Teardowns › Homepages & product pages › Zero-price effect

The Times sells a puzzles-only side door: "£1 for your first 3 months"

The Times · Subscribe page · UK visitors (logged out) · thetimes.com · captured 16 Oct 2026

Grey areaZero-price effect Social proof Incentive

Step by step

1
Social proof
The Digital plan is labelled "MOST POPULAR".
2
Zero-price effect
"Puzzles Subscription: Challenge yourself with Times Puzzles every day. Pay just £1 for your first 3 months."
3
Incentive
"Student Subscription: Attending a UK university? … unlimited digital access for just £9.99 /year for 3 years."

Prices quoted in pounds (£), exactly as shown on the page we captured. Prices vary by region and change over time.

The psychology

Why it nudges

A £1 entry offer is close to free and lowers the bar to start a habit. A cheaper puzzles product is a side door into the subscriber base. "MOST POPULAR" is social proof, and a student price speaks to one group. Whether this lifts subscriptions for The Times is not public.

● Mixed evidence · More on zero-price effect, with sources →

Context

A UK newspaper with a hard paywall.

Honest nudge or dark pattern?

Grey area

Grey area: the price after the first 3 months isn't shown next to the £1 offer on this page.

Sources: Captured by Nudgeswipe, 16 Oct 2026 (logged out)

Steal this, honestly

Offer a narrow, cheap first product that builds a habit.
State what the price becomes after the intro.

What to test: £1 for 3 months vs 1 month free. Measure month-4 retention.

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 Times: The Times sells a puzzles-only side door: "£1 for your first 3 months"
Bias: Zero-price effect: 'Free' is treated as more than just a lower price.
Why it nudges: A £1 entry offer is close to free and lowers the bar to start a habit. A cheaper puzzles product is a side door into the subscriber base. "MOST POPULAR" is social proof, and a student price speaks to one group. Whether this lifts subscriptions for The Times is not public.
Our verdict: Grey area. Grey area: the price after the first 3 months isn't shown next to the £1 offer on this page.
Source page: https://nudgeswipe.com/examples/times-puzzles-1-pound-for-3-months/ (JSON: https://nudgeswipe.com/api/teardowns/times-puzzles-1-pound-for-3-months.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 thetimes.com, 16 Oct 2026
Shampanier, Mazar & Ariely (2007), Zero as a special price. doi.org/10.1287/mksc.1060.0254
Captured by Nudgeswipe, 16 Oct 2026 (logged out): thetimes.com

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