Contact NYT Cooking Support

Well here is a classic example of an app with fake reviews. Unfortunately, for NYT it’s the good reviews that are fake. It’s just not possible for an app to have a field goal rating of distribution. About half of the reviews are five stars and the other half is 1 star with just a few sprinkled among the 2/3/4 stars. If you search for recipe apps then look at the ratings, each of them will have a downhill rating: meaning the majority of the reviews are 5 stars with fewer and fewer ratings distributed amongst the stars 4-3-2-1. Don’t believe the 5 star reviews for any app when you see an equal distribution of 5 and 1 star reviews. In the case of the NYT cooking app, most of the 1 star reviews are from users that believe the annual price of this app is just too much, I am in that group. When the app used to be free, I used it daily and Ioved it. I might even have given it a 4 or 5 star rating. Did the app crash from time to time, yes it did. But I didn’t care. Did I experience issues with my saved recipes? Yes, but I didn’t mind. The app was free and with free you accept these issues. This app is unfortunately just not priced correctly to get the rating it deserves.

I was happy with the app, and then one of my credit cards expired and I forgot to update it. Then came… the slew of threatening-sounding emails saying my payment is “past due,” “urgent billing notice,” etc. So then I had had it and went to cancel the subscription, and that’s when I saw the dark pattern. It says you have to call to cancel, but then you log into your account and there’s another option to cancel by chatting with an agent. There is no other way to cancel your subscription- you can’t do it on your own on the app or website like you can with almost any other subscription service. And if you don’t pay the past due amount for the subscription you weren’t using anyway, you’ll just keep getting the emails. Even after you cancel your subscription. Yikes. I wonder how much money NYT actually gets back this way, and if it actually offsets the cost of having chat and phone agents dealing with subscription cancellations, which I can imagine is one of the top reasons people contact them. Anyway, I was planning to cancel and maybe come back at a later date when I’m done traveling, but because of this dark pattern and threatening emails I plan to never come back. Hope that last $5 was worth it!

When I first got it I thought it was great. It has slowly gone downhill though, to the point where it’s not even really useful anymore and definitely not worth the price. It just feels like the app is being neglected, and with every update it gets worse. It was great that you can save recipes from other sites, but now the app no longer shows the pictures of non-NYT recipes so you have to read the title of each one to find what you want. Forget about browsing through your saved recipes to find visual inspiration for dinner! Also, it does not allow you to organize non-NYT recipes into different folders... Thus in order to find anything I have try and remember the exact title of the recipe I’m looking for and scroll through dozens of recipe names hoping to find it. It is literally easier to google it and just find the recipe online again. The final insult was that now it makes you sign in every single time you use it which is a huge PITA... I’m not really worried about someone stealing my recipes! If you’re just saving NYT recipes this would be adequate but if you want to save all your online recipes in one place, look elsewhere. I switched to Paprika.