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.

very agreed, they have tons of good articles which is about as many times as I've been warned never to sign up with them because you cancel.

You can subscribe to The NY Times through the App Store and then cancel painlessly just like any other app subscription.

California has this and it's great. https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202320240ab...

I use privacy.com proxy cards for this. Don't even bother unsubscribing most of the time, I just cancel the card and let nature run it's course :)

Legally, can't they let the subscription run and say you owe them the money?

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.

But what if they pass it to a debt agency? I think it's a risky strategy.

Ignore it? Even a debt agency has profit margins to hit and wouldn't take on unprofitable clients.

Depends if they allow signup from a prepaid visa. There's no one to chase, its a prepaid.

Managing subscriptions can be a pain, especially when you want to avoid endless emails. You might find using mailsAI helpful for organizing your outreach and keeping things tidy. It made tracking my subscriptions way easier without the hassle.

Tracking subscriptions isn't the problem. The problem is how much work it is to go and unsubscribe from many services. They all have a different process, that they don't make easy to find, and add as much friction as possible to discourage you. If you are trying to clean up your finances and unsubscribe from lots of things at once, it's exhausting. Having a single list of per-service cards that you can run down and click a button to pause or cancel is as much a convenience as it is a relief.

As a bonus, it's much easier to see where I've been spending so much money than running through my bank transactions and doing my own tally against their unhelpful categories and mismatched business names. And of course, the spending limits do as much to protect me from myself as it does surprise charges and price increases. It's been an invaluable tool for me, and I heartily recommend it.

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.

Exactly. I wish all the Apple bashers good luck. Well worth the 15-30%

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.

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