I got hit with this a few years back. I signed up for Ps CC for a month (I thought) to create an anniversary gift for my wife. I used it ONCE. Tried to cancel and they told me I had in fact signed up for a year, and that if I didn't cancel now, they'd give me two months free.
I didn't want it at all! Anyway, I sucked it up, got on with the remainder of the year, because they wouldn't let me put the cancellation in early, had to do it X months before the end. Then life happened and I missed the deadline to cancel and got suckered for a second year!
Fuck Adobe and this practice is all I have to say, I stick strictly to Open Source options now. It may have been my fault for not reading the first time, but robbing me a second time by counting on me missing the cancellation because they wouldn't let me do it there and then is just scummy.
Sounds like Adobe hired some executives from the cable TV or satellite TV industry, where the fine print on some packages locks you into 24 or 36 month contract terms. They know exactly how to do it with the minimum legal amount of notice to the customer when signing up, and how to write the terms of service for acceptance to make it ironclad. Same with 2-3 year terms on cellular carriers with a "free $0!" new samsung phone.
For a long time the local telephone company in British Columbia (Telus) was giving away "free" xboxes or 46 inch flat screen TVs if you locked yourself into a triple play service contract. Of course the buy-out price to end the contract early far exceeded the value of the product given out.
> Same with 2-3 year terms on cellular carriers with a "free $0!" new samsung phone.
I really like the moves T-Mobile has done to change this. They very transparent that you are financing the phone on your monthly bill and then receiving monthly credit to off set the monthly payment.
What's wrong with that? If they are giving you 500+$ worth of stuff for you to sign on to a contract, I'm sure they are going to protect themselves from people just signing on to get free stuff and immediately canceling.
If you sign a 2-3 year contract and want to break it before it ends, there will always be some kind of penalty.
Japanese cell phone companies did something similar for many years, they all offered two-year contracts with a cancellation fee of around $100, and you could only cancel in the last month before it auto-renewed. The government finally passed new regulation to stop this a few years ago.
The extra insult was they called it a "discount package" (50% off!), but it was already baked into all the advertised prices. In other words you pay double the listed price if you don't take the lock-in.
They still have very misleading text on their contracts and their sales people will try to imply canceling has a cost attached. You could usually get the fees waived if you wasted enough of their support staff’s time.
Krita is pretty decent replacement, if you want a paid alternative, then Affinity Designer / Affinity Photo is half price right now, and they don't use a subscription model:
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/
Krita is basically (one of the) best in class applications for digital sketching/painting specifically. But it's not really a replacement for photo editing or graphic design.
While Krita can be nice, it can also be a bit difficult and bothersome to use.
For example, there is no printing support. Units everywhere (other than document creation) are in pixels and cannot be changed to millimeters, etc. Tools (like drawing a rectangle) operate on the current layer instead of creating a new one like Photoshop, which makes drawing annoying. Guides aren’t that fantastic to use. There’s a lot of areas that require polish in Krita.
I had this exact issue. I specially chose the more expensive monthly options and read all the fine print, but apparently the cancellation fee snuck by somehow. My solution was removing my credit card, adding a “you don’t deserve to get paid” prepaid VISA charged with ¥200, and canceling anyway. They tried to charge me on and off for about a month — and a random charge attempt 3 months later.
Having to do this is a terrible felling and I feel like a bad person, but I at least put the cancellation fee I would have paid to good use by buying Affinity Designer.
This is why any time there is anything with a date associated with it more than a week or so out I go into my work calendar and add a reminder. Depending on what it is that may be on the date, or a week or even month prior. If it's super important I'll add it to my Google calendar which I don't use for anything except alerts like this that a year+ out where I may not be at the same job but still need to remember.
Honestly, this was a reasonably inexpensive way to learn a life long lesson to keep calendar reminders for distant future, with recurring alarms for several days or more if required. I accepted the defeat, learned from it and moved on.
My wife was/is happy with the anniversary present.
This is why for such services (though I haven't used Adobe software in more than a decade) I use single use debit cards like the ones offered by Revolut.
Adobe is in the same ring of trust as a random shady website and one ring above a Nigerian prince.
That contract you signed with Adobe has residual value when they give up on charging you. They don't just move on, they sell it to a debt collection service and then you will really learn about aggressive tactics.
Caveat Emptor. I subscribed to Revolut "Premium" in order to have unlimited disposable virtual cards but changed my mind since and they too charged me the cancellation "break fee". Apparently everyone is using this tactic these days.
This is a super effective way to get debt collectors sending you messages!
It depends on the company and sales contract, but as you signed up to an agreement for the subscription on these terms it's possible that Adobe would be able to sell the unpaid fees off to collection agencies.
I use a very simple solution for this: whenever I'm handing my credit card information to some service, if there is a slightest chance of such bullshit (which is always the case with any subscription-based service), I just use a virtual card with just enough money on it to pay for whatever I intend to pay. Then they can prolong the subscription, sneak their stupid extras all they want.
This may work in the US (does it, really?) but mostly not in Europe. If the service provider thinks you are a subscriber and don't pay, you will eventually end up in collections. You can't just "stop paying", that will not terminate your subscription.
> they wouldn't let me put the cancellation in early
Everything they did was legal until this. If they won’t process it, send them a letter with your state attorney general’s consumer affairs (or, if you’re a business, commercial division) Cc’d. Address it to their general counsel. State you cancel your contract with them effective such and such date. Contract termination is quite strictly defined in law, for obvious reasons.
I don't know where you live, but I live in the Netherlands and here it is illegal to bill you for a second year of a subscription automatically. After year one, you can cancel at any time (with, I think, a month of notice period).
I live in the UK. In the second year, Adobe gave me the same option, don't cancel and get 2 months free, or pay the buyout at full price (I took the 2 months so the cost to me was lower) and set a calendar reminder every day for the month proceeding the end date to make sure I didn't forget to cancel it this time, even if I was busy.
All it would take is your fleet of lawyers against Adobe's office towers full of lawyers. If you have the resources to back that, be a sport and make the sacrifice for the rest of us.
Honestly, you signed up for the annual subscription so it’s on you. They give a decent cost discount for yearly subscription—it’s only fair to them that they get their end of the bargain.
Important takeaway: only buy month to month plans when testing out services.
EDIT: I’m not a huge fan of subscription models in general. Software doesn’t need to change at the rate it is these days, but it does work wonders for the bottom lines of all these companies.
EDIT2: Monthly payments to open source software is a better investment because they actually need funding, and they aren’t paying shareholders profits.
There’s always someone in these threads who wants to put all the blame on the individual. The fact is Adobe is misleadingly making it look like just a monthly subscription. Proper consumer protection laws would not allow them to do this.
Adobe deserves all the badwill they are getting in this thread, it’s 100% on them.
Is this really a cancellation fee or is it just honoring your contract? AFAIK it's very clear on Adobe's page that your options are (1) Annual plan paid monthly, (2) Annual plan prepaid, and depending on the product (3) Monthly plan at usually 150% higher price.
This is disingenuous at best, and fraudulent at worst - and I know ACCC in Australia will take a very dim view. Take the main page for instance, the one you linked - it lists monthly prices. No mention whatsoever of "annual pricing paid monthly" - it's JUST monthly mentioned. Pic: https://imgur.com/sZPfFDI
When you click "See plans and pricing details" it gives you the Annual monthly and ACTUAL monthly prices. Pic: https://imgur.com/gxokkST
If you click Buy Now the ACTUAL monthly price is hidden from view in a drop-down. Pic: https://imgur.com/l05UZra
I don't know a claims court in the OECD that would rule in favour of Adobe here. Misrepresenting the monthly price up-front is false advertising.
You're getting lots of replies from (I presume) Americans, who are used to much scammier business behavior than what I know from Germany and you describe in Australia. One related example is the pervasive practice in America of displaying a price without fees (like "resort fees" for hotels that can be +50%) and of course taxes, with the actual price only becoming apparent after additional effort is invested in the checkout process.
To me this is a very intuitive presentation of pricing, so not sure what you are referring to as a dark pattern. There are three clearly laid-out options:
1. No contract, pay monthly
2. Annual contract, pay monthly (cheaper than 1)
3. Annual contract, pay in one go (cheaper than 1 & 2)
You pick one of the three options and check out. Where exactly is the confusion?
They are also advertising their Lightroom cloud storage as a backup, but it does not meet the Macquarie Dictionary (Australian English) definition for backup.
I'm not an american apologist by any means, and it is a dark pattern, but it is very clear at point of payment what you're paying, and what period it's for. The drop-down unexpanded clearly says "Annual Plan, paid monthly".
Yes it's a bait and switch, and adobe deserve to be called out on the bait and switch but thats not what this thread is about, it's about someone signing up to (clear at time of purchase) annual billing and wanting to cancel early.
There is a commitment drop-down that shows different prices for the same product. I think it's pretty clear. I hate dark patterns than any other guy on HN, but this is not even close.
Their own site literally calls it a cancellation fee in the linked screenshot. People in the comments here are giving them the benefit of the doubt on everything else, so give their UX designers some credit that they labeled their own fee correctly.
----
But this is kind of a pedantic argument though. One of the big practical issues I see here (aside from whether or not people know they're signing up for a yearly commitment) is that Adobe wants to have its cake and eat it too on what an early cancellation means.
Typically if you buy a year's worth of service for something, you will get access to the service until your payment period runs out. At least in my experience. If you buy a year's worth of Amazon Prime and cancel early, you'll still have access until that year ends.
With Adobe, that's not the case. You pay an early cancellation fee (50% of each remaining month), and you still immediately lose access as soon as you cancel.
Which is pretty crappy deceptive customer service. It's pretty clear that what they want is for customers to not cancel out of sunk cost fallacy because the user is scared to "waste" the extra fee. And then they're hoping that by the end of the year the user will forget to cancel again.
Compare that with a company like Amazon, which (despite its many faults aggressively pushing Prime) will even refund you your Amazon Prime subscription if you cancel before you use any of its benefits or order anything from the site. And I don't think that's exceptional, a lot of companies have much better cancellation policies than what Adobe offers. You don't have to go to bat for them, the CC subscription terms are unusually bad for a tech service subscription.
Wow. If Amazon is being held up as a good example, things are truly bad. My only experience is with Audible, and it is way too difficult and obscure to figure out how to cancel your subscription. Although at least once you do they don't try to pull anything except give you a discount, I suppose.
Although that shouldn't be held up as a positive either. Where I am, it's literally illegal for utility companies to offer discounts or any other type of benefit to customers who wish to cancel or move to another provider. They aren't even allowed to contact you unsolicited after you have requested to cancel the service, as it could be interpreted as attempting to offer enticement to continue. Ending a subscription to a service should not be a difficult thing.
From the screenshot in the Tweet, it looks like cancelling incurs the fee and causes you to immediately lose access to the apps.
If it were merely making you pay what they were contractually owed for the remaining months of your current year, you should retain access to the apps for those remaining months too.
Distrokid did something like this to me also. I wanted to cancel one week after renewal to avoid being auto-billed the next time around, but it seemed to immediately remove our tracks from distribution, etc.
Right before hitting 'place order' there's a link to a pop-up modal with the cancellation terms.
> "Should you cancel after 14 days, you’ll be charged a lump sum amount of 50% of your remaining contract obligation and your service will continue until the end of that month’s billing period."
At no point is the total amount (aka, your contract obligation) displayed, just the monthly amount. I think it's deceptive, at best.
Digital products should be exempt from cancellation fees period. Adobe lost me at Lightroom 1. I bought it, and was happy for a year. They then got cute with subscriptions, and honestly overly complicated software.
I believe most product/services should not have late fees, or cancellation fees.
Every business I have ever worked at used them as steady income. In college I managed a mini storage. The owner told me he wanted me to go to a seminar. The whole seminar was about increasing late fees. Yes--literally tricks to getting tenants to forget the payment date. (If ever have to use a mini storage, prorate a month worth of rent so payment lands on the end of the month. When it lands, say on the 14th it's easy to forget.)
Adobe offers annual pricing that is cheaper than the monthly pricing. How do you suggest they avoid the cancellation fee for annual plans while still offering a discount? Would that not effectively turn their annual price into the de facto monthly price, if people could cancel at will with no repercussions?
If I cancel my lease, the penalty is one month's rent. It doesn't seem unusual to charge a cancellation fee. But for a company like Adobe, they don't have to find a new tenant to take your spot, as a landlord would. So the claim of the cancellation seems less legitimate.
Usually these companies offer two plans, a monthly and a yearly deal. The yearly deal is cheaper because in the long run they profit more. When you cancel early you essentially pay all of the discount you got per month back.
Try going to a shop, negotiate the price for a dozen of something. Get a discount on the price because you're buying 12 of them and then try to buy only 1 quantity of that product for the discounted price.
> AFAIK it's very clear on Adobe's page that your options are (1) Annual plan paid monthly, (2) Annual plan prepaid, and depending on the product (3) Monthly plan at usually 150% higher price.
No, it’s the opposite of very clear? It’s very misleading. They are purposefully avoiding printing the full sum they expect you to pay, just listing monthly prices without mentioning the terms, and a big “buy now” button.
I understand that you should never take anything related to pricing at face value, and I would certainly double check what I get myself into before I sign up, but calling it “very clear” just doesn’t add up.
It's not really obvious no, I personally made the same mistake. I thought I was subscribing to a monthly service, their UX intentionally makes it hard to understand what you're signing up for, after a few months I wanted to cancel but then found out I basically have to pay up a few hundreds and lose access to the service.
It's not an "honest contract" because they make it difficult to understand
Last time I used Adobe products, it was advertised as 10 euros per month, but it was a complete lie. In actuality it was 120 euros per year, and if you wanted to cancel you would have to pay the rest of that contract.
I don't give any business to companies that simply lie to me. Trust is important. Adobe clearly doesn't care about creating any trust with its users.
There exists very little actual effort to let users know inside this payment funnel that they are not just paying 10 euros, but 120 euros.
The total price is not shown for the 12-month contract, as such it’s not compliant with Norwegian consumer law
Surprising to see a company like Adobe operate on such terms, although it also applies to companies like Audi on their EV charge subscriptions for access to Ionity
A single annual payment is a larger liability (for both parties) than the installment plan.
The way they show the prices is problematic. If 12 payments are expected, it should be reflected anywhere that price is shown. But I think it's fine if they are willing to offer a discount for agreeing to make 12 payments vs 1 payment.
Is this any different from AWS offering reserved instances? The pricing structure is the same: you pay by the month but commit to a year. Reserved instances seem perfectly fair to me: what's different here?
Feasible until you realize adobe auto renews contracts and uses a service to update expired cc with your new expiry date without any real consent or notification.
Not sure if you’ve been with Adobe for any period of time and then left, it hasn’t been pretty on multiple products for me.
Exactly. Even the public transport company in my city has a similar TOS.
If you have an annual subscription and cancel it early, they will charge you the elapsed months accordingly to the monthly fee, not the yearly one and I had to pay 150 Euros for early contract termination.
Whereas in the UK, cancelling an annual travelcard has at most a £10 administration fee and you get a refund based on when you cancelled (although since it's discounted to 10 months cost, you probably won't get anything after that.)
Can‘t speak for the current page but some year (1 actually) I signed up for a monthly plan to extract some InDesign into SVG/PDF.
After I was done, I cancelled the plan and Adobe mailed me something like „sad to see you go here‘s a free month“.
What I didn‘t know and did not see ond the sign-up page was that I actually signed up for a YEARLY plan and I had to pay a huge cancellation fee. There was no indiciation or mentioning of a yearly contract (ok, maybe sonewhere deep down and so small nobody can read it).
IMHO, I was tricked into this yearly plan and had to pay much money to get out. It was the day I swore never to pay for Adobe products again.
The problem is that an annual plan charged monthly is there to entice people to spend money they do not have. If the point is to encourage people to pay for an annual plan by offering a discount, they should ask for the money up front.
They do that too, for a steeper discount. The annual contract option is good for someone who wants to pay monthly (less cash out of pocket right now) and knows they'll be using the software for at least 12 months. I would be surprised if that's not the majority of Adobe's customers, who work in a field that requires their use of Adobe software.
Exactly. Why do you think it's lower for option 1?
Yearly commitment. Longer term commitments give you benefits in a lot of places and have checks in place to prevent people from gaming the system. Not very hard to understand.
I'd say especially when it's not costing Adobe anything to cancel your subscription, it's just a money grab.
There are some exceptions where a fee is ok like when it's actually putting the business out financially, like Garmin & Iridium satellite service agreements, Garmin has little choice...but clearly not the case for Adobe
Depends upon the jurisdiction. Under Australian legislation this is likely to be considered misleading and deceptive conduct toward retail consumers, and Adobe could be subject to significant financial restitution.
It's past time that consumers in the US realized their utter lack of power as individuals against corporations, and their collective might. The 'dark patterns' in online commerce, car loans, mobile payments etc are really 19th century business practices that shouldn't be accepted anymore.
It's not a loan because you're not getting use of something before you've paid for it. You're paying for something as you use it, and getting a discount because you agreed you'd use it for a year.
You have to pay back the discount if you end up not using it for a year, as it should be.
I had the same, they wanted me to pay the rest of the year (after 2 or 3 years?). Problem is, that is against Dutch law, after an initial year, one is only allowed to prolong a contract by 1 month at a time. I reminded the person on the phone (who only spoke English, so imagine what happens when you are not as fluent in it as I) that they broke Dutch law, I told that to 3 other persons and they finally told me: Ok, we'll cancel. Finally.
Edit: I had to call them, because the website indeed only showed me these options where I had to pay the rest of the year. Email didn't help, they offered me some discount for the rest of the year. Very strange as a Dutch person, it has become so normal to not worry about this (I really like this law, a nice example of citizens before companies.)
The downfall of Adobe is interesting to watch. New releases get more expensive every year, but they aren't really adding features. I had to switch to Affinity to get an iPad version, for example. 21,000 employees and they can't port Photoshop to ARM? I think at this point, they're just coasting on brand recognition alone. They certainly aren't adding much value; all they can do is rent you their software at higher and higher prices every year and hope nobody notices. The subscription cancellation shenanigans just show how bad their software is -- people will pay them money to not be able to use their software anymore. If that's not a hallmark of a dying company, I don't know what is.
I'm surprised they haven't started suing people over range check functions yet.
Can you really call it a dying company when their annual revenue has tripled over the last seven years? This isn't the downfall of Adobe. This is the most successful they've ever been.
What jrockway describes is a common pattern; it's not necessarily the end of the company IME, but it's the end of the spirit of that company, whatever made them great is gone, they're riding on their laurels (relying on past 'wins').
Cadbury is a brand like this, as soon as they started smoothing corners on their chocolate bars to save a few percent volume and making the chocolate waxy they died. I expect under Kraft/Mondelez the brand is making more money than ever though.
I suspect there's a transition from R&D/development spending to marketing spending that marks the change.
Many companies could triple their revenue by focusing on short term gains over long term profit.
The mix of less piracy, no used software, no discounts except for the education discount (which is also halved) is bound to lead to more revenue in the short term. But it also causes a lot of people to consider their alternatives.
Yes there are alternatives, Affinity, Pixelmator, etc, but all that's being taught in educational institutions is Adobe, and it's what the industry uses.
Private/small business users are a very small part of their business, but one that requires as many (if not more) support resources as large customers, so if anything they're probably happy to see them go elsewhere.
And no, i haven't used Adobe since they introduced subscriptions. I'll subscribe to media and cloud storage just fine, but not pay annual fees for micro software increments that 99% of the time doesn't add anything i need.
If they had something like Jetbrains where your subscription also gives a perpetual usage license for that specific version, then i could subscribe and upgrade when they actually added something i needed, and i'd likely reconsider.
It might be what part of the industry uses, but they’re steadily losing the rest. E.g. UX design has overwhelmingly moved from Photoshop to Sketch and Figma.
I have no love for Adobe, they have some scummy business practices, but:
1) There is an iPad version of Photoshop, and it's fine.
2) They are adding new features (at least to Photoshop), including some interesting and useful machine learning features like "select subject" and "enhance."
Adobe has expanded into digital marketing space. I think they have made several acquisitions in that area and now they are a digital marketing company.
I think digital media & document cloud still bring in the lion share of the revenue, and definitely of the profits (not even sure whether digital marketing is profitable yet, I think it wasn't when I left the company 2.5 years ago, but don't quote me on that, I didn't follow the financials very close)
Ha, this happened to me and I circumvented this by switching my plan to a new plan which kicked off some trial grace period, at which point I cancelled my entire plan. No cancellation fee.
I contacted their customer support and told them to cancel my subscription and waive the fee or I would dispute it via my credit card company. They did.
Even if they won it would be a pyrrhic victory. 20 hours of $20 an hour labor in they would be upside down before you consider liklihood of you canceling, liklihood of the negative experience causing others to be less likely to subscribe and the nuclear option wherein it actually goes to court or spurs future legislation that makes them design their website less deceptively
Yeah, I did similar to this where I just ouright said I cannot afford to pay the cancellation fee and they waived it. Obviously they are in the right to vharge this (if they make it abundantly clear). I do disagree with the practice or pricing model but cant say I didnt know about the fee going into it.
I just tried to cancel today after getting absolutely fed up with Photoshop being buggy and insanely slow. I have a top of the line 16" MacBook pro, and waiting multiple seconds every single action inside Photoshop infuriates me. Can you provide more details on this? I am on their annual plan and they want to charge me to cancel.
I was on a similar plan, and same machine funnily enough. I downgraded to the Lightroom only plan and then cancelled - hopefully that should still work for you.
This has happened for years! It's not some new terrible thing.
You sign up for an annual subscription, paying monthly installments.
They give you the option to pay half of it out if you want to cancel, it's no different than a 12 month phone plan in places like Australia.
God I hate Twitter. People on their are so used to only reading 150 characters, that it's started affecting them in their daily life, that they're not reading the paid agreements they're signing up to.
Edit: This isn't defending Adobe. I was stuck in this agreement for a whole extra year than I wanted to be, because I didn't get a notification about it renewing (but that was again, my mistake). Fuck Adobe, they have shitty practices.
The actual shitty thing that people should be complaining about, is that the subscription auto-renews (unless I missed the checkbox) and I couldn't find a way to cancel it pre-emptively, outside of blocking it at the bank level, otherwise it signed me up for another 12 months.
Yes, this! I signed up for Creative Cloud for a year with monthly payments, but I was absolutely not prepared for the fact that if I didn’t cancel by the end of the 12 months then I would be signed up for another 12 months.
This is not how subscriptions usually work, but with Adobe it is.
With every other subscription I have ever had if I have it for say 14 months or 16 months and then want to cancel I have been free to do so.
But with Adobe when I wanted to cancel after 13 months I learned that I had automatically been committed to another 12 months and would need to pay a hefty cancellation fee.
I like the software that Adobe makes but I hate hate hate the subscription.
When I leave Adobe after my subscription ends this time, I hope to never have to sign up for their subscription again.
God I was looking for this. Went through the exact same thing. Lots of people on their forums complaining about it too. Put me off ever going near Adobe again.
While I agree it is "in the contract" it's not SUPER obvious that there is an early cancellation fee during the checkout process.
If there was a separate box or better, a popup modal/page, that explains this, I'd give Adobe the benefit of the doubt.
The problem is patterning - _a lot_ other companies monthly subscriptions don't have 50% annual cancellation fee or any cancellation fee. So this method of 'lowering the price' is uncommon/against-the-grain.
When faced with an uncommon situation you really need people to understand what they're getting into, otherwise lots of people are surprised when they get hit with this.
Then of course there is going to be a catch to the first one. I cannot imagine anyone being so naive they’d just assume both plans are the same aside from the price...
> "it's no different than a 12 month phone plan in places like Australia."
No major phone carrier in Australia charges cancellation fees on a 12 month contract. None of them even offer a 12 month SIM only contract.
If you have a phone payment attached, you just pay the remainder of the phone which you keep. With Adobe's contract you pay half the remaining amount and immediately cannot use the software anymore.
People are giving terrible advice in this thread. Changing your credit card number or reporting it as stolen doesn't mean you are off the hook for the payment you agreed to. While Adobe probably won't care enough to do it, another company in its place could very well send the debt to collections and ruin your credit score. Next time read the terms of a contract before signing it. Adobe has a no-contract monthly plan which is only marginally more expensive.
> Next time read the terms of a contract before signing it.
But that's unworkable in modern life. We often have to agree to multiple terms documents per day, jumping through hoops for urgent things like receiving security updates. 99% of people clicking "I agree" do so without reading the terms.
I've never had to agree to multiple contracts per day - I'm sure that's true for some people but I doubt it's common. And there is rarely, if ever, a ticking clock regarding accepting software terms of service. People could easily make time to read the terms if they wanted to, it isn't unworkable, they click without reading the terms because they just don't want to put in even the minimum amount of effort.
It's just like everyone suddenly being shocked and surprised that social media companies have the right to ban their accounts and moderate their content for any reason. That was in the contract you agreed to when you made an account.
This is not to excuse Adobe, their tactics here are vile, but pretending contracts don't really exist just because you don't read them even when you sign them is a childish way of thinking.
Companies get away with things like this because consumers have normalized never reading terms of service as acceptable behavior. If they did read the terms, they might see how bad they are, and not use the product. It would be easier for competitors to compete on their quality of service rather than the superficial things consumers do notice like name recognition and aesthetics. There would be some market pressure to prefer honest contracts over dishonest ones. As it is, there is no such pressure from consumers, only regulation.
And even with regulation against dark patterns like the ones Adobe is engaging in, the consumer is still responsible for their own actions. Signing a contract without reading the terms is never going to get you off the hook, at least not in the US. The answer is to educate and empower people to be proactive, not to excuse and normalize their apathy.
Honestly better advice is just to go on Adobe customer support and just tell them its all too expensive and you're leaving they'll cut you a deal.
I've paid half the RRP on full CC for the past 3 years this way telling them it's too expensive every time renewal comes up. I've also heard of people being able to waive the early termination fee.
Hate Adobe more than most, being an ex-Fireworks user but I was kinda surprised how much outrage Twitter managed over this.
Ontop of all this, when trying to uninstall Adobe products through Windows' Add or Remove Programs, you need to create/ login with an online account. Adobe is literally the scummiest company ever.
Readit News
I didn't want it at all! Anyway, I sucked it up, got on with the remainder of the year, because they wouldn't let me put the cancellation in early, had to do it X months before the end. Then life happened and I missed the deadline to cancel and got suckered for a second year!
Fuck Adobe and this practice is all I have to say, I stick strictly to Open Source options now. It may have been my fault for not reading the first time, but robbing me a second time by counting on me missing the cancellation because they wouldn't let me do it there and then is just scummy.
For a long time the local telephone company in British Columbia (Telus) was giving away "free" xboxes or 46 inch flat screen TVs if you locked yourself into a triple play service contract. Of course the buy-out price to end the contract early far exceeded the value of the product given out.
So for example a phone on a plan is fine as there's a capital good but a gym isn't.
I really like the moves T-Mobile has done to change this. They very transparent that you are financing the phone on your monthly bill and then receiving monthly credit to off set the monthly payment.
If you sign a 2-3 year contract and want to break it before it ends, there will always be some kind of penalty.
The extra insult was they called it a "discount package" (50% off!), but it was already baked into all the advertised prices. In other words you pay double the listed price if you don't take the lock-in.
For example, there is no printing support. Units everywhere (other than document creation) are in pixels and cannot be changed to millimeters, etc. Tools (like drawing a rectangle) operate on the current layer instead of creating a new one like Photoshop, which makes drawing annoying. Guides aren’t that fantastic to use. There’s a lot of areas that require polish in Krita.
Having to do this is a terrible felling and I feel like a bad person, but I at least put the cancellation fee I would have paid to good use by buying Affinity Designer.
My wife was/is happy with the anniversary present.
Adobe is in the same ring of trust as a random shady website and one ring above a Nigerian prince.
It depends on the company and sales contract, but as you signed up to an agreement for the subscription on these terms it's possible that Adobe would be able to sell the unpaid fees off to collection agencies.
Everything they did was legal until this. If they won’t process it, send them a letter with your state attorney general’s consumer affairs (or, if you’re a business, commercial division) Cc’d. Address it to their general counsel. State you cancel your contract with them effective such and such date. Contract termination is quite strictly defined in law, for obvious reasons.
Important takeaway: only buy month to month plans when testing out services.
EDIT: I’m not a huge fan of subscription models in general. Software doesn’t need to change at the rate it is these days, but it does work wonders for the bottom lines of all these companies.
EDIT2: Monthly payments to open source software is a better investment because they actually need funding, and they aren’t paying shareholders profits.
Adobe deserves all the badwill they are getting in this thread, it’s 100% on them.
Pay for movies, DRM breaks it Pay for software, it's discontinued
https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html
If you signed up for a yearly plan paid monthly, the cancellation fee is finishing your contract.
If you didn't want to agree to pay by the year maybe you shouldn't have signed up for a year of service?
When you click "See plans and pricing details" it gives you the Annual monthly and ACTUAL monthly prices. Pic: https://imgur.com/gxokkST
If you click Buy Now the ACTUAL monthly price is hidden from view in a drop-down. Pic: https://imgur.com/l05UZra
I don't know a claims court in the OECD that would rule in favour of Adobe here. Misrepresenting the monthly price up-front is false advertising.
This is a dark pattern, Adobe should be shamed.
1. No contract, pay monthly
2. Annual contract, pay monthly (cheaper than 1)
3. Annual contract, pay in one go (cheaper than 1 & 2)
You pick one of the three options and check out. Where exactly is the confusion?
They are also advertising their Lightroom cloud storage as a backup, but it does not meet the Macquarie Dictionary (Australian English) definition for backup.
https://imgur.com/uUqd9ZY
Reminds me of car advertising. They don't show the full price of the lease. They show the monthly payments
Yes it's a bait and switch, and adobe deserve to be called out on the bait and switch but thats not what this thread is about, it's about someone signing up to (clear at time of purchase) annual billing and wanting to cancel early.
Deleted Comment
This is not 75th page on the user agreement, it's the first word in the product name he is trying to buy.
You click see more details, it lists all 3 options, you hit next and it keeps the 3 options in a condensed list, but respects your selection.
Their own site literally calls it a cancellation fee in the linked screenshot. People in the comments here are giving them the benefit of the doubt on everything else, so give their UX designers some credit that they labeled their own fee correctly.
----
But this is kind of a pedantic argument though. One of the big practical issues I see here (aside from whether or not people know they're signing up for a yearly commitment) is that Adobe wants to have its cake and eat it too on what an early cancellation means.
Typically if you buy a year's worth of service for something, you will get access to the service until your payment period runs out. At least in my experience. If you buy a year's worth of Amazon Prime and cancel early, you'll still have access until that year ends.
With Adobe, that's not the case. You pay an early cancellation fee (50% of each remaining month), and you still immediately lose access as soon as you cancel.
Which is pretty crappy deceptive customer service. It's pretty clear that what they want is for customers to not cancel out of sunk cost fallacy because the user is scared to "waste" the extra fee. And then they're hoping that by the end of the year the user will forget to cancel again.
Compare that with a company like Amazon, which (despite its many faults aggressively pushing Prime) will even refund you your Amazon Prime subscription if you cancel before you use any of its benefits or order anything from the site. And I don't think that's exceptional, a lot of companies have much better cancellation policies than what Adobe offers. You don't have to go to bat for them, the CC subscription terms are unusually bad for a tech service subscription.
Although that shouldn't be held up as a positive either. Where I am, it's literally illegal for utility companies to offer discounts or any other type of benefit to customers who wish to cancel or move to another provider. They aren't even allowed to contact you unsolicited after you have requested to cancel the service, as it could be interpreted as attempting to offer enticement to continue. Ending a subscription to a service should not be a difficult thing.
If it were merely making you pay what they were contractually owed for the remaining months of your current year, you should retain access to the apps for those remaining months too.
Right before hitting 'place order' there's a link to a pop-up modal with the cancellation terms.
> "Should you cancel after 14 days, you’ll be charged a lump sum amount of 50% of your remaining contract obligation and your service will continue until the end of that month’s billing period."
At no point is the total amount (aka, your contract obligation) displayed, just the monthly amount. I think it's deceptive, at best.
https://imgur.com/uUqd9ZY
I believe most product/services should not have late fees, or cancellation fees.
Every business I have ever worked at used them as steady income. In college I managed a mini storage. The owner told me he wanted me to go to a seminar. The whole seminar was about increasing late fees. Yes--literally tricks to getting tenants to forget the payment date. (If ever have to use a mini storage, prorate a month worth of rent so payment lands on the end of the month. When it lands, say on the 14th it's easy to forget.)
No, it’s the opposite of very clear? It’s very misleading. They are purposefully avoiding printing the full sum they expect you to pay, just listing monthly prices without mentioning the terms, and a big “buy now” button.
I understand that you should never take anything related to pricing at face value, and I would certainly double check what I get myself into before I sign up, but calling it “very clear” just doesn’t add up.
I don't give any business to companies that simply lie to me. Trust is important. Adobe clearly doesn't care about creating any trust with its users.
There exists very little actual effort to let users know inside this payment funnel that they are not just paying 10 euros, but 120 euros.
Surprising to see a company like Adobe operate on such terms, although it also applies to companies like Audi on their EV charge subscriptions for access to Ionity
https://www.adobe.com/no/creativecloud/plans.html
Looks the same to me. Is it possible the law isn't what you think it is?
Pay monthly for monthly plans, and pay annually once for annual plans.
The way they show the prices is problematic. If 12 payments are expected, it should be reflected anywhere that price is shown. But I think it's fine if they are willing to offer a discount for agreeing to make 12 payments vs 1 payment.
This is what you do when you rent a house, 1 year contract monthly payments.
Not sure if you’ve been with Adobe for any period of time and then left, it hasn’t been pretty on multiple products for me.
If you have an annual subscription and cancel it early, they will charge you the elapsed months accordingly to the monthly fee, not the yearly one and I had to pay 150 Euros for early contract termination.
https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/times_fares/ticket_types/4657...
Deleted Comment
After I was done, I cancelled the plan and Adobe mailed me something like „sad to see you go here‘s a free month“.
What I didn‘t know and did not see ond the sign-up page was that I actually signed up for a YEARLY plan and I had to pay a huge cancellation fee. There was no indiciation or mentioning of a yearly contract (ok, maybe sonewhere deep down and so small nobody can read it).
IMHO, I was tricked into this yearly plan and had to pay much money to get out. It was the day I swore never to pay for Adobe products again.
Yearly commitment. Longer term commitments give you benefits in a lot of places and have checks in place to prevent people from gaming the system. Not very hard to understand.
There are some exceptions where a fee is ok like when it's actually putting the business out financially, like Garmin & Iridium satellite service agreements, Garmin has little choice...but clearly not the case for Adobe
They should think and act as building services to help the users, rather than extracting money. Even though part of a business is extracting money.
It's past time that consumers in the US realized their utter lack of power as individuals against corporations, and their collective might. The 'dark patterns' in online commerce, car loans, mobile payments etc are really 19th century business practices that shouldn't be accepted anymore.
This whole thing sounds a lot like a loan. If Adobe wants to provide a loan then they should be regulated like a bank.
Otherwise a monthly fee isn't a loan, and a monthly fee shouldn't have a cancellation fee.
You have to pay back the discount if you end up not using it for a year, as it should be.
Edit: I had to call them, because the website indeed only showed me these options where I had to pay the rest of the year. Email didn't help, they offered me some discount for the rest of the year. Very strange as a Dutch person, it has become so normal to not worry about this (I really like this law, a nice example of citizens before companies.)
[0] https://www.acm.nl/nl/contact/tips-en-meldingen/tip-ons
I'm surprised they haven't started suing people over range check functions yet.
Cadbury is a brand like this, as soon as they started smoothing corners on their chocolate bars to save a few percent volume and making the chocolate waxy they died. I expect under Kraft/Mondelez the brand is making more money than ever though.
I suspect there's a transition from R&D/development spending to marketing spending that marks the change.
The mix of less piracy, no used software, no discounts except for the education discount (which is also halved) is bound to lead to more revenue in the short term. But it also causes a lot of people to consider their alternatives.
Yes there are alternatives, Affinity, Pixelmator, etc, but all that's being taught in educational institutions is Adobe, and it's what the industry uses.
Private/small business users are a very small part of their business, but one that requires as many (if not more) support resources as large customers, so if anything they're probably happy to see them go elsewhere.
And no, i haven't used Adobe since they introduced subscriptions. I'll subscribe to media and cloud storage just fine, but not pay annual fees for micro software increments that 99% of the time doesn't add anything i need.
If they had something like Jetbrains where your subscription also gives a perpetual usage license for that specific version, then i could subscribe and upgrade when they actually added something i needed, and i'd likely reconsider.
DEC, Commodore, Novell, SGI, Cray, Lotus, and Acorn would like you to explain how a computing companies last forever.
1) There is an iPad version of Photoshop, and it's fine.
2) They are adding new features (at least to Photoshop), including some interesting and useful machine learning features like "select subject" and "enhance."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-27/forget-ph...
Me 1: Adobe 0
You sign up for an annual subscription, paying monthly installments.
They give you the option to pay half of it out if you want to cancel, it's no different than a 12 month phone plan in places like Australia.
God I hate Twitter. People on their are so used to only reading 150 characters, that it's started affecting them in their daily life, that they're not reading the paid agreements they're signing up to.
Edit: This isn't defending Adobe. I was stuck in this agreement for a whole extra year than I wanted to be, because I didn't get a notification about it renewing (but that was again, my mistake). Fuck Adobe, they have shitty practices.
The actual shitty thing that people should be complaining about, is that the subscription auto-renews (unless I missed the checkbox) and I couldn't find a way to cancel it pre-emptively, outside of blocking it at the bank level, otherwise it signed me up for another 12 months.
This is not how subscriptions usually work, but with Adobe it is.
With every other subscription I have ever had if I have it for say 14 months or 16 months and then want to cancel I have been free to do so.
But with Adobe when I wanted to cancel after 13 months I learned that I had automatically been committed to another 12 months and would need to pay a hefty cancellation fee.
I like the software that Adobe makes but I hate hate hate the subscription.
When I leave Adobe after my subscription ends this time, I hope to never have to sign up for their subscription again.
It's not that terrible, but it certainly is something immigrants like me don't expect. Now I assume it's the case.
If there was a separate box or better, a popup modal/page, that explains this, I'd give Adobe the benefit of the doubt.
The problem is patterning - _a lot_ other companies monthly subscriptions don't have 50% annual cancellation fee or any cancellation fee. So this method of 'lowering the price' is uncommon/against-the-grain.
When faced with an uncommon situation you really need people to understand what they're getting into, otherwise lots of people are surprised when they get hit with this.
- Annual plan, paid monthly: $50 / month
- Monthly plan: $75 / month
Then of course there is going to be a catch to the first one. I cannot imagine anyone being so naive they’d just assume both plans are the same aside from the price...
Because it’s common sense and practice.
Why would anyone commit to a yearly contract otherwise?
No major phone carrier in Australia charges cancellation fees on a 12 month contract. None of them even offer a 12 month SIM only contract.
If you have a phone payment attached, you just pay the remainder of the phone which you keep. With Adobe's contract you pay half the remaining amount and immediately cannot use the software anymore.
But that's unworkable in modern life. We often have to agree to multiple terms documents per day, jumping through hoops for urgent things like receiving security updates. 99% of people clicking "I agree" do so without reading the terms.
It's just like everyone suddenly being shocked and surprised that social media companies have the right to ban their accounts and moderate their content for any reason. That was in the contract you agreed to when you made an account.
This is not to excuse Adobe, their tactics here are vile, but pretending contracts don't really exist just because you don't read them even when you sign them is a childish way of thinking.
Companies get away with things like this because consumers have normalized never reading terms of service as acceptable behavior. If they did read the terms, they might see how bad they are, and not use the product. It would be easier for competitors to compete on their quality of service rather than the superficial things consumers do notice like name recognition and aesthetics. There would be some market pressure to prefer honest contracts over dishonest ones. As it is, there is no such pressure from consumers, only regulation.
And even with regulation against dark patterns like the ones Adobe is engaging in, the consumer is still responsible for their own actions. Signing a contract without reading the terms is never going to get you off the hook, at least not in the US. The answer is to educate and empower people to be proactive, not to excuse and normalize their apathy.
"Annual plan, paid monthly" vs "Monthly plan"
It's not like they hide the fact on page 488 of some multi-document contract. It's on the sign up page.
I've paid half the RRP on full CC for the past 3 years this way telling them it's too expensive every time renewal comes up. I've also heard of people being able to waive the early termination fee.
Hate Adobe more than most, being an ex-Fireworks user but I was kinda surprised how much outrage Twitter managed over this.