They renewed the graduate at $415 and called it cancel any time. I know this one from the inside, which is the worst way to know anything. I spent years at the You Know Who Post in a cardigan that cost more than a semester of textbooks, linking every morning to paragraphs that sat behind somebody’s paywall, and I never once asked what happened to the kid who signed up for the student rate and then, God help her, graduated. I thought journalism was the thing that read the fine print for you. It turns out journalism also has fine print, and it renews automatically.
Here is the record. New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Monday, Nov. 2, 2026, that Bloomberg L.P. — the parent of Bloomberg News — will pay $500,000 in penalties, change its subscription practices and refund eligible subscribers in New York and nationwide over its Bloomberg.com subscriptions. According to the attorney general’s office, a first-time subscription could cost $1.99 for the first three months and then increase automatically to $39.99 a month; customers also complained they didn’t know a $1.99 monthly plan would become $34.99. A student annual subscription cost $99 and then automatically increased to $415 after graduation, with no warning; in some cases, the office says, annual student plans jumped over $300, and other annual subscribers saw increases of over $100 at renewal. The office found Bloomberg failed to clearly disclose the terms, didn’t give the post-purchase acknowledgment New York law requires, didn’t give enough notice before renewal, made cancellation information hard to find, and did not refund annual subscriptions despite promising customers at sign-up that they could “cancel any time.” Since 2021, the office says, the website and chatbot presented a maze of questions and options, forcing some people to click through multiple pages before reaching a cancel option; subscribers could cancel by email or phone, but Bloomberg didn’t tell them so until 2023. Westfair’s Peter Katz notes that former New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is the company’s founder and majority owner.
Now the terms, because terms are where the bodies are buried. The assurance of discontinuance — I read the PDF — says Bloomberg “neither admits nor denies” the findings. Restitution goes to U.S. subscribers between Feb. 9, 2021, and June 30, 2023: annual promotional subscribers who canceled during their first renewal year can get up to $200, pro rata; monthly promotional subscribers who canceled within three months of the higher price get $15 each; student subscribers who asked to cancel within three months of the jump get 50% of that first non-student renewal; and people who complained to Bloomberg, the attorney general, the Better Business Bureau or the FTC get back what they paid after the complaint or first cancellation request. Fine. Take the refund. But do not mistake the $500,000 for a reckoning. The press release doesn’t say how many people paid the jump or how much Bloomberg collected from them, so nobody outside can say what share of the take the penalty is. The same release lists the office’s recent subscription cases — Thirty Madison, $400,000 in August; 1-800-Flowers, $375,000 in July — and the prices on these settlements read like a cover charge. The corporation designed the maze, the state sold it a ticket out, and the kid with the $415 bill gets a form letter. I am not cheering the referee. I am counting the chairs.
Taryn says the twins’ diaper subscription renewed at triple the price the week they switched sizes and the cancel button was behind a chatbot named something like Sunny, and she has never forgiven a sun. Buck says he canceled a fishing magazine in 1994 by mailing back the cover with a swear word on it and it worked fine. I love them. They are seasoning.
“Cancel any time” is the alibi. The $415 is the story. Sit with it until it confesses. A company whose product is information — whose whole pitch is that it tells you what the price of things will be before you pay it — didn’t tell its own customers what their price would be. Maybe the new disclosures fix it. I hope they do; I would rather renew than rant. But a subscription you can only leave by solving a maze isn’t a subscription. It is a toll road with a newsroom attached. The cardigan stays. Fill the notebook. Then, if you subscribed between February 2021 and June 2023, check your inbox for the refund notice, and ask Bloomberg, out loud: how many graduates paid the $415, how many found the cancel button, and how many are still paying because they never got past the chatbot?
Sources:
- New York State Office of the Attorney General, “Attorney General James Secures $500,000 from Bloomberg News for Deceiving Consumers about Subscriptions,” Nov. 2, 2026
- New York State Office of the Attorney General, Assurance of Discontinuance, In the Matter of Bloomberg L.P. (PDF), 2026
- Westfair Communications, Peter Katz, “AG James settles with Bloomberg News about deceiving subscribers,” Nov. 2, 2026
— Theo Ashford-Lindström
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