Teardowns › Pricing & paywalls › Reference price

The New York Times strikes through $7.50 to sell All Access at $1 a week

The New York Times · Paywall / pricing · Logged-out visitors (USD shown) · nytimes.com · captured 16 Oct 2026

Honest nudgeReference price Price & attribute framing

The New York Times Paywall / pricing, captured 16 Oct 2026 — Our capture, 16 Oct 2026, logged out. Numbers match the steps.

Step by step

1
Reference price
"All Access: $7.50 $1/week", with the higher price struck through.
2
Price & attribute framing
"Billed as $4 every four weeks for your first six months, then $30 thereafter."
3
Authority
The Family plan is badged "BEST VALUE" at "$8.50 $2/week… Access for four".
4
"All Access includes news, plus Games, Cooking, Audio, Wirecutter and The Athletic."

Prices quoted in dollars ($), exactly as shown on the page we captured (US-priced). Prices vary by region and change over time.

The psychology

Why it nudges

The struck-through $7.50 is a reference price that makes $1/week look like a deal, and the per-week framing makes it smaller still. The Family plan for four is a different product; its "BEST VALUE" badge acts as a recommendation cue. The headline copy rotated between our captures ("Come for the Games. Stay for The Times." and "Benefit from the facts."), which could be a test or personalisation. Whether this lifts subscriptions is not public.

● Strong evidence · More on reference price, with sources →

Context

A news publisher bundling Games, Cooking and The Athletic. The intro price rises after six months.

What they've said publicly

NYT said (Q2 2024) that Games "was a valuable funnel for new bundle subscribers", as quoted in a NYT talk at INMA (2025). The same talk says subscribers who engage with both News and Games in a week have "the best subscriber retention of any engagement habit in the bundle".
NYT at INMA, 2025 →
At the end of Q1 2025, NYT reported 11.7 million subscribers, about 49% of them on the bundle or multiple products.
NYT Q1 2025 prepared remarks →

Honest nudge or dark pattern?

Honest nudge

Honest nudge as captured: the intro length and the full price after it are on the same card, and the fine print names the date the price changes.

Steal this, honestly

Print the bill and the post-intro price right under the headline price, as the Times does.
Name the bundle items people already love.

What to test: Per-week vs per-four-week headline price. Measure subscriptions and churn at month 7.

Next: run it on your product

Apply this with your agent

Take the steps above into your own flow. The prompt carries this teardown, the honest-vs-dark line and the steps.

You are helping me apply a behavioural-design pattern ethically.

Pattern: The New York Times: The New York Times strikes through $7.50 to sell All Access at $1 a week
Bias: Reference price: A price is judged against a comparison price: a 'was' price, a monthly rate, a renewal rate.
Why it nudges: The struck-through $7.50 is a reference price that makes $1/week look like a deal, and the per-week framing makes it smaller still. The Family plan for four is a different product; its "BEST VALUE" badge acts as a recommendation cue. The headline copy rotated between our captures ("Come for the Games. Stay for The Times." and "Benefit from the facts."), which could be a test or personalisation. Whether this lifts subscriptions is not public.
Our verdict: Honest nudge. Honest nudge as captured: the intro length and the full price after it are on the same card, and the fine print names the date the price changes.
Source page: https://nudgeswipe.com/examples/nyt-all-access-1-a-week-intro-price/ (JSON: https://nudgeswipe.com/api/teardowns/nyt-all-access-1-a-week-intro-price.json)

Rules: say a brand "uses" a tactic, never that it "worked"; outcomes are not public unless the company published them; no invented uplift estimates; flag mixed evidence. Honest nudge = true, visible, easy to reverse, and in the user's interest. Dark pattern = hides costs, fakes scarcity or popularity, shames, or makes leaving harder than joining. Quote company-published results as "X reports", with the source link, and don’t generalise them. Don’t cite retracted or failed-to-replicate studies as support (e.g. Ariely & Wertenbroch 2002). Don’t state study figures unless they’re on this page or in a source you can link. If an idea crosses the line, link the matching deceptive.design pattern.

Tasks:
1. Ask me for my product, the flow (URL or screenshots) and the goal.
2. Audit where this pattern already appears, or could, in that flow.
3. Propose 2-3 ethical experiments: hypothesis, variant copy or UI, primary metric, and a guardrail metric (refunds, complaints, cancellations).
4. Flag every dark-pattern risk and say how to stay on the honest side.

Open in ChatGPT Open in Claude Open in Grok Open in Cursor

ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Cursor open with the prompt filled in (it is also copied, in case the prefill doesn't load). Gemini and Codex don't support prefilled links, so the prompt is copied and the app opens; paste it in.

Sources

Our capture of nytimes.com, 16 Oct 2026
Kalyanaram & Winer (1995), Empirical generalizations from reference price research. doi.org/10.1287/mksc.14.3.G161
NYT at INMA, 2025: inma.org
NYT Q1 2025 prepared remarks: nytco-assets.nytimes.com

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