$10/month subscription

If that sounds like a lot of ongoing work, you could create a *second* account with a subscription at the $3.50/month level, then never log in with that account, except to renew once a year. Maybe add a suffix to your existing account name when creating the second account.

There is a bit more overhead for LWN (two financial services transactions instead of one), but since they offer subscriptions at the $3.50 level one would hope that the overhead is not a significant fraction of the starving hacker subscription. And besides, since it's really $10.50/month not $10, there's an extra $6/year to cover that overhead.