Misleading pricing:
Using the billing period as the header and showing the price for the billing period… except for monthly—which shows 1/4 the price and says “every week” in smaller, gray text.
Punishing non-subscription payments:
Adding a $6.50 (1400%) surcharge for wanting a weekly one-time payment instead of a recurring subscription.
Charging more for longer periods:
Monthly billing, once you remove the dark pattern and convert it to its actual price, is $2. There are 12 months in a year, meaning it would cost $24 to maintain that subscription for a year.
Why is the yearly subscription $29, then?
If you want to verify this for yourself, you’re going to need to clear your cookies and reload an article a lot. They do A/B tests and show different subscription requied modals. This one was the worst.
Worked out to yearly prices from the weekly cost, they are:
7*52 = $362
0.5*52 = $26
Or $29
It is because of your post I realized it’s cent not dollars. I thought who pays 50 dollars per week for an online newspaper.
In euros AFAIK we don’t really use cent very often and it would probably be shown as €0,50
I remember that I wanted to subscribe to a German newspaper that advertised 6 months for 99ct or whatever. I wanted to see if the regular pricing after the 6 months was good but I had trouble even finding it and when I finally found it, the different subscription options were so opaque that I truly didn’t understand which plan to pick. In the end I didn’t subscribe. I have no idea why some companies make their offerings so inaccessible.
Write them a physical letter complaining about their website and mail it to them via international mail. That should get the point across nicely.
They know. Some of them admitted their paid tier only exists to argue that a tracking free website exists and they can advertise and track all their readers.
I don’t trust the “$29 for the first year”. Does this mean it’s going to get more expensive later?
Things go up every year.
except wages and welfare, of course
“hey why are people not buying as many things these days?”
Because of tradition at this point.
Oh, absolutely.
It’s an introductory offer so, yeah, one should expect to pay full p^rice starting the second year.
There are 52 weeks in a year, so the monthly would equate to $26 per year, not $24. Still, cheaper than the yearly.
Wife used to subscribe to WaPo and my local Houston Chronicle. Both make unsubscribing deliberately aggravating. Unsubscribing via the website didn’t work. Phone calls resulted in long hold times and automated loops, where they repeatedly demanded authentication and then hung up on you to force a restart. When we did eventually get someone to say the subscription was cancelled at Houston Chronicle, they just… kept billing us even after the account was disabled.
We ultimately had to go through our credit card to stop payment.
I am glad you are aware of going to your credit card company when you can’t resolve problems.
But… your requirement is to make one good faith effort to cancel (e: keep screenshots or timestamps of phone calls and notes), and if it does not work, you should go straight to your credit card company. It is not up to you to chase them or argue or beg.
But… your requirement is to make one good faith effort to cancel
Sure. But when you’re starting the process you think “maybe I just did it wrong”. By the end, you can see the pattern and conclude “these people are just scammers”.
You’re absolutely right about that, but I guess I’ve been through this enough times that I’ve just refined the process, like a river slowly smooths down a stone over years.
Thing is, with a yearly subscription they cannot raise the price for a year. With a monthly subscription they can raise the price whenever. Since it’s Bezos, I expect you’d be paying more in a year when going for the monthly subscription as it’s probably going to be raised after every 3 months. That’s why they made the prices so confusing with the “only 50 cents” as favorite option. They want you to go for the cheapest option be ssue they can profit from that the most. They lure you in with cheap prices, then suck you dry.
For AI generated “news”:
Oh he didn’t invent the thing and he’s certainly not unique using it. This is like being mad at just one specific bird for pooping on your car.
I loaded a bunch of articles until it prompted me to pay. I got the screenshot below. In my opinion, this is an intentionally misleading fake 50c/month offer.
Fuck is ‘core’ and ‘premium’??
Will they deliver the news all he way to my device e ery morning if I get premium?
The $2-3 subscription wouldn’t be unreasonable, but I’d rather give it to an outlet that doesn’t try to mislead me even before I become their customer.Premium includes the stories that are critical of Amazon and billionaires, which Bezos usually has pulled from circulation.
/s
After your first year, renews at $120 every year.
Holy crap that’s a big change!!
I’ve cross posed this to !misleadingprices@piefed.social
I still don’t understand why anyone would ever pay for access to news articles. There are plenty of free and legitimate articles on the Internet, and public access TV still broadcasts news. You never need to pay anyone.
Honestly, putting a price on access to news just makes me not trust that organization. It feels like a scam, like paying for bottled water when water is one of the most abundant resources in the world.
Paid subscriptions are only a thing because people bought into it and normalized it instead of boycotting it. That’s why everything is a subscription nowadays and no one can just buy and own a product now. We have to spend our lives paying a regular fee for access to something we never own.
See, the problem is, free news has to make revenue from somewhere.
If they aren’t taking subscriptions, then they are probably showing ads, so their content is at the mercy of their sponsors.
Even if they are taking subscriptions, they are probably showing ads. That makes it doubly bad.
The alternative is secondary sources (i.e. social media), where theres already a bias by whoever is curating it.
We are amidst an actual information war. Like, there are at least two totally separate realities existing on the US right now. A reliable source of news is important, and capitalism has destroyed all of the old outlets and left us skeptical of the new ones. Good job, everyone.
I pay for access to the local newspaper and a few other things. I agree it isn’t ideal but the people producing the content need to eat.
Also, having a subscriber base directly providing funding can potentially make a news org more trustworthy. Being reliant on your subscribers for funding provides a mechanism of accountability to them that a news org dependent on advertising doesnt have.
Do you work for free? No? Then why should journalists?
Because the more a news source depends on ads revenue the shittier it is.
I would understand paying for online news as an alternative to ads, and only if the news organization does actual reporting free from political or billionaire interference.
Off the top of my head, I can think of exactly one news website that seems to meet that criteria at a surface level.
For everything else, fuck 'em— archive.is :)
Google offers things for free, see the shitty stuff they’re doing?
Personally, I’d rather keep on paying for my newspapers and have them not do, or not as much, shitty things. And that’s exactly what I do (plus I like to receive my news in print knowing no one is tracking what I’m reading and how) ;)
I actually pay for 404 Media, because they are a small investigative outfit and do not do ads. That’s worth something!
News no, analysis maybe, but I don’t know if wapo actually does that.
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