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.
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.
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.