Unless you are a paid subscriber you can only access so many NYT articles a month...I do sometimes go over my quota....but I can delete some cookeis and am good to go again....and today is the start of a whole new month. I think you can access the site 20 times before they shut you out unless you pay.

When you subscribe, you get emails. Some contain links to recipes, others want you to buy something. I just use the recipe links. :)

Linda I've bumped up against that with articles (at which point I clear cookies and start over) but with cooking, I signed up for free and nothing led me to believe it was introductory. Maybe I'm wrong but I just checked my emails from when I first registered a couple months ago and no mention of limits or having to pay in the future. We'll see I guess.

The cooking section is free (for now?). No doubt they will bug you to subscribe to the full site. DH subscribes to the whole site so when I hit my article limit I use his account. Before they went pay-to-read we both had subscriptions. I figure we'd share the paper version if we subscribed to it so nothing wrong with sharing the on-line version.

Thanks, everyone! Maybe I just typed in the wrong web address.... instead of typing in cooking.nytimes dot com, I may have typed in nytimes dot com and figured I'd just click on recipes.

On Wednesday, June 28th, they sent out a letter announcing the change. If you do not subscribe to the NYT, you can get a 28 day free trial for the cooking and after that it will be $5 a month. If you subscribe to the NYT, the cooking acccess is included. Digital access is listed as $3.75 per week, but they usually have a discount of 30-50% for the first year. Here's the guts (but not all) of that letter:

So here is the deal. If you are already a subscriber to The Times, you will retain access to

Cooking.

If you are not a Times subscriber, the next time you visit Cooking you will receive a free, 28-day trial subscription to Cooking, at the end of which you will be prompted to subscribe. A subscription to Cooking costs $5 a month.

With that subscription, you'll have access to all of our more than 18,000 recipes, our instructional guides and videos, our seasonal and thematic collections of recipes, your recipe box and the organizational features attached to it. (Without a subscription, you'll still get access to the recipes featured in this newsletter, to the new recipes we publish each week and to a limited number of rotating collections. But that's about it.)

The Times did not make this decision to charge for access to Cooking lightly. Our desire from the start of this enterprise was to give our users access to the very best recipes in the world, along with the ability to save and organize them, and to use them on whatever device they wanted to, with accompanying instruction to make them delicious, every time. It would be great to be able to give all that to you for free, forever.

But we simply cannot. The work we do is expensive, and we want to do more of it. We travel ceaselessly, and cook every day. We test our recipes relentlessly. We photograph and make videos about them, we think beautifully. And we build features that help make cooking, and planning, and shopping for meals easier, more enjoyable, even fun. Your subscription will help us continue to do that, and better, and more.

So I hope you'll join us for the free trial, and then stick around to cook with us as a subscriber for many years to come.

lascatx, I got that letter a couple of days ago, it was always free before. I can still get some content free, but you can't use their recipe box and not all recipes are available, so I'm still thinking.....

Annie

Ooops, yeah, I got it too. On the one hand it sounds expensive - I dropped CI for less - but on the other hand I'm spending more for a far less useful site. Maybe I'll just swap.

Thanks for the great explanation, lascatx, about what's going on with this.