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.
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.