Not only do they not allow you to cancel online, they autorenew your annual subscription to the tune of HUNDREDS of dollars. This happened to me and I'm certain I didn't explicitly opt-in to autorenewal, as I would never consciously opt-in to autorenewal of such a costly service. The told me the following: "by choosing to pay by credit card, you opted into autorenewal." !!??
I moved out out of the country, they autorenewed, I called them, and they refused to cancel the rest of my year's subscription! They insisted upon continuing to send papers to my old address for an entire year.
Completely scammy, I will never do business with them again.
As with someone else's report about the LA Times: they say they don't, but you don't have to care what they say.
I did it this way. I went to their live help chat. The moment I said "cancel", I was redirected to another representative, who was clearly trained in customer retention. I held my ground (which is so much easier for me in chat than on a phone call!) and cancelled.
Two years ago I lived in CA, tried to cancel, ended up submitting a ticket and was told I have to call for "security purposes".
If I didn't have anything better to do I would have loved to submit about 40 tickets a day asking to close my account until they finally did and banned me.
I had this issue with a water delivery service when I lived on the East Coast US. In the end I sent an email saying that I was moving back to Italy, stopping any further charges from them on my CC, blocking them by email, and they could do whatever the hell they wanted with my account.
This is exactly why I changed my payment method with them to a virtual credit card. When I want to stop my sub I'll just block the VCC via my online banking. There is no way I'm spending time and money calling internationally to unsubscribe.
I am surprised. I have a current subscription and my online account allows me to cancel. I also paid via PayPal so canceling the recurring payments would also cancel the subscription. Edit: looked it up and saw the link to cancel in Account->Subscription - https://myaccount.nytimes.com/seg/cancel .
Interesting. I had subscribed via Amazon for Kindle and did it automatically. I wonder if the same thing would be true if you bought your subscription through the app.
Perhaps not easy, but it is (a) online, (b) consistent from one app to the next, and (c) pretty much guaranteed to work correctly and work immediately.
Considering the sort of problems people are discussing in the wider thread, this is pretty idealistic.
I moved out out of the country, they autorenewed, I called them, and they refused to cancel the rest of my year's subscription! They insisted upon continuing to send papers to my old address for an entire year.
Completely scammy, I will never do business with them again.