ZEIT ONLINE GmbH

⚠️ Watch out for the subscription trap / misleading terms! I can only strongly warn against the subscription practices of Zeitverlag. When I signed up, I was told the subscription could be canceled monthly. Now, out of the blue, I received a bill for a whopping €158.60 for a six-month subscription! Throughout the entire ordering process, there was no clear or transparent notice of these hidden total costs. This is how customers are misled and land in financial trouble because of non-transparent contract terms. I’ve now contested the contract for deception and mistake and handed the matter over to the consumer advice center. Totally unprofessional and disappointing for a supposed quality publication. Never again!

In terms of content, DIE ZEIT is, for me, one of the best publications in the German-speaking world. The articles offer real depth, outstanding perspectives, and genuine variety. For that, it would earn a clear five stars. But the subscription management is an absolute disaster and doesn’t fit the publisher’s modern image at all. It feels like you’ve been pushed back to the 1990s digitally. There’s no real dashboard—you can’t view your subscription settings, and you can’t make changes yourself. Downloading invoices? Not a chance. Everything is complicated and handled in writing or via email through customer service. If you’re looking for excellent journalism, you’ll find it here. If you expect a modern, digital user experience, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Please digitize this urgently.

Note: I’m referring to customer service. I’ve been a subscriber for over 10 years. Unfortunately, the service for subscriptions is currently extremely poor. Some concrete examples: 1. Vacation service (delivery pause): 21 days after I submitted the request, it still hasn’t been confirmed (no response). 2. Complaint for a missing issue (requesting re-delivery): after 7 days, there’s still no reply. 3. The following week, there was again no delivery. Should I submit the complaint in the system again, or is it not worth it? 4. On the service phone line, someone picked up after 21 minutes, only to hang up immediately (July 31, 2026, 8:18 AM). Unbelievable. Dear ZEIT, I love your content, but this is completely unacceptable. Please switch providers urgently!

It’s an absolute outrage that the ABO can’t be managed online. A bureaucratic cancellation process—symbolic of Germany as a whole. We’re in 2026!

Absolutely shameless subscription scam. “Overnight stay at a hotel is free…”—you can certainly post a flyer and send me the email correspondence, since I’ve asked, to no avail, how and where exactly that free hotel overnight stay is supposed to be bookable, including for a second person. Disgusting—total scam. And after a year, I cancelled my subscription. Then—boom—phone call: “We don’t want to lose you…” They keep talking about a hotel stay plus one person, blah blah. I brought up the exact case I mentioned earlier and called out this fraud of baiting customers into the subscription, and they were suddenly very quiet on the phone. To this day, I’m still waiting for the so-called free hotel plus one person trip offer. Unbelievable. As I said, feel free to post all this nonsense online afterward. I hope this scheme gets published in your great newspaper one day and that someone investigates and explains exactly how it works—and exactly who is trying to trick your readers.

I only give one star very rarely. But Die Zeit deserves it. I canceled ages ago, paid everything, and took care of it all. Two months later, they’re still demanding money from me. I ended up in debt because of you—just because you wouldn’t understand “no” or a cancellation. May God punish you. The AI age will take your jobs away anyway.

The podcasts from Zeit are definitely extremely interesting and well produced, but the way they treat their subscribers is unacceptable. After you’ve already paid for a subscription with the streaming provider, you’re expected to pay an additional subscription for certain episodes. And this is despite the fact that they run ads multiple times in every episode! I really like the content, and I do believe you should support independent journalism, but this approach still goes too far for me—and for that reason, I think it should be boycotted.

Be careful—this feels like a subscription trap, and the customer service is often extremely unfriendly. The employees talk down to customers and act like they have an unbelievable God complex. I did a short survey, and then just a few weeks later I owed this scam company around 100 euros. Any ads from this “news portal,” no matter how legitimate they look, should be ignored immediately. Stay alert 🙏❤️.