Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

imgur.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 845 posts

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

#361

Post by Silhouette »

Stratoscope wrote: post #347
Silhouette wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mine sometimes does. We also tend to refund recent payments liberally if, for example, someone who hasn't been using the app in a while asks to cancel just after they've renewed for another period. Sure, it's a principle thing, treat our customers as we'd like to be treated ourselves. But it makes sense from a purely business point of view as well. In return for giving up some small amount of subscription revenue by…

I know you don't want to self-promote yourself needlessly here, but do you mind if I ask the name of your company? With a positive attitude like yours, it seems like something I would want to know about.

Thank you, I appreciate the sentiment. Unfortunately if I told you that, I might inadvertently be outing other parties as well through my comment history, and I don't think that would be fair. I hope that our policies aren't that unusual anyway. We're just a small business run by real people and trying to treat our customers as real people too.

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

#362

Post by KDJohnBrown »

Not nearly as bad as cancelling a gym membership. 20 years ago I tried canceling my membership to 24 Hours Fitness when my company stopped reimbursing it.

They refused to do it over the phone so I reported my credit card as lost and their charges as fraudulent.

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

#363

Post by fredsted »

ganafagol wrote: post #357

I expected to read details of some legal battle over months. But this is a transcript of a chat for about 15 minutes. Srsly? That's what outrages you? Having to wait for a few minutes to cancel a newspaper subscription? How many times a day do you do this kind of thing?

It's outraging because it should be a single click, and there should be no need to go through this ordeal.

Incidentally, NYT can make it easy. I'm in Europe and canceled my NYT subscription last week – it was really easy, just a click on my NYT account page.

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

#364

Post by seer »

Silhouette wrote: post #243
e-clinton wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normal? What other business does that? I can’t think of one.

Mine sometimes does. We also tend to refund recent payments liberally if, for example, someone who hasn't been using the app in a while asks to cancel just after they've renewed for another period. Sure, it's a principle thing, treat our customers as we'd like to be treated ourselves. But it makes sense from a purely business point of view as well. In return for giving up some small amount of subscription revenue by…

What a great attitude! I wish more businesses were like that. I had to leave a startup once, that I as a senior dev managed to drag to profitability, because I saw how they treated their customers.

It was such a sad experience- while helping out with the customer side I was wading through emails _begging_ to cancel their subscription. Some people were closing their bank accounts to do that, because the founders intentionally introduced dark patterns to hide the unsubscribe functionality.

I mean yeah they did get a fair amount of money from those schemes, but they did loose all of their senior devs in the process.

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

#365

Post by helsinkiandrew »

whoisjuan wrote: post #25

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…

I wonder if this isn'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're sick of their cancellation process, if you want to read NY Times news again you'll signup.

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

#366

Post by helsinkiandrew »

kristianc wrote: post #144
e-clinton wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normal? What other business does that? I can’t think of one.

If you don’t use Amazon Prime during the trial period (or over the year if you sign up for a year) Amazon auto refund you.

They actually refund rather than just cancel further payments?

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

#367

Post by lostlogin »

astura wrote: post #139
e-clinton wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normal? What other business does that? I can’t think of one.

Banks and credit cards cancel inactive accounts.

They do. I bought a house with a cheque. It was the only cheque I’d ever written and it bounced. The bank had closed the account without telling me.

Fun times.

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

#368

Post by andix »

rawtxapp wrote: post #22

I'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's website, if it doesn't work, I just cancel the card all together.

It only works if you didn'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.

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

#369

Post by knorker »

jb775 wrote: post #353
chmod600 wrote: post #278

I just cancelled and it was relatively painless, to their credit. When they asked the reason, I said that political coverage was unfair. Left is OK, unfair is not. I don't consider myself "on the left" but I really don't mind a publication being left of center or right of center. If it's good, I will pay for it (I subscribed tp The Atlantic at least twice, and the New Yorker once, and probably others in a mix of prin…

> they want to persuade me to hold a set of opinions Glad more people are realizing this. It's harder to spot/acknowledge for people on the left since the biased coverage feeds into their worldview...in my opinion it's artificially solidified their confidence on how "correct" they feel they are about political topics. The next step in this realization is nothing to do with one-sided reporting, it's the massive scale…

The right don't have agenda-pushing affect their world view?

Huh?

There was recently an attempted insurrection based on fake news, you know.

I must say though that Fox News has gotten downright rational (on all things) since then. Politically biased, sure, but they're actually news lately.

Post reply on HN