this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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AssholeDesign

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This is a community for designs specifically crafted to make the experience worse for the user. This can be due to greed, apathy, laziness or just downright scumbaggery.

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Leave it to a Bezos-owned company to confuse customers and mislead them for profit. (infosec.pub)
submitted 1 month ago by tfm@piefed.europe.pub to c/assholedesign@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/35308060

Misleading pricing:

Using the billing period as the header and showing the price for the billing period... except for monthly—which shows 1/4 the price and says "every week" in smaller, gray text.

Punishing non-subscription payments:

Adding a $6.50 (1400%) surcharge for wanting a weekly one-time payment instead of a recurring subscription.

Charging more for longer periods:

Monthly billing, once you remove the dark pattern and convert it to its actual price, is $2. There are 12 months in a year, meaning it would cost $24 to maintain that subscription for a year.

Why is the yearly subscription $29, then?

If you want to verify this for yourself, you're going to need to clear your cookies and reload an article a lot. They do A/B tests and show different subscription requied modals. This one was the worst.

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[–] CannedYeet@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago

Wow, that's really sneaky. You think you're paying $29/year for access to the news, but really you're getting the Washington Post.