Release notes, May 20: pause your subscription, cleaner cancellation, better story titles
Hey everyone, posting this week's release notes.
Most of what shipped is in two places: subscription controls and content quality.
What changed:
Pause your subscription for a month. New control in Settings > Subscription. Billing stops, your existing newsletters and settings stay readable, and HeyNews resumes automatically at the end of the month. Use it when you need a break without losing your setup.
Cleaner cancellation. If you want out, share a brief reason, review any save options (including switching to a cheaper plan if the current one is too expensive), and schedule the cancellation for the end of the billing period. "Keep my subscription" reverses it if you change your mind before then.
Better story titles in Content Desk. Story titles stay closer to the original article or video instead of being paraphrased. YouTube stories show the native video title and published date. Renaming a source no longer rewrites the titles of stories that came from it.
Broader search. It now checks titles, summaries, source names, and URLs together, so you can find a story by topic, site, or link instead of just the exact headline.
Plus the usual fixes: Stripe Portal cancellations now sync back to HeyNews correctly (including the option to keep your subscription before the billing period ends), scheduled downgrades use the right billing period, trial cancellation and missing-payment-method handling are more consistent, and retrying a stuck story extraction clears old error messages once it succeeds.
Full release notes: https://roadmap.heynews.co/p/whats-new-may-20-2026-8PfbDb
If you hit anything weird in the subscription or search flow, send an email to support@heynews.co, and we'll dig in.
Cagri, co-founder
Replies
Useful update. The story-title change is the one I’d watch most closely for trust: if people are using HeyNews to sound like themselves, rewritten titles can quietly become a voice/provenance problem, not just a UI detail.
Maybe worth showing a tiny “title source” indicator in Content Desk — original article/video title vs edited by user vs generated/cleaned. That would make search and publishing feel safer when someone is reviewing a batch quickly.
@jim_jeffers I’ve noticed many platforms make cancellation frustrating on purpose, so seeing a simpler process here actually improves my trust in the product overall. It feels more respectful toward users.
@jim_jeffers @new_user___090202674ab6e030a7a9c52 I really like the pause subscription option because sometimes I just need a short break without fully canceling everything
@jim_jeffers @new_user___090202674ab6e030a7a9c52 Really appreciate the new pause feature because I’ve canceled subscriptions before only because pausing wasn’t available.