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Comment by benjaminbachman | Hacker News Reader

I like the New York Times but I was infuriated by the unsubscribe process. I also turned down a super cheap extension.

I am now subscribed via the Google Play store, which means the NYT loses a big chunk of the money, all so I can be guaranteed an easy cancellation button.

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I didn't have any trouble cancelling the NYT. My credit card number changed, and that was that :-)

That sounds like tremendous trouble if you have your card on any sites like Amazon.

It was indeed a nuisance, but when a fraudulent transaction appeared on my statement, it had to be done. I just found it convenient to not update the card on the NYT.

Virtual cards are great for this. My brother keeps recommending privacy.com, I need to look into it.

I used virtual cards for decades. PayPal had a Firefox extension that did this in the early aughts.

I used getfinal.com for several years too but they went bankrupt. I don't even try anymore

I had a newspaper send me to collections when I tried that; over a matter of about $18 for newspapers they never delivered because I hadn't paid.

The NYT cut me off when the old card got declined, so if they had sent it to a collection agency, I would have disputed it.

I can easily cancel from the nytimes.com website by going to my account settings.

That must be new, maybe in response to some recent FTC opinions that every web site should have a cancelation option that was equivalently easy to the subscribe option. Used to be you could only cancel over the phone.

California address.

Or international address

Figures. I wonder what it would cost to buy myself a functional California address.

I just now unsubscribed from NYT, in response to this thread. I had to do an online chat, but at least it wasn’t an overly prolonged process. I am quite certain that I did not have an option to unsubscribe from account settings.

I also unsubscribed from The Washington Post. It did have a non-chat-based unsubscribe option, which I greatly appreciated.

I also unsubscribed from The Economist. It was the worst. They went through multiple but-here’s-an-even-better-deal stuff, then tried to subscribe me to email newsletters.

Thanks, HN, for the incentive to do this; I had meant to for some time.

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