Sign o’ the Times (Premium)

I’ve had a troubled relationship with The New York Times for decades, dating back to its terrible, one-sided tech coverage in the early 2000s. But the problems have only escalated in recent years.

At a high level, I find it offensive that I pay a lot for The New York Times and it still displays annoying, often animated advertisements in its app. That sounds obvious enough, but there’s more.

In addition to being expensive, the New York Times charges in 4-week increments for its main subscription, as opposed to the more typical monthly and annual time frames. This is an interesting strategy. We all know that subscription services are a gotcha of never-ending payments. And that every service seems to have gotten more expensive in the past few years without delivering more value, some of them multiple times. But the Times’ four-week cycle means you’re charged one extra time each year, as opposed to monthly (13 billing cycles per year instead of 12) as if there were 13 months in a year. At the current price of my subscription, that’s an extra $20 each year, but it’s about to go up to $23 because of a new price hike.

And while the ads all over the place are annoying, it’s not just ads: The Times is addicted to animated promotional graphics that I can’t stand, and there’s no option to disable them. I came here to read, not get dizzy. Competing publications like The Washington Post support an iOS accessibility feature that disables this nonsense. The Times does not.

I routinely review laptops, as you know, and I also routinely move from browser to browser so I can keep up with those developments. And every time I sign in to the Times in a new browser, every single time, it tries to upsell me to something called “All Access” with a full-page ad I have to click through before I can access the content I came there to see.

The Times acquired The Wirecutter, which I love and recommend, some years ago, and I thought this would be wonderful, since I already pay for the Times. But it’s a separate subscription: Access to The Wirecutter costs an additional $40 per year. Are you kidding me?

Wait, it gets worse. Like many, I read sports, and just about every day. And when the Times acquired The Athletic a while back, I thought that was great: It’s a well-respected publication and there’s no version of this story where the Times charges me extra for sports, right? Right? Wrong. It’s extra. So I can’t access any sports stories with my $20/$23 per four week subscription now. Seriously.

I mentioned these issues with the Times recently in From the Editor’s Desk: Reactive Change (Premium), and was nervous about even figuring out what it was, exactly, that I was paying this company, plus what I could be paying them. But in discussing this with my wife, who also reads this publication each morning, I finally decided to look, to dig a bit deeper into the true costs here.

The current subscription was costing us $260 per year, but it was about to go up to $300! Plus another $40 for The Wirecutter.

My wife was willing to walk away from the Times. But she had one question for me: How much did it cost to subscribe to The Washington Post, the other newspaper we both read every day? (I also subscribe to The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, mostly for work but she doesn’t read them.) I didn’t remember, so I looked it up. And the Post has an entirely different thing happening.

My Post subscription currently costs $120 per year, and, yes, it’s billed once per year by my choice. (You can be billed monthly, too.) But I paid a lower promotional price in each of the previous two years, $60 and $40: When it renewed in late 2023, the publication never thought to alert me, I’m sure that was a misunderstanding, so I didn’t have a chance to challenge the charge or make a change. But I won’t make that mistake again. More on that in a moment.

In any event, $120 is still a lot less than $260. And in my experience, paying for something in a big chunk like that, as I did previously with Mint Mobile and still do with current subscriptions like Google One, is advantageous. Paying month to month is more expensive over the long run. But $140 more expensive?

Here’s the thing. Like other publications, the Times and the Post both offer new subscribers special deals that are not available to current subscribers. (Normally; if you complain enough, you can sometimes get the deal. Just ask any Sirius XM subscriber.) This type of thing has always bothered me, dating back decades to the pre-digital world: Why wouldn’t you give loyal, long-time customers the same deal you give to any schmo off the street? It doesn’t seem right. Surely, customer loyalty is valuable.

I guess not. So it’s time to fight back.

One strategy is to unsubscribe when a promotional term ends and then resubscribe with a new email address to get the cheaper promotional rate again, repeating this for as long as you can get away with it. I don’t do this as much as I should, and I have examples where this no longer works, as with YouTube TV, which is onto my insidious plan to save money. But with the Times and the Post, whatever. I’m ready to bail on the Times and even if I paid full price, I’d still save money if we just read the Post. I decided to get aggressive and finally do something.

After discussing the math with my wife. I’m not an idiot, I canceled my New York Times subscription. The publication immediately offered me the $1 per week promotional pricing for the All Access subscription, billed in four week increments–so, just $52 hilarious dollars for an entire year–and I accepted. I lowered by bill each four weeks from a planned $23 to just $1, and I got more in return (All Access includes The Wirecutter, games, cooking, and whatever other Times content). Yikes. (Next year, I suspect I will need to use a new email address.) In other words, I saved over $200, but really I saved about $250, because I have to factor in The Wirecutter subscription I no longer need to pay for separately.

Feeling empowered by this, I looked at the Washington Post, which renews next month, and I canceled that subscription too. It didn’t offer me a sweetheart deal to stick with it. So I signed up again with a new email address in a Incognito browser window and–voila!–I went right back to the promotional $40 annual rate when billed all at once for a year. So I saved $80 there too.

Add this all up and I saved about $330. And it took me about 10 minutes, tops, not counting having to change the sign-ins on my various devices. That’s obviously worth doing, as is creating calendar reminders so that I review these things in one year and behave accordingly. The only question I have now, is what took so long?

Dear God. It’s time to take a look at those other subscription services.