is that the paywall creates a tension between writers (who want readers) and the platform (which wants subscribers). Many of the best articles get locked behind the paywall, which pushes casual readers away. If you're cancelling because you're tired of hitting that paywall on every interesting link, you're not alone.