Every once in a while, I cancel a subscription and get a new low rate. I know this is practically universal these days, but given how many things my wife and I subscribe to, I’m interested in hearing as it’s happening what deals you get when you - yes you, the person reading this - go to cancel things, because I might want to do the same.
Prompted by: we are NYT All Access subscribers, and they recently ended my old deal and jumped me up to a substantial new deal of $390/year (non-print; All Access gives us digital + all the puzzles + Wirecutter + recipes + The Athletic)(we use all of those).
I went through the simplest online effort ever, and they dropped us to $104/year for the next year. So, there. Maybe that helps you, and/or maybe you’ve experienced something similar. Thanks!
Every year as our SiriusXM comes up for renewal at a ridiculously high price, I contact them and tell them I don’t want to pay that much and they always come up with a deal that’s within a dollar or two of what I was already paying. I set a reminder on Outlook and reach out a couple of weeks before the rate increase. It’s a silly dance we’ve shared for years.
Mrs T and I both recently got new phones (identical i-phones, for family tech support reasons - don’t get me started). We always choose to use different network providers, because that improves the likelihood that, wherever we happen to be, at least one of us will have decent signal.
So: Mrs T bought first and got a deal from Network A; I bought a few days later expecting to get a similar deal from Network B. Nope, £10/month more - so I rang up to query this. I mean, I could just switch to her network and get the cheaper deal, right? (I don’t want to, but the guy I’m talking to doesn’t know this). Can you match what she’s paying?
Long story short, yes they did manage to match the price Mrs T was paying, but in order to get the cheaper price I had to have (at no extra cost) my data allowance increased to infinite; the number of countries I could use the phone in changed from European to almost global; and I also got a free subscription to the TNT sports channel. Thank you very much, I said.
This same happened to me recently. I decided I didn’t want SiriusXM anymore and to drop it. While I was on the phone to cancel, the price kept dropping, It went from almost $400 a year down to about $200. I still decided to cancel and for the next six months I got letters and emails offering me lower and lower prices, until it finally stopped when it got down to $75 a year. I only have one vehicle. I had auto-renewed it for the past three years at their almost $400 price. How stupid am I?
Another SiriusXM subscriber/veteran of the “don’t cancel, we’ll let you have it for cheap” dance here. I think I’ve called to cancel and got the “deal” seven or eight times at this point.
I used to have to do the annual cancel dance with Comcast (Xfinity) as well. But last year they came out with their “up to 1 gig” 5-year price lock plan, which ended up being about $10 a month less than renewing my existing 400mb plan.
Yesterday one of our TV subscriptions contract was ending and a new higher rate was coming. My wife called to cancel our subscription altogether and offered us a new option that was just a couple of dollars more than what we were already paying.
Oh it’s always advantageous to question subscription prices.
Do mine about 3 times s year.
I keep a secret phone (for sooper seekrit things I’m not talking about )
I fussed with the network for a couple weeks about my rate. They were offering really cheap monthly thing in advertising. I felt I deserve the same deal. I said just forget it. I’ll move on.
Next hour I got called with an offer I couldn’t refuse. With, get this, a free upgraded phone. It’s not some fancy iPhone or the new razor. But it’s got more crap than I’ll ever use. They actually amaze me what they can do.
I suck at getting discounts from ATT, even got suckered into adding a line that was supposedly going to reduce my rate when I bought 4 new phones. I hate dealing with them soooooo much. Can’t believe I walked in th store with a plan to pay upfront for phones and walked out with a payment plan and an extra line. Okay this rant stops here for my mental health.
Comcast is another fricking dance for basic basic service.
I am da champ though at getting NYT and SXM subs dirt cheap.
So I let my “all access”subscriptions expire. Instead of sxm on the dial I start listening again to am/fm and I like it! Do I miss wordlebot when I let the NYT sub expire , a little than not at all. But then the new offers roll in. I picked 4/mo and 3.99/mo for 12 months.
Ya have to play hard to get. I need to take my own advice. The telecoms are intimidating
My son told me this story. He calls a hotel to make a reservation. They quote him a price. “Oh don’t you have a cheaper room?” “Sure we do” and they quote him a lower price. Rinse and repeat. He gets what he assumes is the same room for maybe half the price.
A variation of this: Our ISP routinely runs new customer promotions that only last a year or two. When the time comes, I threaten to cancel, they counter with some lame ass deal that’s nowhere as good as their new customer promotions. I cancel anyway and then immediately re sign up under my partner’s name. We repeat and rotate every few years like this. What a waste of everyone’s time.
I used to do the XM song and dance too, but got sick of their ads and DJs talking. Canceled for real and paid for a Spotify subscription instead and couldn’t be happier.
I don’t really use Sirius XM at all, but my Sony car system came with the capability for it when I installed it several years ago. Sirius provided the receiver and antenna free with a very low-rate annual subscription, so I went for it. Every year, I call and get the monthly rate reduced by 75% by re-upping for another year. Finally, I cancelled it completely this year.
This week, I decided to completely change my AT&T subscription, which includes U-Verse TV, internet, home phone, and cell service. I was able to get better service at a lower price, but the thing that really surprised me was that I could get a 15% discount on my cellular service (4 phones) by adding a second number to one of my existing phones. That’s right…add an eSIM second number and I go on a “new” plan that is cheaper for all my cell services. I don’t want or need a second number. I even asked if I could just get the discount and they can keep the second number. Nope. Take a second number and get a discount on your overall bill.
Overall, I reduced my AT&T bill by about $200/month.
One silly thing I did for more than a decade was keep an Adobe Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) student subscription active for like $15/mo — well worth it at the time, before AI, since I was using it for both work and school. At the end of your subscription they’ll try to raise the price on you, but a live chat will get you another discount. I think in later years they even automated that, so if you just try to cancel online, the website will automatically offer you the discount (which is the case with many services).
Eventually your student status will expire, but at that point, I was taking community college classes for fun, and so just signed up again under the new community college email address. The $100 I spent on the one-credit gym or music class or whatever it was saved thousands across various software subscriptions and hardware discounts (like Apple stuff).
There is not an age limit; you just have to have an .edu address at an accredited institution, and community colleges count. Probably also the continuing ed programs at those same colleges, if they get you a .edu address. Some alumni associations will get you one too. Though in recent years, some services have started requiring proof of active enrollment, and not just an .edu address anymore.
Cheap subscriptions, fun classes… what’s not to love?
I have my domain name registered with the granddaddy of registrars, Network Solutions. It used to be that every year they would bill me some ungodly amount (I forget exactly how much, like $100 for the year or something). I would call them up and tell them I was going to switch to GoDaddy, and they’d reduce the fee to $35. This went on for about 5 or 10 years. Finally I got fed up with the hassle and just asked them for a price to renew for 20 years. So I got a great deal: 20 years for about $250. At least it was a great deal at the time. By now I suspect registration prices have dropped significantly. But at least I don’t have to worry about it again until 2035, if I’m still alive.
When I called to drop cable, the cable company said, “We’ll miss you.” When I took my phone off my wife’s Verizon plan, they not only didn’t try to stop me, they didn’t offer my wife some super-special new phone plan to ensure her continued loyalty.
Over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that other people’s business is more important to a company’s than mine is.
Inspired by the posts above, I was quickly and easily able to lower my SiriusXM bill using the AI chat bot, and my NYTimes bill chatting supposedly with a human.
Bolstered by that, I next tried Netflix and what a miserable disaster that was. I tried chat again and was connected to a person so incompetent I wished I was dealing with AI instead. Without permission they changed my plan to the tier that contains ads and then tried saying they couldn’t fix it, I would have to cancel my account and reopen it. After going round-and-round for a while with them claiming there’s nothing they can do and they definitely can’t transfer me to someone else, I finally disconnected and futzed around on the website long enough to finally get the option to stop the plan change without having to completely cancel my account.
After some googling, Netflix is apparently of the “don’t let the door hit you on the way out” attitude when someone goes to cancel, and doesn’t offer discounts. Just to save anyone else the hassle.
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