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Startup promises to cancel your hated Comcast subscription for you for just $5

Two-man band says it'll sit through the pain

Free marketeers would be proud; a startup in the US has just started up to deal with one of the toughest and most frustrating corporate trials – cancelling a Comcast subscription.

Airpaper, which appears to be a two-man San Francisco upstart, will take up the torturous process of navigating the corporate ins and outs of cancelling your Comcast subscription for a $5 fee. That might sound a lot for something you can do yourself, but it's not easy.

Readers from outside the US might wonder what all the fuss is about, but American ISP Comcast's cancellation process is notoriously difficult to get through. Last year Ryan Block, a vice-president at AOL and a former tech blogger, shamed the telco by recording part of the 20 minute call he had trying to do just that.

The problem is that Comcast doesn't want to let customers go, so staff run through a seemingly endless script offering more and more incentives to stay. That's fine if you're looking to bargain, but if you're just sick of the high prices or expensive add-ons and want a better provider, the firm intentionally makes it difficult.

"We love turning bureaucratic processes into surprisingly pleasant processes we call "AirPapers," the Airpaper guys – Earl St Sauver and Eli Pollak – explained. "Sound too good to be true? Try our Comcast Cancellation process or sign up for one of our processes that are coming soon. We think you'll like working with us."

Of course, there is a certain element of trust involved here. Airpaper customers wishing to cancel must send in their Comcast account number, along with name and address details. We hope this data is stored in a safe way.

Airpaper has plans for other services, including sorting out visas to overseas countries, and filing city government forms for San Franciscans. But it's a measure of how loathed the Comcast cancellation process is that Airpaper picked handling it as their launch service.

Of course, a simpler way to do things would be for regulators to force Comcast to allow people to quit quickly and easily. But here in the Land of the FreeTM, it's considered better that we simply pay someone else to do the dirty work. ®

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