New Scientist Avis 

I was interested in subscribing to NS - I used to take it back in the 80's, but after reading many , many 1 star reviews here and the scripted disconnected responses .... I am not going to subscribe...

So well done NS, potential customer put off even before subscribing !!

You could do so much better by sorting out the subscription, and equalising the subscription cost to all customer, whether new or existing...
Make a brave move....
Offer more options .... 3 month... 6 month etc etc , with no auto renewal (or an OPT-IN renewal option, not an automated OPT-IN).... or at the very least more warnings before renewal takes place.... instead of the trap you have in place now....

with less of a cost penalty for choosing a shorter period.... and you might actually win over (more) customers....

EDIT: (28/3/25) The response from New Scientist should tell you EVERYTHING you need to know about the kind of customer service you should expect ...
Personally , good decision not to subscribe

The same here. I realised that I have been charged £199 when their website says subscription is £117! After contacting them twice, this was their reply:
"We always endeavour to give our subscribers the best savings however, due to the increasing cost of production there is a need to increase subscription prices. We’ve tried to absorb increases to our costs for our existing subscribers for as long as possible." So existing customers are been charged an extra £82. How outrageous!!! I will unsubscribe too and check the legality of this.

Slimy. Make it hard to cancel

Im joining many other reviews regarding the app 'revoking' my subscription and therefore not able to view content on an almost monthly basis even though I was paying automatically. I was also paying $35AUD for digital content and realised that the subscription price had dramaticaly fallen in price and I was not notified. Another bug bare is the inablilty to supply a straightforward cancellation option. It is a sneaky non-transparent practice and dangerously shirking consumer rights.

DO NOT SIGN UP

To cancel you need to email them, this extra friction is in bad faith. There should be an automated option.

I have just contacted new scientist regarding pricing. Via the new scientist app settings button I was given an automatic renewal price of £99.99. I was unpleasantly surprised to be charged £199.00. An email got what appeared to be a stock answer since some details of my subscription were incorrect. A call to customer support got no further so on the basis of the abysmal customer support and at best misleading pricing I have reluctantly had to cancel my subscription.

New Scientist replies to emails without reading them first.
I get totally irrelevant replies.
I have been complaining to them that it is impossible to find their letters page in the online version, for years now!

Do not subscribe to "New Scientist" magazine. They are politically biased and subjective in their writing. They are not a good source for the uniformed. I was not happy with their content, so I asked to cancel my subscription. They will not do it, they force yo to take remaining issues, and merely say they will not auto-renew you (I did not have that as an option anyway). VERY poor business practice forcing a person to buy yet to be printed issues! Beware. ARF PhD.

On reviewing New Scientist reputation on Trustpilot I believe you have purposely made it difficult to unsubscribe. Signing into the account is easy, but it seems we have to sign into the same account again when we need to “easily” manage our subscriptions.

I could not cancel my subscription because I could not access my account a second time to do it myself - due to a constant message that my email does not match my subscription number, the same subscription number that could only be accessed by signing into my account for a third time. Unbelievably frustrating.

This is such a disappointment for a magazine that I highly regard. Your subscription cancellation process is infuriating.

The title is great, the customer service is not.

I have been subscribed to NS for 4 years now and love reading each issue. The problem comes when you need to speak to their customer services.

My subscription auto renews in December and I needed to change the account the payment it comes out of. I emailed several times only to be told my account couldn't be found, then finally was sent my subscriber number after 5 days of back and forth.

I called the customer service line with my number and spoke to the renewals team who couldn't find my account again, then hung up on me.

I called back and explained again what had happened, and was told that my subscription finished December 2024, and was put on hold to sign up for another year when I was hung up on again.

I called back for a third time and spoke to someone else who said that my auto renewal had already been processed to cover me until Dec 2025 and £199 had been taken from my account, the one I didn't want to pay with.

How can one customer service department get it so wrong? Hanging up on people and then giving them different stories entirely? I have had to ask for a refund of this payment and have cancelled my subscription.

Same rip off as others here. Rolled over my subscription without my permission. Then, by the time I’d noticed, they said I wasn’t eligible for a refund. Highway robbery.

The subscriber has passed and I'm trying to organize a cancellation and refund. I managed to do this successfully with 5 other magazines, but this seems to be too complicated for New Scientist who have promised a Supervisor call back, but can't seem to even organize that.

Exactly the same experience as many others. Cancelling is nigh impossible without calling them (an illegal practice now). Don't subscribe unless you want to lose several more instalment fees before they actually stop charging you.

Submitted a cancellation request within time. Have been charged.

UPDATE:

I called up and spoke with an associate who said I would be refunded etc. panicked today to receive my copy of new scientist and that my subscription was active until Jan ‘25.

Emailed and query was dealt with today and confirmed refund. Better than previous interactions, but still should not have happened.

New Scientist has great content, but the ABSOLUTE WORST customer experience possible. It's like trying to quit the gym. You have to call them to cancel, they make you wait on hold, then they try to hard-sell you into continuing your sub. Way to, you pissed me off.

A great magazine, full of interesting articles. They lose a star for making it impossible to change to a digital only subscription and/or cancel without having to contact them manually. A poor policy and one clearly designed to make it more difficult for subscribers to leave. Honestly, all of these companies that engage in this kind of behaviour (and there are many) really need to examine whether this is a good policy as it makes one far less likely to want to subscribe again and generally leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

EDIT: so they cancelled my subscription, but refunded no money. This is just brilliant New Scientist. Now I have paid for a subscription that I don't even get. This is either incompetence (less likely) or active thievery (more likely) but at this stage I can't tell for sure. I was intending to switch to a digital only subscription but this is increasingly becoming a very unlikely proposition.
New Scientist is actively engaging in the worst practices and really needs to examine what it stands for.

Scam for subscription

Had a subscription for the online access and print magazines. Paid £149 last year, a little more than the previous year. This year £249 was deducted from my account. A quick search showed the current fees for an annual online and print subscription are £165. Raised the issue with PayPal, but apparently New Scientist are disputing the discrepancy, for an existing subscriber it should be £249. Scam company tactics.

Why am I getting emails from "newsletter @ e.newscientist dot com" saying that to avoid suspension of my Xfinity account I should log on to the email and update my payment info.

I don't have Xfinity and know scams but is new scientist running a scam?

The most appalling service I have encountered from a Company, bar none. I got no warning my yearly subscription payment method had expired, just an email to say it had done so. Ok fine - I renewed through Paypal. The payment went through fine. Now 9 days later, I still haven't had my account updated as paid, I have had zero answers to my emails, and the telephone number on the email they originally sent doesn't even work. Each time I have spoken to someone on the phone about this, it's been like navigating a maze trying to get to the correct person, and each time they promised it was now resolved, nothing changed.