The irony with all this, is if a company makes it difficult to cancel their subscription, it's probably not a good product. Antidotically, I've found that making it easy for users to not only cancel, but refund, has given me eye opening things to fix in some products that made it so less people cancelled or refunded. So I try to always err on best user experience.
NYT made it difficult, and they are a pretty good product. If you didn't live in california and wanted to cancel your subscription, you were required to talk to a service rep who would try to get you stay by giving you some free period before normal subscription billing resumed
You are interested in providing something worth paying for. Other people are interested in maximizing ROI for ad spend.
> Antidotically,
Anecdotally