I would pay for news if I knew I could cancel easily without jumping through ridiculous hoops. I'd really like to get a NYT subscription but that'll never happen so long as they have their Kafka inspired cancellation process in place.
Dark patterns around subscription cancellation have led me to only use subscriptions I can do via Apple. Having a single menu in the Settings app to manage all your subs is such a comfy feeling.
I can say you owe me money too. The hard part is collecting said money. The overheads of collecting from a non-cooperative customer would not make it worthwhile.
Same! I have contemplated it many times since the content is consistently good and I canceled my local paper after they doubled the price twice in the last couple of years.
That’s an interesting observation. I canceled mine last year and it was nearly one click, easy. Navigate to my account, manage subscription, cancel (or similar). Donzo.
I was so not irritated by it at all that I was actually willing to resubscribe a deep discount.
I wonder if changes were made this year, because I’m generally pretty sensitive to that malarkey too
Same for the Economist. I was on their signup page about to start a subscription when I figured I'd better check how cancellations work. Sure enough there's no simple online cancellation option like there is for signing up. There are a whole bunch of stories out there of people being given the run around and wasting a stupid about of time cancelling their account.
I even double checked with their support to see if it had been changed and got a ridiculous gaslighting response about this being better for customers. I generally think pretty highly of their journalism but these sleazy tactics definitely lowered my opinion of the company and prevented me from giving them my business.
The FTC was looking to do this stuff with "Click to cancel" but it's currently in limbo "to give the companies more time to comply" for some freaking reason.
