Our account bills every four weeks, not by the month. In 2021 we received 13 bills, which necessarily means that two must fall in the same calendar month. You can verify your billing plan here:
https://myaccount.nytimes.com/seg/subscription Changing the billing date won't prevent this. Our billing dates were: 23, 20, 20, 17, 15, 12, 10, 7, 4,
2, 30, 27, 25. If the NYT isn't worth paying for one four week period you should cancel.
yup - this - charges 13x a year, so there is always going to be one month where you get two charges. I consider having to pay $14 for the entire year a pretty good deal. YMMV, of course.
It definitely allows them to advertise what appears as a lower "monthly" charge (I know they don't advertise it as monthly, but when a lot of people sign up that's undoubtedly what they are thinking) vs if they collected the same amount annually in monthly installments.
I mean, yeah, this is marketing psychology at work. But NY Times very clearly denotes billing amounts as every 4 weeks - so any consumer who assumes monthly is just not paying attention. And this also hasn’t changed…4 week billing periods have been how the Times has sold this since day 1 of their digital subscriptions.