17 minutes to do something that should take 17 seconds. These folks are the masters of dark patterns!

This. I&#x27;ve been using privacy.com for all my online subscriptions. I just cancel the card I used to sign up and call it a day.

I have all my subscriptions go through PayPal. Makes everything easy to cancel.

I have not had good experiences with cancelling subscriptions through PayPal. My one attempt at reversing a transaction there went nowhere, and eventually I had to contact my bank to do so.

General advice when subscribing to NYT is to do it through PayPal. Once you cut them loose from their funding from PayPal, they let you go without hesitation.

My answer would be &quot;Don&#x27;t change the subject.&quot;

Reminds me of the old MCI telemarketers. You&#x27;d tell them you&#x27;re not interested in their long distance service, and the rejoinder would be &quot;You don&#x27;t want to save money?&quot;I&#x27;ve been witness to a number of cold callers having their heritage and species loudly questioned for using this tactic.

&quot;Cancelling your product is going to save me even more money.&quot;I mean, it&#x27;s annoying to have to talk to sales reps when you don&#x27;t have to, but I feel like people here are being a little overly dramatic?There are certainly some cases where it becomes almost impossible to cancel things (people hanging up on you, etc.) which are much worse than what is described here and looks like it would take about 30 seconds of my attention in a background chat window.

The marketing&#x2F;sales talk like, “Am I to understand you’d like to cancel even though our product could be saving you $xx in time and money?” repulses me to no end. I understand they’re trying to keep a customer. I just hate the leading questions. I hate that I feel like they’re trying to outwit me, or trick me into realizing I’m so silly for wanting to cancel something.Even though I might cancel products, the cancellation isn’t always forever. I’ll gladly go back to companies that treated me well. However, companies that pressure me to stay I typically write off as scummy and won’t go back if the need arises.

My credit card expired and they sent my account to collections. I still subscribe because I like the work their journalists do, but when I read an article about how they&#x27;re dying I don&#x27;t really feel bad for them.(I am also tempted to cancel my Wall Street Journal subscription when I accidentally read an opinion column. Not sure why real journalists let partisan hacks put their opinion columns right next to their real work. Strange business model!)

Haha yes! Right around the time I decided I didn&#x27;t want the sub anymore was luckily right around when I cancelled (for unrelated reasons) the credit card they had on file. Super easy!

I’ll gladly pay more through Apple just because I know it’ll be trivial to cancel later.

Yep, me too. For things like the NYT, I buy through Apple&#x27;s store, and cancellation is all in one place and easy, as are the terms of when the cancellation will take effect.Completely straightforward, no hassle, no surprises.

Yep, and they will even refund you if you cancel promptly after a recurring payment.

The challenge is the price. I call and cancel every year, and then renew in the same phone call since they finally offer me 8 bucks a month (and then bump it to 15 after a year). With Apple the cheapest option I see is 14.99, so even though it sucks up my time, the call helps me save 80+ bucks a year.

If you subscribe through Apple it’s just as easy to cancel it as canceling any other subscription.

You can buy a single issue of the NYT (and many other newspapers) via kindle and &quot;own&quot; them forever.

I&#x27;m surprised how many publications went the route of selling subscriptions to a virtual paper. I can&#x27;t bring myself do to it. If it was just a 75 cents charge for the new articles and you could access them forever, that would be more appealing to me.Put it this way wouldn&#x27;t mind buying a national geographic on the iPad but I don&#x27;t want a subscription for this very reason and it seems like a waste of money paying for something I might not get into.Thanks for posting

I bought a subscription last year during their $4 a month special but cancelled it a few months later. I had to go through the chat system on the website to cancel my subscription, but my experience was rather different. I told the customer service agent that “I thought I’d be reading more of the newspaper but I found that the free allotment of articles will likely suit my usage,” and the service agent cancelled the subscription.

Love it, definitely gonna start doing that now! Thanks!

Hi, this is Antonio from the New York Times. May I inquire as to what your &#x27;other&#x27; reason is?

I always chose &quot;other&quot; for any question of this type. If there is a text box that must be filled out to describe &quot;other&quot;, I always write &quot;Other&quot;.

I just say, &quot;Cancel my subscription.&quot;  Don&#x27;t play their game, don&#x27;t give them an inch, if they ask why, just repeat &quot;Cancel my subscription&quot;.  If they say something else, just say &quot;cancel&quot; and nothing else.  They will cave.

When they ask why you are cancelling say &quot;No reason&quot;. There is literally nothing they can say to prolong the whole experience. Don&#x27;t volunteer any information. Don&#x27;t tell them what is wrong with their website. Don&#x27;t tell them anything. You will make the whole process go longer.

Glad that worked! I hope that didn&#x27;t put you off learning French.Personally, I stopped trying to write such letters after a couple instances where the recipient company claimed they never received any letter from me.Then I learned you should always send a letter with a signature to have a proof of reception, which is a bit more expensive. And then one kept charging me anyway, and still claimed the letter didn&#x27;t reach the right department (after more time spent on the phone with them).Bottom line is if a company wants to make it difficult for you to leave the relationship with them, there are tons of tricks in the books for that. Therefore I blacklist them after any sign of dishonesty.

Ha! I had this experience years ago. I subscribed in college to practice my French, but ended up wanting to unsubscribe because I had more important uses for the money. Sure enough, I had to use my rudimentary language skills to write a letter to unsubscribe and mail it off to France.

Being too afraid to make a quick trip to the post office sounds like major overkill to me. Besides that couldn&#x27;t you have ordered stamps and envelopes online?

As a Canadian who has been in the US close to 10 years, this is the first I&#x27;ve heard of this! I had always assumed the flag was meant to be set by the letter carrier in some bygone era as a courtesy to let residents know they had mail. Thank you, kind internet stranger.To answer the question, this service doesn&#x27;t exist in any other country I&#x27;ve lived in -- Canada or Japan, in my case.

I&#x27;ve never heard of it outside the US.In Australia, you post something by putting it in a post box, they&#x27;re located in shopping areas and have specified collection times, usually daily on weekdays.Of course, you can also go into the post office and deal with a human who will take the postage $ as needed.These days, the number of times I&#x27;ve posted something can be counted in low single digits per year. Mostly dealing with government forms that need signatures because stupid reasons.

Does not exist in Germany either. Most of our regular mail delivery is done by foot or bicycle, except in very sparse rural areas. And our mailboxes have locks anyway. So it&#x27;s either the post office or a street mail drop-off box&#x2F;pillar box. Nobody I know does regularly post letters anyway, it&#x27;s more in the range of 1-2 letters a year if even that.

In the UK, there&#x27;s normally a postbox serving a whole street that people can put letters in to send (distinct from the letterbox in each house&#x27;s front door). GP&#x27;s nearest postbox might have been inside their local post office, or they might just have needed to buy stamps.

Most houses don&#x27;t have an external mailbox, the mail goes through the front door and into a basket. A lot of houses on terraced streets have no front garden and open directly onto the road, especially in cities.There is doorstep letter and parcel collection for less than a dollar.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;send.royalmail.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;send.royalmail.com&#x2F;</a>

Can people in the UK not send outgoing letters by putting them in their mailbox and raising the little outgoing mail flag? Is that a uniquely American thing?

This reminds me of the French newspaper lemonde.fr, which I had subscribed to, and then wanted to unsubscribe after a couple months. There was simply no way to do so online, not to reach any customer support. The only option was to send a letter via post. This was during our first lockdown in UK, so no way I would go to the post office for that. I&#x27;ll simply never be a customer again.

There is value to them in having you as an active subscriber on a paid plan, even if they&#x27;ve given you a discount.

I subscribed to the NYT a couple years back. I had to talk to a rep to get canceled, and at one point he offered something like half a year for free if I&#x27;d keep the subscription. I insisted on canceling, because I was getting irritated, and he laughed out loud that I refused the free offer. Right then they lost me forever as a customer.But it was a valuable lesson on looking at the exit strategy for a service before you sign up for it. And I try real hard to only do business with companies that make it as easy to stop spending money with them as it is to start.

Also then drama in the newsroom. It does not inspire optimism about the professionalism and objectivity of their coverage.

&gt; For a serious newspaperUnfortunately this is now a debatable topic. Their headlines have been trending towards the National Enquirer for years.IMHO, they should crash and burn.

You must really like the NYT. These dark patterns are never excusable.

Presumably not, if they use dark patterns and not only survive, but thrive. Right?

If they really need to rely on dark patterns just to survive - which I highly doubt is the case - then they simply don’t deserve to survive.Yes, it sucks, but that’s how the free market works.

eh, I don&#x27;t know. NYT sucks up a LOT of talent from across the country. What I&#x27;m saying is: this sort of thing is maybe excusable from small&#x2F;independent journalism outlets trying to stay afloat, but you don&#x27;t need to make excuses for NYT. They pay their own executives handsomely to do that.

The NYT has been doing really, really well financially the last 4 years. Their stock price is up almost 300% since 2016--not the only metric, obviously, but it certainly gives some indications of how concerned investors are that it will stay in the black.Other, smaller papers are not doing nearly as well.

NYT has been a net negative on society since 2016, rapidly so since 2019.

A while back someone posted a look into their finances and business strategy. They were fumbling the ball a decade ago, but are now doing extremely well

Some business and industries do more social good than others. We&#x27;re all still adjusting to the internet. I&#x27;m on the side of leaning towards giving NYT a pass for this. It was a single chat interaction, not so bad.

They&#x27;re not a charity or a nonprofit that relies on donations. They&#x27;re a business selling a product, and the only thing that should rationally factor into giving them money or not is if you want to buy the product. Need doesn&#x27;t factor into the equation.

Honestly only case where I&#x27;m willing to overlook it. It&#x27;s so hard for them to stay in the black. I can&#x27;t imagine, in this age. For a serious newspaper that does good investigative journalism, I&#x27;ll accept some desperate measures to keep subscribers and not hold it against them.Any other company and I&#x27;d call them garbage, but the NYT does a lot of good. (Same would go for other top investigative journals that have published a lot of pieces revealing major information to the public.)

I don’t understand why a crossword puzzle company spends so much effort on a journalism side project.

I have used it and it seems to work pretty well, they just set up a complete integration with 1Password so I trust them because of that as well.

I love it, I use it for the gyms, my internet provider, the laundry machine provider, any place that I don&#x27;t trust their data storage, etc.

I have to replace my simple.com account, so instead of doing that for a dozen or more subscriptions, I just changed the funding provider in Privacy, and keep the vendor-specific virtual cards.

Sometimes the merchant will tell the card is a virtual card and not allow it, but most of the times it works perfect

Woah, I had no clue that Privacy existed before but it looks really cool! What do you think of the service? Have you had any problems with it?

Getting collections to your door for not paying your internet bill is mostly a European thing. I haven’t seen it in the US.

The solution to that is, you never give them your real name, address, number, email, etc. It&#x27;s never verified and Privacy doesn&#x27;t seem to check your name matches.

Unless you have a contract, no, you don&#x27;t owe them anything. Saying that you&#x27;d like recurring charges doesn&#x27;t obligate you to continue paying after you&#x27;ve stopped using a service.

I was a member of a well-known gym for more than ten years straight. Once, my card expired, and when I went to work out they said the membership had lapsed.No problem, right? I&#x27;ll pay up on the account, re-activate, and work out. Nope, they wanted to charge me a reactivation fee. I said &quot;no&quot; and left. Never paid them another dime.What a stupid business.

You don&#x27;t owe someone money just because they say you do.  If you&#x27;ve given notice to someone that you want to cancel in a reasonable way, then you don&#x27;t owe them money any more.  Keep documentation of your efforts to cancel, and if they try to put something on your credit report, go to court.

There is some danger to this since just because your card is declined doesn’t mean that you stop owing them money. Gyms like to take advantage of this.

What kind of fraud does it sound like? I gave my credit card to the merchant and said they could charge it for auto-renew, but that doesn&#x27;t seem to put me under any obligation to make sure the card is still valid next year - credit cards expire or get canceled all the time. The merchant is free to cancel the subscription if the auto-renew fails.

Why would it be fraud? I paid for the service when I used it, if the business makes it impossible to cancel a subscription or makes you go through endless hoops to waste your time, that&#x27;s on them. After I stop paying for it, they&#x27;ll just stop providing me the service.If you signed a contract for X amount of months, then I get it, you have to pay, but I always do month to month at the gym, they still make it impossible to cancel.

&gt; For what it&#x27;s worth I&#x27;ve never had trouble canceling anything I&#x27;ve subscribed to.You probably don&#x27;t subscribe to things that are hard to cancel!

That&#x27;s not fraud by any stretch of the imagination.

For anyone wondering - no this definitively isn&#x27;t fraud - no it will have no impact your credit (there isn&#x27;t even a mechanism for this to happen), nor will it get debt collectors after you (you don&#x27;t owe a subscription continual payment, failure to pay only means they can terminate your service).

This is not fraud at all. You could just as easily file a dispute. You&#x27;re under no obligation to continue allowing a company to charge you a recurring subscription that you do not wish to continue with.Cards stop working due to fraud or lost cards all the time. Businesses must accept this as a fact of life. Forcibly dunning is a malicious business practice.

Sorry, send me a letter with proof of debt.

Credit cards expire all the time, if I had an interest in ensuring payments flowed I would have given you an updated credit card... which I&#x27;m sure would be easier than cancelling.

Another way to frame it is as a form of communication:You have made cancelling through English difficult so I am communicating cancellation to you financially.It’s funny how they listen more to the latter. The only dark pattern they have is credit reporting which has real risks if they cross a line.

Fraud is shaking down customers for money.

This sounds like some kind of fraud, or at least an easy way to tank your credit and get debt collectors after you if caught.For what it&#x27;s worth I&#x27;ve never had trouble canceling anything I&#x27;ve subscribed to.

There&#x27;s a &quot;credit score&quot; in Europe???

Happened to me. Cancelled Sky Broadband, CS reps wouldn&#x27;t acknowledge it. Got sick of the back-and-forth. Sky don&#x27;t just make you wait on hold for 30 mins, they play ads at you while you wait. Fuck that. Stopped the direct debit.Debt collectors got in touch years later asking for £50.I said, &quot;fine, send me a copy of whatever bill I supposedly didn&#x27;t pay.&quot;They didn&#x27;t have it. &quot;We don&#x27;t have any documentation, just pay us.&quot;Escalated to a complaint and they dropped it.I&#x27;d do the same again, but could totally understand why some people wouldn&#x27;t. YMMV.

&gt; It only works if you didn&#x27;t give them your name and addresshow can that leave you with bad credit score if you never gave them your social security ( or equivalent) ?

Credit score? Europe?What part of Europe has credit scores?Also you can’t just send an collections agency with huge fees, there’s laws against that. At least in the Netherlands

It only works if you didn&#x27;t give them your name and address. At least in Europe some debt collection agencies will track you down and charge an enormous fee, and will leave you with a bad credit score.

Privacy.com is awesome, but I recently tried using this for Bloomberg, and their e-commerce platform seemed to know that I was using a prepaid card and declined the authorization.

I&#x27;ve never been able to cancel any subscription with ease, so nowadays I always use Privacy to get temporary credit cards. When I want the subscription cancelled, I try the provider&#x27;s website, if it doesn&#x27;t work, I just cancel the card all together.

That is the point, that&#x27;s why I subscribe, regardless of the unsubscribe difficulties.The value is way higher than some inconvenience.

That’s not really the point. It’s that once companies have your CC info they make it arbitrarily difficult to stop paying them. This kind of behavior should run afoul of consumer protection laws.

Then why are you subscribing to the New York Times?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_controversies_involving_The_New_York_Times" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_controversies_involvin...</a>So much for your &quot;paper of record&quot;. It&#x27;s the Paper of the Establishment. And always has been.

I&#x27;m fine with paying for quality news.

Signed up for some hosting online.Cancelation apparently required a fax. 
Got a legal friend to help me write a scary letter.Service was promptly canceled.

Another related dark pattern: When cancelling a Prime trial, Amazon makes it appear as if you&#x27;re going to lose the Prime benefits immediately, not at the end of the trial, to keep you from cancelling early.(It seems like you DO keep them until the end of the trial, but you only get told that after cancelling)Together with their decreased support quality (agents barely understanding what I write + the typical &quot;tell the customer what they want to hear so they go away and give you a good CSAT, by the time they realize you lied it won&#x27;t matter for you anymore&quot;), I have a _very_ low opinion of Amazon. They still have a service (delivery time), price (free shipping) and consistency advantage in many cases, but it&#x27;s quickly shrinking, and I am much more likely to buy from alternative places if they can make a competitive offer.

Same, then you get bombarded with ads on Amazon for a free trial despite the fact you&#x27;re logged into your Amazon account and Amazon knows damn well you&#x27;re not eligible for the free trial anymore. I quit Audible after prices stopped being related to length. At the $17 a pop for the three-hour books I was buying it was going to cost me $900 to get the whole series. Nope!

The other issue with audible cancellation is that you throw away your credits...but then if you try to spend 5-10 credits quickly it becomes challenging...so you don&#x27;t cancel. lol

Ah, that must be famed &quot;Beetlejuice(, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice!)&quot; technique.

This probably has to do with Apple charging 30% for any in-app payments so Audible didn’t bother implementing any payments &#x2F; subscriptions functionality on their app.

When I canceled my audible subscription I wasn&#x27;t aware that I also would loose my remaining 7 credits...I will not subscribe again after this experience.

This happened to me with audible. They didn&#x27;t have the cancel subscription on the app. Had to hunt for it on the site.Was asked if i was suuuuuuure i wanted to leave, 3 separate times before it canceled.Definitely not thinking of doing that again, or like i do for some streaming services, pay for a couple months, stop, then pay for a few more.Utterly rediculous.

&gt; People that read HN are absolutely the type that would consider paying for NYT (or at least the two cohorts have great overlap).Unlikely considering the general popularity of articles highlighting their incompetence&#x2F;malfeasance. See: slatestarcodex articles of the last week

How often do you see NYT articles on the front page? It is very rarely for me.

&gt; People that read HN are absolutely the type that would consider paying for NYT (or at least the two cohorts have great overlap).?? I automatically assume that articles that are written by NYT, NewYorker, and The Guardian are complete BS and should be ignored.0 journalism found there.Wanna spend money somewhere? Spend it on The Atlantic or Bloomberg.

This isn&#x27;t the first time I&#x27;ve seen NYT cancellation process in my social feeds. It has to be a negative feedback loop cycle. People that read HN are absolutely the type that would consider paying for NYT (or at least the two cohorts have great overlap).This cancellation process never considered the impact of internet cancel culture and rage reactions. It&#x27;s far easier to damage a brand than it is to build it up.

Netflix is notoriously generous here. They allegedly auto-cancel accounts that don&#x27;t use the service for too long!<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.independent.co.uk&#x2F;arts-entertainment&#x2F;tv&#x2F;news&#x2F;netflix-account-cancel-delete-subscribe-renew-email-a9527626.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.independent.co.uk&#x2F;arts-entertainment&#x2F;tv&#x2F;news&#x2F;net...</a>

AOL was great when you were on a free trial and called saying you wanted to cancel but forgot. They just kept giving me another month. I was given maybe 6 months free when it should have been 3.

AOL in the 90s was second only to phone companies for being able to scam retention people.In our college house, we’d always run these rackets and get free plane tickets, CDs, tickets, etc. The phone companies were even better. At peak, we’d farm $300-600 a semester for switching long distance.

It looks like an editorial&#x2F;opinion piece. (Just to be clear I went through the same process and I hate NYT)

A friend used to work for a call center handling AOL cancelations. They had a goal of keeping 85% of the callers subscribed.

They&#x27;ve been wildly successful over the last several years and are dominating the competition in online subscriptions so I think the advice they&#x27;ve been acting on recently is working just fine.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;05&#x2F;business&#x2F;media&#x2F;new-york-times-q3-2020-earnings-nyt.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;05&#x2F;business&#x2F;media&#x2F;new-york-t...</a>

Back in 2006 an AOL subscriber recorded their conversation with an AOL customer service agent while trying to cancel the service. It was really bad, way worse than this NYTimes process. The NYT wrote an article about the debacle [1] and had this to say about Netflix&#x27;s great customer service and ease of cancellation, compared to AOL&#x27;s awful service:&quot;Seeing how Netflix would be so protective of my time were I to leave makes me all the more unlikely to do so.&quot;Maybe the NYT should take their own advice.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;07&#x2F;02&#x2F;business&#x2F;yourmoney&#x2F;02digi.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;07&#x2F;02&#x2F;business&#x2F;yourmoney&#x2F;02digi...</a>

&gt; Do they really think that they can curve their churn this way?I don&#x27;t know. Ask Amazon[1] I guess?My point is that it&#x27;s wrong to attribute this to a &quot;fragile&quot; business model. It&#x27;s just plain, old greed and contempt for the customer.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techtimes.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;255977&#x2F;20210114&#x2F;amazon-prime-dark-pattern-service-cancellation-explained-why-consumer-groups.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techtimes.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;255977&#x2F;20210114&#x2F;amazon-pr...</a>

If you ever need to cancel comcast, time warner or similar entirely and quickly, just tell them you&#x27;re going to prison. No joke, it works.

Heh, comcast says the same thing. I was snookered into accepting a improved internet plan with &quot;free HBO&quot;. Which after a few months added TV broadcast fee, and substantial other costs. I tried to move back and they literally said the are not an ISP and will not sell me an internet only plan.I had to cancel the plan and have my &quot;roommate&quot; (actually my wife), start as a new customer to get an internet only plan.

The worst experience I had with this involved 4 customer service representatives simply hanging up (after a 30+ minute wait) after exhausting their script. I simply recorded the final call, stopping paying the bill, and sent the documentation I had to the credit reference agency when the contract went into defaultAt some point they sent a debt collection agency, that was much less stressful than it sounds. They called me up, &quot;you owe $telco money&quot;, &quot;No I don&#x27;t&quot;, &quot;oh?&quot;, &quot;Yes, I have complete documentation of cancelling it, but their CS reps kept hanging up. Sorry, you&#x27;ve been had.&quot;, &quot;Oh, this again. Sorry to have bothered you.&quot;, never heard from the debt collection agency again.

I have a similar story with Spectrum&#x2F;Charter.I already had them for Internet access, but had DirecTV at the time for my TV.They must have a quarterly quota to upsell to their subscriber base, so I&#x27;d get a call like clockwork every three months, pushing a cable TV package. Each time I&#x27;d tell them that the only reason I&#x27;m with DirecTV is because of Sunday Ticket (NFL package; exclusive to DTV). That always worked, until one day.This sales rep responds with, &quot;We have Redzone&quot;. I reply that it&#x27;s not the same, and I really need the package I have with DTV. Then he says, &quot;You know there are websites that stream all the games for free, right? Why not do that?&quot;Yeah, basically telling me to pirate the games.... &quot;That&#x27;s a good point! Hell, I don&#x27;t need any TV service at all then, right?&quot;

There is this legendary Comcast cancellation recording you can commiserate with: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soundcloud.com&#x2F;ryan-block-10&#x2F;comcastic-service" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soundcloud.com&#x2F;ryan-block-10&#x2F;comcastic-service</a>

The one downside to cable now streaming, is that the answer I used in the past &quot;I don&#x27;t have a TV&quot; no longer shuts them up. It used to be amazing; it seemingly broke their brains. The two, three times I had to use it, the rep fell silent for a solid 3-4 seconds, then &quot;You...don&#x27;t have a TV?&quot; &quot;That&#x27;s right&quot; &quot;...okay, so that&#x27;s just internet then&quot; &quot;Yes&quot;.

I&#x27;ve used &quot;I&#x27;m moving out of the country&quot; with great success.

There is no part of the government you can complain to, to put them on a shit list?
Over here it’s called:
The National Board for Consumer Disputes.It keeps companies in line.

times like this I imagine a cancellation service. Imagine paying $X to some Indian company that calls them and whenever they offer alternatives they just respond that they are not authorized to do that. Bonus if they have a think Indian accent that makes it somewhat hard to understand.The only disadvantage is that you would probably have to give that company your billing information for that to work.

LOL, cable companies are the worst. I got Mediacom to cancel my non-working service and refund my money, but only after sending a completely deranged demand letter to them[1], copying their general counsel. And you know they googled me and found that I could back my threats before they did it.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gowder.io&#x2F;pgmediacom.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gowder.io&#x2F;pgmediacom.pdf</a>

I said the phrase &quot;I want to cancel cable but keep internet&quot; 23 times to a Time Warner retention specialist then their supervisor, and I may have talked to her supervisor, too. They get paid to ignore you and read back canned responses like &quot;but what about your favorite channels?&quot;, &quot;what about watching sports?&quot;, etc. It was the first time my girlfriend had ever seen me angry.

But are they measuring the effect of people telling their friends how bad the experience was, or posting it on HN?

&gt; Do they really think that they can curve their churn this way?I&#x27;d bet that a small percentage of cancellation requests are waylaid by these sorts of underhanded tactics. Even if the success rate is low, it&#x27;s still not zero.

Honestly they got me for a couple of years with this. The $10&#x2F;month digital subscription was hitting my credit card, but every time I tried to cancel I ran into issues. It took took quite a while before I got annoyed enough to put the effort in to actually cancel it.It is such a scummy tactic. I tell everyone not to subscribe to NYT just based on that experience.

I had a similar thing with Comcast which kept referring me to their retention department and asking me to call.I replied to them no less than 5 times, each time pointing out that (a) I don&#x27;t have time for phone calls (b) their terms and conditions permits cancelling by e-mail.Another way is to notify them once by e-mail to end your subscription per [insert T&amp;C clause and citation] and just stop paying. If they don&#x27;t get payment they&#x27;ll stop anyway, and if they come chasing after you, you have the notification you sent.

Wow, had similar. I cancelled online, they said my account was in good standing, nothing owed, and killed my t-mobile.com account.A few months later I got a collections notice for $500 from t-mobile, went to a t-mobile store, said that my account looked weird, and they had recorded me as not owning my phone, despite a clear account history that I paid full price for the phone and didn&#x27;t owe anything.Still get collection notices, but it&#x27;s now over 7 years, and my credit card recovered by some 70 points or so when it aged out.

T-mobile can be dirty. The law specifically prohibits holding numbers hostage--but they found a way to try anyway. My employer had gone under, I wanted to keep my number. No problem with my employer, they released it. The problem was I was trying to port the number to a pre-paid T-mobile number (at the time you could buy 1000 minutes for $100&#x2F;year, the unused minutes rolled over. For light use it was the best deal out there.) The port kept failing, though, puzzling the employees. I finally got the truth out of someone in a call center--there was a big bill owed (duh! But I wasn&#x27;t the responsible party.) I pointed out that what they were doing was illegal, the person I was talking to didn&#x27;t care.A letter to the regulators, though, a few days later I got a call from a much more friendly person who made it work like it should have. It&#x27;s amazing how much better companies behave when the regulators come calling.

I&#x27;ve had success pursuing bad i.e. potentially illegal cancellation practices by filing a complaint through the attorney general&#x27;s office where the company is located.In my case: 
1) First I had a rough time cancelling my account _in person_ at a T-mobile store. The remote T-mobile employees in charge of cancellation kept hanging up on the T-mobile employees calling them from the store because cancellations are bad. This was so normal to the local T-mobile employees it was laughable to them. 
2) T-mobile never cancelled my account - they suspended it...and didn&#x27;t tell me! They reopened it 6 months later, charged me for a few months w&#x2F;o notifying me, then sent the unpaid dues to a local debt collector. I only found out after being contacted by a debt collection agency.I was able to get both T-mobile and the collection agency they work with to &quot;look into it&quot;, but I could not get a direct answer from T-mobile about how to fix the situation after multiple calls to them, and the collection agency relied on T-mobile to strike the debt clean.Bob Ferguson is the attorney general for Washington where T-mobile&#x27;s HQ is. Bob is THE man in case you were wondering. After filing a complaint to his office, which was then forwarded to T-mobile, I heard back from someone at T-mobile specializing in these situations in a week&#x27;s time and was informed the situation was fixed and the debt was removed from my credit report.

comcast has been doing it for years, it seems to be working out pretty well for them?

In the past I&#x27;ve responded &quot;it&#x27;s personal&quot; when they ask why I&#x27;m cancelling. That seems to work.

I just tell them I’m unemployed and wosh nobody wants to offer me any services at all.

&gt;Do they really think that they can curve their churn this way?Yes, because it actually does work. If you need proof, just call up one of these companies and say &quot;I am cancelling because your service is too expensive.&quot; Odds are decent that you will get some type of promo offer to keep you. If there is any competition in your area for internet&#x2F;cable and you have never done this, you are wasting money.OP could have also had any number of other problems that could have been solved by these retention specialists. Basically they are doing the equivalent of an IT person asking if you have turned it off and back on again. That might be frustrating for the type of people who read HN and know better, but the reason they ask it is because there are legitimately issues that can be solved by this extremely basic level of support.

A question can to mind, and this is the answer:Thousands of Americans Waste $348 a Year on Subscriptions They’re Not Using [0]It makes perfect sense to have a &#x27;shield&#x27; that will minimize the &#x27;quitters&#x27;. And this article focuses on streaming services only.People who want to leave a service are probably NOT coming back. So an effort to keep vs lose forever has little downside.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gobankingrates.com&#x2F;saving-money&#x2F;budgeting&#x2F;americans-waste-subscription-services-survey&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gobankingrates.com&#x2F;saving-money&#x2F;budgeting&#x2F;americ...</a>Edit&#x2F;addition: regarding your &quot;.. I wonder if this isn&#x27;t a profitable practice though.&quot;
Well they keep doing it, so.. at some point they ran the numbers and they saw it is better for them. Perhaps in 10y this may change, we will notice by the change of corporate practices. Profit will determine this.

What they can&#x27;t measure is the fact that I won&#x27;t sign up in the first place because of their poor reputation.My guess is there are a lot of potential subscribers reading stories like this and deciding not to bother with a subscription.

I wonder if this isn&#x27;t a profitable practice though.However much annoying these processes are (I had to suffer an identical Financial Times cancellation process last week) They know how much it costs to take cancelling users through an account specialist and presumably they get enough people to continue subscription to make it worth while.A continuing paying customer now is worth far more than someone who may subscribe again in the future. And even if you&#x27;re sick of their cancellation process, if you want to read NY Times news again you&#x27;ll signup.

I pay for a lot of subscription services like music- and film streaming, and SAAS-services but would never ever give my contact- and payment details to a newspaper or magazine. Newspapers and magazines brought their death on them self imo. People will pay for your service if they can trust them with their information, and not be harassed.

Gyms will send you to collections for this, as not paying isn’t the same as canceling. I’d be afraid of the NYT doing the same.

CapitalOne calls these &quot;virtual numbers&quot;.I think the primary feature is limiting the damage of a compromise.It sounds great to also use this as a way for the customer to cancel service with an unwilling company, but I think in practice they may come after you with a collection agency.

This is what throwaway credit card numbers are for. I&#x27;d like to see that concept become more mainstream. If you make it hard for me to cancel a service, fine. It&#x27;s a single click in a well-designed financial app: delete card.

I bet there are one or two executives who decided it would be this way.  They should be named and removed.  This is a prime example of an issue with simple hierarchies: the single point of failure.

I had this thought the other day - what was the last big story the NYT broke that wasn&#x27;t Trump related in some way? Like, actual investigative work whether in local governments or in other countries. I can&#x27;t think of a single significant story that the NYT itself broke and led the charge on

To be fair, POWER 10 is an absolute beast. They did make the mistake of using a custom DRAM connection method (in itself actually good), for which there exists only one chip to translate it to normal DDR4. This chip uses someone else&#x27;s IP for the DRAM controller part. This other company is against the system running with open firmware.Apart from that, they&#x27;re great.

Its brand is about all it has going for it. It&#x27;s the IBM of journalism. We like to think it&#x27;s still a leader, but we&#x27;re kidding ourselves in doing so.

This is why we need a CPA with teeth. The should be that if you can sign up with a click on mobile, you can cancel the same way. The amount of regulatory capture in our plutocracy is maddening.

I get that ending the subscription is annoying and I wish they hadn&#x27;t done it but claiming they have a &quot;fragile&quot; business model is just wrong.They are WILDLY successful. Their operating profit jumped 28% last year and literally are blowing away the competition in overall subscriber numbers and growth. It&#x27;s really not even close<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;05&#x2F;business&#x2F;media&#x2F;new-york-times-q3-2020-earnings-nyt.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;05&#x2F;business&#x2F;media&#x2F;new-york-t...</a>

As with many things in life, if it didn&#x27;t work, they wouldn&#x27;t do it.So to answer your question, yes, it probably does reduce churn, if only slightly. Is there an occasional person who goes to try and cancel, runs into this byzantine process and then says, ah fuck it, I&#x27;ll just stay subscribed so they don&#x27;t have to deal with this bullshit? Yes, but probably only infrequently.Instead, it infuriates all the rest who DO go thru the byzantine process and add more frustrating to whatever reason they were already intent on canceling from in the first place, as was demonstrated in this OP&#x27;s chat transcript.

Imagine having a business model so fragile that your only line of defense is to obscure the cancellation process through these tactics. Do they really think that they can curve their churn this way?I mean best you’re doing is getting maybe another month or so of revenue from a customer who is just pushing the pain of cancelling because they are busy or lazy.And at the end instead of getting what could be a dormant customer who can sign up later again, what you get is someone who hates your company.What an incredibly stupid way to erode the brand of a publication, whose major asset to survive is precisely its brand.

It also took exactly 15 minutes between encountering the live agent for the first time and the final sign-off. That&#x27;s nothing given that they had to communicate via live text chat. And as others have pointed out in this thread, it&#x27;s actually possible to cancel just by filling out a form, not that this excuses the dark patterns and endless offers.This reads as someone determined to get something juicy they could screenshot, or else someone who was already so annoyed from having to find the cancellation method on the site that they let it cloud their responses to what was a relatively painless process.

Exactly. I was cringing so hard because he kept engaging with the rep on lines of questioning that were so obviously going to go down the path they did. I&#x27;ve cancelled my NYT account in the past and it was rather painless because I was consistent in my response and communicated clearly that I just wanted to unsubscribe. I&#x27;ve since renewed my subscription, but cancelling service with an ISP or even Amazon Prime at this point is way more annoying.

The interaction didn&#x27;t seem that bad to me. The business is hurting and valuable. I can kind of see how you&#x27;d get there and want &quot;customer retention specialists&quot;, who are people that have a job they don&#x27;t like where they are probably measured on some metric related to how many cancels they let through. Sucks all around, but again I was expecting so much worse.A single chat interaction? Not horrible.

Except that it&#x27;s not required at all, as confirmed by multiple people already in this thread.OP chose the chat route, was complaining to the virtual chat bot for a whole page in the screenshot, then presented technical issues as a reason for cancelation - which the human support rep correctly tried to help the customer with, and customer engaged in that discussion, and once OP said they want the subscription canceled regardless (just a few messages later) it got canceled.If you were to run a business, and a customer tells you the only reason they no longer wish to remain your customer is because of technical issues that you know how to solve, would you just try to help them, or would you ignore it?Let&#x27;s say someone disabled javascript in their browser, and your website doesn&#x27;t work because of it, would you just cancel their subscription or would you offer to help and if they still insist on canceling it then cancel it like the rep in the screenshot did?

Maybe, but there still remains the issue that such a pointless chat is even required to cancel in the first place.

Almost the entire conversation is the customer complaining, then the rep needing to respond to it.

For an interesting definition of &quot;most&quot;?  I see, what, 3 lines that weren&#x27;t direct answers to direct questions?  One of those was pretty legitimate feedback, which seems sensible when the rep tells you feedback is why they&#x27;re asking.  Another is just asking for a copy of the chatlog.

Ah, yes. Treat others as souless automatons option.

This should be met with a combination of &quot;Sir, are you having an aneurysm right now?&quot; and &quot;I&#x27;m sorry, our staff only speaks English. Non-English speakers should send a letter to postal address xxx&quot;.

I just tell people I have terminal cancer and will be dead soon so I would like my subscription canceled please.

Reminds me of that angry guy trying to delete his Blizzard account after the Blitzchung controversy.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;dPLVwn6.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;dPLVwn6.png</a>

Yes. Stick to the business at hand: this is who I am, this is how you can look me up in your system, this is what I want to do. Feedback doesn&#x27;t help, they&#x27;re not going to take your advice, don&#x27;t waste your time.For example: &quot;Please tell us the reason for your call today?&quot; Should be met with the answer, &quot;Please cancel my subscription.&quot; &quot;May I ask why you want to cancel?&quot; &quot;Please cancel my subscription.&quot; &quot;Have you ever used reader mode?&quot; &quot;Please cancel my subscription.&quot;

Nonsense. If your situation was generalizable, then no one would accept rebates or gifts offered during the cancelation process - yet many do, which is why sales rep continue to offer them.

Yes, but the incentives are not strong enough to allow it.
Give some companies some heavy fines for this bad behavior and you’ll see the rest start to stand in line quickly.

When I tell someone I want to cancel a service, the only thing I ever want to hear is, &quot;Yes sir.&quot; followed by, &quot;All done, sir.&quot; And maybe a, &quot;Have a nice day, sir.&quot;Period.I give you money. You give me a service. I stop giving you money. You stop giving me the service.Its just that goddamn simple.

Agree 100%. It sounded a bit like a tech request on how to get rid of ads, which established some scope for agent to assist.I&#x27;m subscribed to NYT and WP to help support journalism; I&#x27;m using Samsung&#x27;s Internet browser which is just great - no ads, easy on the battery, and a dark mode to boot.

Most of this chatlog is &quot;you&quot; adding more noise than is necessary for this transaction.

I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re discriminating, probably just massive laws they have to deal with for every new country, and they&#x27;re still pretty new so probably don&#x27;t have their resources.Can you use a VPN?

US residents only. Anyone aware if something similar that doesn’t discriminate?

I recommend <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;privacy.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;privacy.com</a> for guarding against greedy, software subscriptions.1. Create a virtual credit card for one merchant2. Set the monthly payment limit just above the merchant&#x27;s monthly charge3. When you no longer feel like paying the charge, decrease the limit to $1 a month or just cancel the card.4. Any future charges will be blocked!5. Let the merchant&#x27;s systems go through the hassle of terminating your account.

You don&#x27;t owe them a justification just because they ask for one. You can simply say &quot;decline to state&quot;.

I always hate it when a customer service person asks me why I&#x27;m canceling their subscription.I called my mobile phone carrier to cancel and they asked me why. I said &quot;I don&#x27;t like your TV advertisements&quot;. That put a quick end to that line of enquiry.

I&#x27;m curious if there is a relationship between how strict one company&#x27;s retention policy is (e.g., tactics like this), and the overall health of the business. Is it positive, negative, neutral? In either case, I do worry about the future of paid journalism.

How do you subscribe through Google?  Do you need to download their app or something?

Oh! I didn&#x27;t know that. Looks like you give up the introductory offer, but the price is actually a bit better ($17&#x2F;mo vs $17 every 4 weeks) and I&#x27;m perfectly fine with that.Thanks for the tip!

You can subscribe through Apple&#x2F;Google and cancellation will be a few clicks away.

This is the only reason I’m not a subscriber. I have no interest in starting an open ended subscription that I have to fight to cancel.Shame too because I love the NYT, but I’m mostly able to scratch that itch with the economist, my local paper, and some smaller news outlets.

When most people see &quot;cancel membership&quot; they will think it is immediately. They will just wait to cancel until the last possible day and when they forget it&#x27;s free money for Netflix. It&#x27;s smart&#x2F;shady. I&#x27;m sure it contributes to their decreasing churn.

Can&#x27;t you just cancel your account at any time? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.netflix.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;node&#x2F;407" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.netflix.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;node&#x2F;407</a>

we&#x27;ve cancelled our netflix subscription multiple times.in fact, they&#x27;ve made it so easy that we&#x27;ve resubscribed plenty. if anything, the netflix model is one to emulate. that being said, we&#x27;ve never tried removing my credit card.

This has not been my experience with Netflix at all. I regularly unsubscribe and resubscribe later. Unsubscribing is always just a click of a button and I&#x27;ve never had to speak to anyone at Netflix for anything.Incidentally they also appear to honor their data deletion policy. If I stay unsubscribed for more than six months, my account ceases to exist and I need to create a new one to resubscribe.I would have thought Netflix would be the gold standard for how to do this properly. I&#x27;m sure they have lots of people like me who subscribe a few months a year just to check out whatever&#x27;s new. If I ever ran into a problem like this I would never sign up again.

Netflix does something similar. It won&#x27;t let you remove your credit card so you don&#x27;t get billed automatically after the  first month.

There are several publications I would willingly support (eg The Atlantic, the New Yorker) but I don’t and this is the reason why: I absolutely refuse to subscribe to services that are going to be a hassle to cancel.It’s the gym business model. I’m sure this shows incremental gains in revenue but I bet it’s at the cost of retarding growth.I want to start and stop a subscription as I please. I want to do it without having to speak to a human being. I don’t want to be called by the provider to renew my subscription.I will not reward or support scummy retention tactics.

Me too. I&#x27;ve subscribed and unsubscribed to their digital plans a bunch of times in the past ~10 years and it was never difficult. Perhaps this is new?

Last month I cancelled my subscription online in about three clicks. Not sure how they determine who to redirect to chat.

Sadly I&#x27;ve seen worse for a subscription service. For example, Birchbox, a monthly makeup service will autorenew for you for a full year and won&#x27;t allow cancellations at all. Also obviously you can sign up online easily but can&#x27;t cancel there, you have to work through their customer service, like most of these sites that try to steal your money.  I guess treating customers who already left you doesn&#x27;t matter much to these companies and in some cases like Birchbox I&#x27;m surprised what they are doing isn&#x27;t predatory and illegal.

At least for the economist this was not the case last month. I canceled my sub and got a new one for my kid who wants the paper copy (this way I got the intro deal for students) and it was painless. Plus I can still log in online.So maybe enough people complained, or someone in the subscription department ran across a conscience and tried it on for size.

This is a bit off topic, but if you ever want a cheaper Adobe subscription just go through the cancellation process and opt to discuss it.This was some time back and I&#x27;ve simply cancelled since then, but it was a good little thing to do back then.

I had a similar experience with the Economist a few years ago. Signed up for a trial (something like $5 for 13 weeks?) and decided to cancel at the end of the trial.It took me 10 minutes on the phone to cancel, and then I received 3 phone calls later that day from the Economist offering me special offers to re-subscribe. I have to admit that I may have answered rather rudely when the third caller asked how I was doing...

I signed up in app for they $1 a week or whatever offer during the election cycle and also had to go through this ordeal, although it wasn&#x27;t as bad.Initially it sounded like you had to call them or fax your cancellation, so I was already happy when I found the chat option.

To their credit, they tell you pretty plainly that the monthly subscription is a year-long commitment.I also find that they&#x27;re usually pretty willing to keep adding new customer promos if you threaten to cancel because their price went up.

That&#x27;s an obvious reason though.. It provides user training, addiction, lockin, and demands to further entrench Adobe CS in companies as &quot;required software&quot;.The lockin of all my documents and content is enough to run me towards Free and Open Source software. Albeit the software may not be as polished, but I will not be subject to my data being hijacked and ransomed by a for-profit entity.

Fun fact: the Adobe Creative Suite is insanely simple to pirate.

This is nothing.Try cancelling the &quot;monthly&quot; Adobe Creative Suite subscription without paying out the remaining 11 months!

It will make you want the cancel process to be just as easy as the subscription. Instead you have to chat with a person who will try to retain you as a customer.

Of course, they could do the same thing without charging 30%, which they only get away with for lack of competition.

This sort of thing is why I’m fine with Apple charging the people I do business with a 30% cut: Apple provides a lot of value making “payments” and “subscriptions” consistent between vendors.

Got my NYT online subscription via Apple, so I just cancel it via the App Store. Easy-peasy.

How do you get a throwaway credit card number?

This is why I use throw-away credit card numbers for everything. I&#x27;ll give a quick try at cancelling a service (out of respect), but if it takes me more than a few clicks, I just stop the card and send their emails to spam. Done and done.

I bought a new vehicle that came with a free year of SiriusXM, but I never activated it because I&#x27;ve heard how scummy the company is about canceling.Once a month they mailed me a postcard to sign up, I called them to ask them to stop mailing me a post card, after a few back-and-forths, the person said, okay, we won&#x27;t mail you anything for two years. I said don&#x27;t mail me ever, I will never ever use them. The person said okay, they&#x27;ve taken me off their list. We shall see...

I&#x27;m not sure. This is a reference to the law I had in mind:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.findlaw.com&#x2F;common_law&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;what-to-know-about-californias-new-online-cancelation-law.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.findlaw.com&#x2F;common_law&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;what-to-know-ab...</a>It seems to imply the subscription had to be a &quot;click&quot; affair.&quot;If the subscription was started online, consumers must be able to cancel it online. No more dealing with fruitless or contentious phone calls with these businesses! One click of a button, and the service is canceled.&quot;

Would this not count as &quot;online&quot;? Or is the law specific that a person not be in the loop?

In theory signing up online in California gives a consumer the right to cancel online, but I don&#x27;t know how closely that&#x27;s enforced, or if a non-resident of the state can vpn the signup.

I just unsubscribed from the NYT. I originally signed up via the Google Play Store, so the process was literally two clicks in the app: choose the sub I wanted to cancel, then confirm. Done.Of course, this isn&#x27;t particularly useful if you signed up via any other channel, but it definitely makes it easier next time around.

The Curb Your Enthusiasm strategy in action.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=B2oLFKYNInQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=B2oLFKYNInQ</a>

A little trick might work. You only need to say you become a trump supporter and they will cancelled it immediately. I use this way and the whole process cost less than 5 mins.

When I learned that NYT is a publicly traded company, that totally changed my perspective  on them.

I had a similar experience with them as well. It definitely surprised me and made me grumpy, but it honestly took half the time as this one because I didn’t put up a fight.I remember being similarly disgruntled by canceling Prime. Lots of misleading calls-to-action across multiple screens. But something about being forced to talk to a human being really rubbed me the wrong way with the Times.

I don&#x27;t remember where I read it, but apparently one person was successful with stopping a free weekly paper from being delivered by reporting littering to the police (they tried telling the newspaper first, but they didn&#x27;t stop).

They do the same stuff with the paper end. Back in the day used to get it delivered... excruciating time canceling it... for a couple weeks it would keep showing up on the doorstep, and they couldn’t tell me why the cancel didn’t go through.The process was so abysmal I vowed never to do business with them. It’s a shame.I dealt with a lot of print companies for some of my business back in the day. The business people would always complain that the editorial boards hated what they did... but then they just replied, “who’s going to pay your salary to write your articles”.I still think journalism needs a better business model. Ads conflict with honest content, and subscriptions don’t pay the bills when it’s easy to get free news from other less reputable sources.

If Facebook made it this hard to cancel, there would be a New York Times article about it.

Before buying a NYT subscription, here's what it'll take to cancel it