Adobe charges subscription cancellation fee
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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.
The consumer now has to worry not only about choosing a decent product, but also about ways the company could extract value from them without being transparent about that, or by hiding a clause in their TOS.
Could you imagine how much slower and inefficient the economic system would be if we were expected to read every TOS of every software we install and every single service we sign up for?
No, this is not fine. Do not accept bullshit terms meant to extract value from your pocket at no marginal cost for the business or no benefit to you as a consumer.
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.
1. adobe waives the cancellation fee for australian customers
2. adobe eliminates the discounted annual plan for australian customers
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.
RAW Photo import and editing is currently limited in Krita, and you cannot export RAW formats. But even professionals tend not to use destructive layer based editors like gimp/krita/photoshop/painter/paintshop pro etc and are instead using dedicated software like lightroom, rawtherapee and darkroom.
But if your output format is not RAW, then you have more than enough to edit "photos".
You have layers, masking, vectors and spatial bitmap editors. That's all any of these editors workflows have been since the 90's. Anything else is extra.
Put me in front of Photoshop on modern mac or IFX Amazon Paint on Irix and my workflow and (sloppy) output would be the same.
It's less about what features are technically supported and more about what workfkows the ux is built around, at least for me.
I am just an amateur though, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt.
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.
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.
You can make up any persona on the account and they wont know who to pursue.
The account name and address can really be anything... and this is also true for the CC on file.
But we are talking about really deceptive sales practices by Adobe. Fighting fire with fire in this instance seems particularly reasonable.
That aside, engaging this tactic on transactions with merchants with reasonable cancellation terms would be borderline fraud. If you use the services and they satisfied your needs, you really should be paying for them.
In most EU countries when you want to take out a loan, the bank takes a look at your current status ( employment, expenses, family, etc.) and debt history stored by the central bank ( which is basically you had a loan of 10k for 5 years, don't own anything anymore) and judge based on that if you're credit worthy or not.
Let's look at it from a different perspective. If a coworker and I build a service in my garage from the ground up where I let users pay $100/mo month-to-month, $75/mo for a six month agreement, or $50/mo for a twelve month agreement, you're saying it's fine to agree to the twelve month term, get the 50% discount for a few months, and then cancel your card even though the only reason I offered such a steep discount in the first place is because you promised you'd pay me for twelve months?
I do not owe them the money yet they sold the debt. Nobody cares ... I now have a default on my credit reference.
The whole industry is crooked
Not sure what one can really do about it.
I think also the whole "you'll need an army of lawyers" idea is probably born from confirmation bias (settled cases get NDAs). I wonder if we shouldn't require registering a settled case, if there was any court action (arranging a date, say) then settlement details would be published? I guess it might encourage frivolous suits.
How does this get settled in a non-broken/corrupt country? You lodge a complaint and the government launches a fleet of lawyers on your behalf? I'd be surprised if that's a routine response to consumer complaints anywhere.
Legislators ban scam in consumer protection law
Subsequent victims just get the credit card charges reversed, or a trivially easy court victory.
I would very much encourage you to really look into this unwise practice. It's not a matter of if, but when, this will come to haunt you someday. You have a personal mobile device, use it for personal stuff. Use your corp provided devices for corp related stuff.
Stupidity for convenience :p
MDM may be as light as a single app with its own policies, or something as heavy as device configuration (for VPN, remote wipe, etc). Containerised app groups seem to be a good balance.
My wife was/is happy with the anniversary present.
At any rate, what's even worse for me is that you can't cancel in the last 3 months of the contract with ISPs which nobody tells you so it's even easier to get stuck with it for an extra year.
Which is ridiculous. It doesn't require 90 days to de-provision a circuit.
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.
Adobe hasn’t even sent an email saying yet charge failed and I have to update my payment method out anything else. It’s as if they are aware of how shady the cancellation fee is and won’t chase you down for it.
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.
It does list the "Best Value" plan, but when you go to "Buy", it presents a shopping cart with the following text (no fine print, no other tricks), and even uses the word "commitment":
"Commitment:
Annual plan, paid monthly: US$52.99/mo."
Even at that point, the above is in a drop-down, and you can change it to "Annual plan, pre-paid", or "Monthly plan".
They want to charge you as much as possible and get as much money from you as they possibly can, you want the opposite, the end result is something between the two, it's on them to reach there goal, so it's on you to take care of your own money and what you do with it.
Adobe deserves all the badwill they are getting in this thread, it’s 100% on them.
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.
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?
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
If you're not happy with a cancellation fee, that's what the monthly pricing is for—you pay more month to month but can cancel any time. It's a very normal trade-off. The only real alternatives Adobe has to a cancellation fee are to only offer monthly pricing or forbid cancelling an annual contact at all.
It isn't true that this is the only option. Instead of onerous lock-in like a gym membership they could have a sliding scale -- the longer you pay for it, the cheaper it gets. Their decision to go for annual lock-in is short term thinking.
This seems pretty fair to me, when you signed up for the contract, those purchases figure into their operations.
Reverse the paradigm, if they cancelled providing you these services, would you expect a refund, or would it be a money grab to expect to get your money back when they violated the terms of the agreement?
If a user signs up for a year contract, the business has certainty of future income. The business gives a discount for assurance of that future revenue.
If the user cancels early, the cost is the lose of that future revenue on the balance sheet - and this does influence the business.
You can't lose other people's money you never received.
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.
If you click the options you can see the prices. This is a common practice, I feel like there are people are really trying to make this a bigger deal than it is.
Either way, that still doesn't tell you explicitly what the cancellation fee would be.
In Australia there is a thing called a 'Critical Information Summary' required for phone/internet plans. This is an sample of one from an old plan with similar terms to Adobe's (monthly payment, 12 month contract): https://imgur.com/a/bBVuip2 . It states how much it'll cost if you stay for 12/24 months. It also states the maximum that'll you'll have to pay to cancel, and how the cancel fee decreases as you go.
This isn't hard... they could put it upfront, but they don't and it only benefits Adobe.
Also, you might want to check those prices in the screenshot you linked, none match the price you would actually pay over 12 months, or the minimum cancel fee.
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.
Reminds me of car advertising. They don't show the full price of the lease. They show the monthly payments
It's beautifully criminal in design.
You could certainly argue that describing the plan as $x paid monthly is outright false, when it should be "12 monthly instalments of $x".
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.
These are not necessarily mutually exclusive viewpoints.
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?
The customer has already been paying more than they'd have paid if they went for a long duration contract.
If it looks dishonest it probably is. On this page https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html I see an entry for all apps. The description is like so.
All Apps
US$52.99/mo
It has a big old buy now option that you are obviously supposed to click in place of the small text that says see plan and pricing details.
When you click buy now you are taken to what ought to be familiar to most people as a shopping cart pattern. On the entire left side is just a spot to put your email and a button designed to draw your attention below it that says continue to payment. Most people are going to read it from top down and not glance much at the item they have put in their cart.
If they do they may notice a drop down in the description of the item in their cart with black on grey text that says annual plan, paid monthly in the description of the item you are already buying where people are much less likely to attend to this detail.
If they click the drop down they may note the options but more likely we are already passed this screen and onto the next one.
If you put a nonsense email in and click proceed to payment you will notice, you know or not, text in 6 point font at the bottom.
In light text that on a 24" 1080p screen is 9 pixels high or about 0.098 inches tall
> By clicking "Agree and subscribe," you agree
In bold same size it says
> You will be charged US$52.99 (plus tax) monthly and at the end of your one-year term, your subscription will automatically renew monthly until you cancel (price subject to change). No annual commitment required after the first year. Cancel anytime via Adobe Account or Customer Support.
Now again in light text it says
> Cancel before Apr 26, 2021 to get a full refund and avoid a fee
If you had no economic interest and your job was to be as informative as possible you would allow the user to click the product which would take you to a product page wherein it would list 3 options with separate descriptions where you would add the desired item to the cart. This means that you would affirmatively choose that option instead of having the default in a drop down positioned so many wouldn't attend to it at all and you wouldn't mention the fee in tiny font on the payment screen. It would be fully specified in body text with a check box saying something to the effect. I acknowledge that if I cancel before the one year term I will be charged a fee of up to n dollars. If you check it you would be able to add the item to your cart and pay for it secure in that everyone knew what they are buying.
It doesn't work like this because deceiving people is good for business.
I think it is a bit more nuanced than that. Business isn’t purely about making money, it is about exchange of value.
It doesn’t work like that because people don’t think Adobe products provide the value Adobe wants to charge for.
If adobe credibly believed that their annual plan for their products was worth what they’re charging, they would not hide the pricing.
So “it doesn’t work like this because deceiving people is good for” _accumulating capital_.
This is happening a lot.
The Burning Man organization used a dark pattern to attempt to withhold ticket refunds last year.
The burning man org made refunds something you had to request, then sign in, and opt out again in or lose all of it.
They increased the minimum amount you could donate during the refund period and said the money was to “save” the event.
Then they turned around and applied for the max PPP loans. [1] https://www.burn.life/blog/interview-with-the-ceo-of-burning...
WinRed, a political organization in support of the former president, used a series of increasingly deceptive interface patterns that have provably awful publicly disclosed refund rates. They also used increasingly deceptive interface methods and emotional statements to sell the idea. [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/us/politics/trump-donatio...
If anything Adobe should be regarded for only using deceptive financial practices and not trying to sell some sad story if we don’t give it to them.
I am sure you can agree they didn't do their best in making the nature of the contract as clear as possible here.
Only explaining that in fine print once you get further along in the sign up process is the convoluted/dark pattern bit here.
If they want to honestly advertise that price then it needs to say “billed monthly with annual contract.”
IMO A less deceptive label would be $624, billed in monthly installments.
But if those ways weren't good enough for Adobe and they wanted to have it both ways, advertise "cancel any time" and but still have "(you can do that, but then you have to pay in advance for the remainder of the year to do so)" or something like that in the fine print then they deserve all the hatred. And maybe even lawsuits for deliberately misleading labeling, but they probably have a legal team tweaking that communication in each jurisdiction to the exact shade of dark grey containing enough white for discouraging lawsuits.
And I suspect that the pattern/scheme doesn't pay for itself at all, that it's just the unfortunate outcome of a bad compromise between one group in the company advocating for honest monthly and another group advocating for honest annual.
It is only on subsequent screens that the bait and switch becomes visible. A customer should not have to pay attention at each screen to ensure such a bait and switch does not occur.
That's why this pricing feels dishonest, even if it's technically true. Other companies handle it much more fairly. If you want to subscribe to World of Warcraft, Blizzard makes it clear that it's $15 per month. With discounts offered if you pay for 6 months at a time. That type of pricing feels honest, with a reward for paying for multiple months. Makes the customer feel better than Adobe's presentation, even though it's essentially the same type of pricing scheme as Adobe.
And even more so, I bet if you asked, they would give you a further discount for upfront payment (since it removes non-payment and early cancellation risk that’s priced in)
I guess I’m just unclear what you’re on about?
Not a lawyer, but come from a family of bankruptcy lawyers. If your landlord went bankrupt after you pre-paid, it could get dicey. It's a risk, and probably a low probability of downside, but I encourage people to do more research if interested.
In my experience, typical apartment leases are offered on a 12 month basis. Month to month is usually substantially more expensive.
If you break a 12 month lease early, you're legally on the hook for whatever the contract specifies (typically the entire year in my experience). Most landlords will "generously" agree to let you out of the lease for the equivalent of a couple monthly installments though (again, just my personal experience).
Several of my past leases specified that if broken I would be responsible for monthly rent on a prorated basis until a new tenant moved in.
At the time I bought a house so I broke the lease to move in. Fortunately, the apartment rented within the month so I didn't owe additional fees.
Out of curiosity I googled "rent acceleration" and see it is a hot topic now - mostly with commercial real estate and businesses break their leases due to the impact of covid on them. See https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/what-landlords-need-to-kno... for a summary. Also interesting is some US states make residential leases exempt from rent acceleration.
For rent specifically, you can arrange to have a mutual agreement with the landlord if you for example find a new tenant, but by law the landlord does not have to accept anything.
Some contract also have punitive clauses in it, saying that you can break the contract at any point with 1 months notice, but you have to pay 3 months' worth of rent.
Phone plans for instance will have monthly with "minimum amount owed" underneath so even phone plans advertised for $20/mo will say something like "minimum owed $720" because people kept advertising shady 3-year contract plans with steep cancellation fees.
Where I live it it is illegal to display this without also including the total amount over the entire contract period.
And this is understandable for renting an apartment. The landlord might not be able to find a suitable replacement immediately. The same logic doesn’t apply to Adobe.
That's scummy, and trying to apologize for such behaviour is scummy too.
It should be clearly stated next to that, and not in fine print or faded text or buried in a ToS.
False advertising at best.
Cancellation periods can be random and unattached to when you actually stopped using a service.
It's "clear enough" in the other. That is on the Buy Now page. The price is listed as annualized and the REAL monthly price is hidden from view under a drop-down. This is an acceptably deceptive UX practice for pricing. I can give some room for shitty tactics, this is it.
However - it's not clear at all in the first picture I shared. This is the first page and the main page people will see when deciding which product to purchase. This is the main one I have a problem with. If they said it was an annual price, that would be acceptable. But they don't.
They lie.
It's not a subscription per month, and it's not marked as such.
They are also advertising their Lightroom cloud storage as a backup, but it does not meet the Macquarie Dictionary (Australian English) definition for backup.
Oblig: sales/retail taxes in the US vary city-by-city. While just like the rest of the world: US companies put their MSRP on products - but it would be unfair to expect retailers to charge the MSRP and eat the tax themselves because some areas have zero sales tax but others have a 10% tax. That's bigger than the profit-margin on many items sold at retail - and the simplest solution is just to have everything understand that the price on a box is the pre-local-tax price. And everyone (most people? or just most people on HN...) know roughly what their local sales tax rates are anyway (mine's around 9%) and as everyone pays by card having exact change isn't an issue.
I disagree. If you want to sell something to a market then you should tailor your product to that market. That means doing some basic research about what the local taxes and laws are.
Ideally, the seller should list the price + tax if it is physically sold in a store. This should be fixed (along with the tips culture in US).
Online retailers still have this problem. Sales tax is literally based on the zip code you enter during the checkout page.
So how can this problem be solved? The only solution I see is a federally controlled fixed sales tax similar to EU. But, that would be unconstitutional in US. States hold the power and additional municipal taxes are at the county level.
I think you're trivializing the matter. I've had several conversations with Europeans about it and we eventually come to an understanding that its not easy. On surface, it sounds simple if we assume is a simple nation-wide VAT tax.
Living in couple of countries In EU and Asia, I can't imagine not knowing total price up front. It's pushing legislation problems on the end customer.
So, now, you have a new problem. Top counties with lowest sales tax in the US will massively attract more businesses forcing the rest of the counties to reduce their sales tax too.
The entire problem boils down to federal vs. local control. US is structured with a balance between local, state and federal powers.
The online retail problem is also trivially solved. If I got to the US version of any online shop as a EU resident I'm usually first greeted by a "which version do you want to browse" popup asking me if I really want the US version and not a different country. This affects the default language, currency and locale as well as pricing. There's no reason they couldn't ask for your zip code if they already have to do these calculations at checkout anyway.
The problem is that there's no reason US companies should do this because there's no competitive advantage in having transparent pricing. This would require legislation (probably at the federal level) but once there's regulations, you'd see these solutions pop up everywhere overnight.
It's funny to hear Americans lament about how it's hard to do business in the EU because of the many differences between countries and then turn around and use state or county differences as an excuse why it's "just too hard" to do what companies are doing in the EU. At this point I wonder if Californians are seeing the same "sorry, we can't figure out how to show you this website without harvesting your data" error pages on US news sites given how strict their new privacy laws are.
If the former, I already said:
> Ideally, the seller should list the price + tax if it is physically sold in a store. This should be fixed (along with the tips culture in US).
Can't you ask the zip code before checkout, a popup like "If you want to see the real price enter the zip code now"
On the physical store don't you have in US prices printed on paper stickers? Are prices printed on the bottles and boxes and all stores will have the exact same prices? So if this is something you never seen in US let me explain how is done, some products have a recommended price printed on them but shops can put their own larger or smaller price. You will see also labels with full prices s tricked through and discounted prices printed under.
I also seen shops rotating the prices daily, like if they have 2 products A and B , you have prices like
Monday A: 10$, B:20$ Tu: A:11 , B:19 We: A:12 , B:18
so on, I am surprised that the US does not use this scummy price rotating tactics. The "scam" is that the shop will put an ad on radio and say "bananas only X$" , next day the ad will say "milk only Y$" , and each time you will hear the ad you think "this shop has cheap products, I should buy from there" but when you visit the banana will be cheap but in that day mil is expensive, 3 days later will be reversed.
It's about consumer protection. Buyers must know exactly how much they will need to pay to purchase an item BEFORE they pay. It would be unfair to expect consumers to calculate these things.
Not correct. The price on the 'Box' is the invitation to treat [0]. The price you pay in the UK is the verbal Offer at the checkout. They may/should sell it a the RRP, but it is not correct in law.
When items get individual prices, they are usually small sticker prices and effectively only in small shops or discount prices in bigger stores.
Maybe it's just not become an issue since the MSRP on most product packaging here is in £ or $ as they just reuse the UK or sometimes US packaging so it's clear that price is not aimed at Irish consumers.
I now live in the Netherlands. All prices are what you pay, _and_ the receipt breaks down how much of that goes to taxes, which I think is completely logical.
I like the solution we have - price stickers have full price, and printed receipts carry tax breakdown.
By making tax as difficult as possible, they recruit supporters for their anti-tax stance, and they can claim they're delivering on their anti-tax policy by 'making the system collapse under its own weight' or 'making everyone aware of how much tax they're paying' and they can allow loopholes and fraud opportunities and they can collect donations from tax preparation companies.
Especially considering the fact that usually there are 2-3 rates tops, so one can easily remember that 5-10-20% of what they pay goes to the country coffers depending on the product being bought.
Regardless of the rounding method, the fair way is to sum up purchases and compute tax on the total, precisely to minimize the loss of precision on rounding.
Curiously, as far as I understand the Polish tax code (IANAL), the choice of the method to use is actually given to the vendor! The law recommends[0] that you calculate the tax by multiplying the rate with the total taxable amount, but also allows[1] the seller to choose to calculate per-item tax, and sum that. In both cases, mathematical rounding (half-up) is used[2].
But in practice, there's little to no difference unless you're doing a single purchase of a lot of items with weird pricing bias.
--
[0] - Dz.U.2020.0.106 t.j. - Ustawa z dnia 11 marca 2004 r. o podatku od towarów i usług, art. 106e., ust. 7.
[1] - ibid., ust. 10.
[2] - ibid., ust. 11.
Agreed! If they are actually rounding it will be a statistical wash.
> Regardless of the rounding method, the fair way is to sum up purchases and compute tax on the total, precisely to minimize the loss of precision on rounding.
Again, agreed, this is why we do it this way in the US.
> Curiously, as far as I understand the Polish tax code (IANAL), the choice of the method to use is actually given to the vendor! The law recommends[0] that you calculate the tax by multiplying the rate with the total taxable amount, but also allows[1] the seller to choose to calculate per-item tax, and sum that. In both cases, mathematical rounding (half-up) is used[2].
US tax code, at least as far as income taxes go, uses the same rounding method (nearest decimal) however sales tax is can be quite a bit more complicated [1].
Also somewhat related, we quote our fuel prices to 3 decimals.
[1] - https://blog.taxjar.com/rounding-issues-sales-tax-returns/
Does the sticker have to show all taxes or just the sales tax/GST/VAT? I know that pretty much every country in the world has an alcohol tax that is applied to things like wine. So should the sticker also include that?
In the USA they have a particular hatred of making tax easier to pay. There's a political affiliation whose goal is to make filing a tax return harder and more complicated to do so that people will complain more about it and hate the process. So that has created the tax return filing industry and associated lobby groups. So having sales tax need to be applied on top fits within this world view.
But yes I completely agree that the sticker price should include what you actually end up paying for that item. I also like it in some countries where there's a unit or weight cost with the item, so you can more easily compare different branded products. Though they usually make this number comically small on the price tag to make it harder to compare.
Which political affiliation and what gives you this idea?
One name that popped up after a quick search inside a long article was Grover Norquist. From his Wikipedia entry he is part of a political association which wants to prevent any rise in taxes. From another article I read long ago it was mentioned that this includes preventing automatic filing since the government could introduce new taxes without people knowing.
> In the USA they have a particular hatred of making tax easier to pay. There's a political affiliation whose goal is to make filing a tax return harder and more complicated to do so that people will complain more about it and hate the process. So that has created the tax return filing industry and associated lobby groups. So having sales tax need to be applied on top fits within this world view.
It's actually this:
> since the government could introduce new taxes without people knowing
Along with increasing gov size, increasing gov expense, and destroying another industry.
I'm all for increased competition in tax filing software, and you're starting to see open source competition here as well. But spreading opinion as fact, and in this case in particularly, is called "misinformation" or "fake news"
There are groups of people (political association) and vested interests (lobbyists) who want to make tax harder to pay than it needs to be so they can profit from it, either politically or financially.
In addition you need to manually calculate the sales tax for every different county in the USA on top of the sticker price. It has been suggested that this is enshrined in law and/or done by the stores themselves, but the net effect is that this sales tax is at the forefront of people's minds when going shopping.
Nearly all other countries have tax systems where the VAT/GST/Sales tax is already included in the sticker price, so you don't need to know which country has how much sales tax and manually add it on. Additionally lots of other countries have income tax systems where the authority already has all your information and can easily provide you a pre-filled tax return.
Given that the USA does not do these things and people actively block them, then my opinion is that the country as a whole has a hatred of making tax easier to pay. Most people may not want that, but they are either unwilling or unable to change it.
NOPE! That's the misinformation. They don't want to make it harder to tax, they want to make it harder for the gov to add taxes. That's it.
> In addition you need to manually calculate the sales tax for every different county in the USA on top of the sticker price. It has been suggested that this is enshrined in law and/or done by the stores themselves, but the net effect is that this sales tax is at the forefront of people's minds when going shopping.
It is enshrined in law in some states, not all. And again the reasoning is so that tax cannot be hidden. Not to make it more difficult.
> Nearly all other countries have tax systems where the VAT/GST/Sales tax is already included in the sticker price, so you don't need to know which country has how much sales tax and manually add it on. Additionally lots of other countries have income tax systems where the authority already has all your information and can easily provide you a pre-filled tax return.
I'll need some evidence of this, as this is not my experience having traveled to many different countries. Some do, not most.
> Given that the USA does not do these things and people actively block them, then my opinion is that the country as a whole has a hatred of making tax easier to pay. Most people may not want that, but they are either unwilling or unable to change it.
Again NOPE. It's a hatred of ever increasing taxes. The gov must prove it needs the money, not just have their hands in our checkbooks whenever they're dry.
So ultimately you have a different view on taxation, and that's fine. What's not fine is lying about why the other side is doing it. This is where that divide is coming from.
In the EU it's illegal to show prices ex VAT (or other components that might make up the final selling price) to non-business/commercial consumers.
In places where including VAT/GST/BTW/whatever is normal, shops (usually targetting resellers or contractors etc) where a significant amount of people don't have to pay the tax, I think generally both prices are listed and it's required to be very clear about what's going on.
Where I live (Poland), prices on shelves are displayed in full (more than that, there's the price you'll pay for an item and price per unit of mass/volume, to enable comparisons), but on the receipt, there's always a per-product sales tax summary printed. So if I cared about sales tax revisions, I could easily notice it on the receipt. But most of the time, I just learn about revisions from a news article.
Yes, same packet of potato chips costs R20 at capital R25 at hill stations (but its MRP shows R25).
Further, if something is advertised as XX Eur/mo it's implied it's a month-by-month thing. Situations you described are very very clearly marked as being a contract with a start and an end date as well as a total including any and all fees as well as cancelation terms. You can't hide essential terms deep within a several page legalese document.
3 options, 1 yearly, 2nd yearly with monthly payment and third pure monthly. I did not have to read any long contracts to understand this.
If people don't do due diligence of 5 mins to find what is going on, it's on them..
Scammy companies shouldn't be protected, but if people don't bother to do the most basic due diligence before buying products, it's on them - like forget reading a terms of service. He doesn't even read the product name or description. Gets into a yearly contract for a cheaper price and then complains about the cancellation fees.
At some point either people have to take personal responsibility or should have other adults buy things for them if they don't know what they are doing.
It is a basic necessity for beneficial trade to occur that the terms are made clear, not just technically available, to the people potentially wanting to undertake that trade, before anything legally binding occurs. The issue is not that there are cancellation fees, it's that they are not made clear.
The exaggerated, but still representative, example might be the Earth demolition plans in Hitchhiker's Guide, which were "available for 50 years in the local planning office in Alpha Centauri." Totally fair, right? Anyone could have just gone there and read them.
Demanding "personal responsibility" as a solution to avoid bad deals is the same as accepting that it's OK for some people to be scammed. No one is perfectly on guard all the time. If it is permissible for companies to engage in scammy behaviour, and scammy behaviour increases profits, then in order to be competitive, companies will engage in scammy behaviour. So it will be everywhere. Since, as noted, individual humans aren't perfect all the time, eventually someone will get scammed.
The obvious, morally superior, and more economically beneficial solution is simply to not allow scamming to be profitable. That, among other things, means ruling in favour of the consumer when companies perform shady practices.
Postscript: People with this kind of "libertarian" stance really annoy me. To give the benefit of the doubt, I'll assume that "personal responsibility" isn't just thinly veiled personal exceptionalist elitism. If that's the case, the only reason you can even have these beliefs is because you take so much about the modern world for granted. There is a lot going on in order to create an environment where mutually beneficial trade can happen.
In the absence of strict, neutral enforcement of fair trading rules, people scam the shit out of each other. It's way easier, and more profitable, than actually creating something of value that people want to buy. The total effect of this, if it were allowed to occur, is that it creates an environment of distrust and uncertainty, which means mutually beneficial trades that would otherwise happen won't happen, making everyone poorer. Advocating for "personal responsibility" as a solution to avoiding scummy business practices is directly advocating for this situation.
Historically, before commercial law was explicitly codified, the means of ensuring that merchants were trustworthy was essentially reputation. The way this scaled was with merchant groups, where the reputation of one member going bad affected them all, so they all had incentive to police each other (or alternatively, collude). Plus the fact that people in general were much less dependent on markets for necessary goods, the labour force being mainly agricultural. However, this made opportunity for trade highly exclusive, and largely only available to the privileged ("merchant class").
I guess my question for you is, do you want to have to read every single EULA, thoroughly scan the terms of every transaction every time you buy something, and otherwise do a lot of work and research any time you have to make some vaguely commercial agreement to avoid getting into an agreement you, in retrospect, didn't want? If not, I suggest you carefully re-examine your beliefs and what they imply.
A final remark. The economics of scamming are highly asymmetrical. If individuals have to do a lot of due diligence even for routine transactions, that is a massive cost to that individual. In contrast, organisations willing to partake in scummy behaviour can spend almost endless resources optimising their ability to ensnare customers, because once the process is developed, the marginal cost is very low if not zero. So individuals cannot be expected to "keep up" in this environment.
To suggest they either deserve to be tricked or shouldn’t be able to buy things themselves is revolting.
So in the case of $1000/mo rent, and a 1 month cancellation fee, the minimum total cost will be displayed as $2000. If it is the total remainder of the contract, then it will be displayed as $12000.
It's not that there's no consequences, it's that the consumer is clearly and without the need to navigate dark patterns made visible of those consequences.
I am not sure if apartment lease is a good example.
As a counter example, here are some shady practices and dark patterns in Australia (Internet Service Provider): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haImi4cWau0
Regarding your linked youtube video (which as far as I can tell from skimming, is basically ranting about how ISPs penny-pinch on backhaul capacity and then fail to meet their advertised plan speeds during peak hours), I would encourage you to look at something closer to the present than from 4 years ago. All ISPs now report on minimum speeds during defined peak hours. I believe this is mandated by the ACCC. See the following URL:
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/12/nbn-typical-evening-speed...
A typical ISP plan choice page [1] lists the following information:
1) Monthly price (e.g. "$79/mo")
2) Minimum total cost of the contract (e.g. "$158 if cancelled within the first month")
3) Typical evening speed (e.g. "48 Mbit between 7pm and 11pm" on a 50Mbit plan), which will change depending on which address you enter and thus which technology option you get (namely, if you are on FTTN you will see lower typical speeds reported than a FTTH address, especially for higher speed plans)
This was introduced specifically in response to this issue, where peak-hours congestion was a common complaint amongst consumers.
ISPs are also increasingly publishing their CVC graphs for each point of interconnect. This lets you see a historical utilisation of the network.
[1]: https://www.telstra.com.au/internet/nbn as an example
Berlin‘s public transport company has the exact condition in their terms of service.
> https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/streit-ueber-monatskarten...
(„ Zudem sei eine Kündigung für Abonnenten unattraktiv, da sich für die schon genutzten Monate nachträglich der Preis erhöhe, hieß es.“)
It‘s definitely not a scam or rip-off, just a case of someone not reading the contract before signing it.
If there are no consequences for bailing out of a contract, it makes them rather pointless.
At least this is how I expect things to work here, in the UK.
Beyond that, a contract is a contract.
I just checked and while they do only indicate "X €/month" on the product page, as soon as you enter the checkout process it says "yearly subscription, monthly payment - Y €/month" with the additional options "yearly subscription, advance payment - X €/year" and "monthly subscription - Z €/month". I'm not sure how they're getting away with the misleading prices on the product pages tho (usually there's at least an asterisk indicating this comes with additional conditions and obligations).
By contrast, going to tmobile.de or blau.de, even without speaking German it's extremely clear that prices are based on 24-month contracts. Never is the monthly price mentioned without a clear label below it indicating 24 month terms. Blau even takes it a step further and places the text twice in the box, once in the UI and another time directly below the price.
What? ISP and similar contracts in Germany almody work exactly like this but with 2 years minimum not 1 and no cancelation in the last 3 months of the period.
This is not 75th page on the user agreement, it's the first word in the product name he is trying to buy.
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.
In my only experience with breaking a lease, my lawyer advised me to inform my landlord that I was aware of California state law, and then wait for them to negotiate. They initially counter-offered that I pay 2.5 months to break the lease, and ultimately agreed to 1 month. Probably harder to do during COVID, though, with such high vacancy rates.
[1]: https://caretaker.com/learn/breaking-a-lease-early/mitigatin...
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/renters-r...
AFAIK what you linked to only says a landlord is required to try to find a new renter. In SF that's probably easy to find but any many places it could easily be several months all of which you'd be required to keep paying.
Normally I'd have had a cordial discussion with my landlord, but in this case the landlord was a giant corporate REIT whose boilerplate lease was largely unenforceable (no doubt they know this, and have figured out that people assume leases are legally binding regardless of the terms).
In Oregon, USA, for example, early termination fees can’t be more than 1.5 months rent. In most US jurisdictions landlords are required to mitigate their losses by finding a new tenant. Few courts will let a landlord twiddle their thumbs and collect much more than a few months rent if a tenant leaves early.
As an aside, you (paxys) are all over this post's comments defending Adobe vigorously. Do you possibly work for them?
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.
That’s perfectly normal and also practised by other companies.
It's another mental obstacle for the customer to overcome on the sunken cost fallacy, it's slimey at best.
Maybe businesses are savvy enough to read the fine print, but I think many normal consumers don't understand that there is a fee to cancel, given that it is not prominently shown. You can't just bury meaningful parts of a contract into terms and conditions.
There is a doctrine of unconscionability in contract law that says just because you secure agreement to highly unfavorable terms doesn't mean the contract is beyond review of a court, if there is a significant asymmetry between the contract parties.
Adobe is the one that wrote the contract, if they added cancellation fees that are honestly pretty unusual for the software service/subscription field, then that's on them. Their hands aren't tied by the contract, they wrote the contract. It's their choice to charge people money for a service they no longer have access to.
But whatever, I'll extend yet another olive branch. I'll pay for the remainder of the year as long as I can cancel auto-renew immediately and put down in writing that I will not be charged for the next year. Not too surprisingly, Adobe also doesn't allow its customers to do that, because of course it doesn't.
It's obtuse to argue that all of this is about fairness and not about taking advantage of customer mistakes to bleed them dry for a service they don't want anymore. But I suppose it's just in my contract that I have to argue with a representative at a specific date and time in order to signal that I don't want to renew for another year of service. Nothing Adobe can do about that. /s
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.
Except... that you are.
> You're paying for something as you use it, and getting a discount because you agreed you'd use it for a year.
So... you're getting the use of something before you've paid for the full year. That's a loan.
Hmm, no, you're still not. You are paying for the months as you use them. You merely agreed you'd use the service for a certain amount of months in exchange for a discount.
Is paying rent on a year long contract is a loan? Is paying your monthly phone bill (which is on a 2 year contract) a loan? No. The phone company is not loaning you money. They're just providing the service at a certain rate contingent on an agreement to use it for a certain amount of time.
I don't think the way you are using the concept "loan" is how other people (and the dictionary) uses it. Agreeing to pay something in the future for services they will render in the future is not a loan.
If that were true then there wouldn't be a cancellation fee.
> You merely agreed you'd use the service for a certain amount of months in exchange for a discount.
That's disingenuous anti-consumer corporate bullshit.
> Is paying rent on a year long contract is a loan? Is paying your monthly phone bill (which is on a 2 year contract) a loan?
They both should be considered worse than loans. They're not only demanding that you pay all the money if you want out but they're also fully necessary in a modern tech society.
> Agreeing to pay something in the future for services they will render in the future is not a loan.
It is if you have to pay for those services even if you don't want them any more.
This isn't the gotcha you think it is. The cancellation fee does not cover the full amount owed for the remainder of the services, so clearly the existence of a (50%) cancellation fee indicates it is not a "loan" you are paying back. If it was a loan, you'd actually be on the hook for the whole thing.
> That's disingenuous anti-consumer corporate bullshit.
Could you elaborate? If you want an actual rolling monthly contract, that is an option too. The point of the yearly contract which you pay monthly is to allow for cheaper prices because you are guaranteeing a year of revenue. If you want maximum flexibility, pay monthly.
> They both should be considered worse than loans.
You realize contracts protect both sides, right? If you have a rolling monthly phone plan, the price can increase every month. If you agree to pay for a year, you get a locked-in price, the seller gets a guaranteed year of revenue, and everyone wins.
> It is if you have to pay for those services even if you don't want them any more.
As pointed out in point 1, you're not paying for the services so this argument is actually the opposite of what you want it to be.
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.)
The "cancellation fee" is because you are breaking a contract which you agreed to in order to receive a discount. If you are actually given a meaningful choice (which I feel quite strongly that you are in this case) and you can't be bothered to understand such a basic aspect of the choice being made, then I have absolutely no sympathy for you.
Exactly. And it’s perfectly legal and practiced by a lot of companies, even the public transport company in Berlin does that.
There seem to be a lot of people in this discussion on HN who seem very inexperienced in signing business contracts.
But that would also be the case for most of the general public, no? Are you suggesting that people should have experience in signing business contracts (and contracts with a predatory company, at that) before it's considered safe for them to buy software?
For example, apartments are rented with an annual price and a monthly payment because a) both landlords and tenants have a lot of switchover costs, and b) tenants want to avoid landlords exploiting the pain of moving by jacking their rent up after a month.
But this is just exploitative marketing BS. When you sign up, Adobe is not buying a physical server that they have to depreciate and would sit empty when you quit. They did not buy extra buckets of pixels that will now sit unused in a warehouse. If a person stops using Photoshop, both the the provider expenses and the renter benefits cease immediately. There's no legitimate reason to charge people a cancellation fee here; it's pure exploitation of purchaser optimism and cognitive bias.
Just sayin.
It sucks to be poor.
But being bit in the ass later because something has changed and you want out will hurt a smaller percentage of people than a large upfront fee that makes it unattainable for many. That denies many people opportunity in the name of protecting some portion of those people from potential negative consequences.
Pay monthly for monthly plans, and pay annually once for annual plans.
Some things like apartment leases are not only in a different context, but it's done for a clear reason. Reserved instances on AWS I'm assuming has a similar purpose but it's also in a different context and it's hopefully made very clear to the user.
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.
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.
But you're right, it's a mark of how bad Adobe's policies are that the things I'm thinking about Amazon are that at least I didn't have to get onto an online chat and argue with a representative for 30 minutes. Amazon didn't act betrayed and snap me with a punitive fee to punish me for my disloyalty.
I'm not necessarily saying that the average tech subscription process is handled well just that Adobe is noticeably worse.
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.
I‘m pretty sure, it isn’t.
Go check the TOS of any public transport yearly subscription models and they will certainly have the exact same clause.
I had to pay a penalty fee for terminating my yearly public transport subscription in Berlin early.
One example of the consumer law being applied is in regard to drip pricing, which was commonly used by airlines and hotels:
https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/online-shopping/drip-prici... https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/airbnb-and-edreams-giv...
Pricing rules, in this case Partial Pricing, are quite clear:
If you promote a price that is only part of the total price, the total price must also be displayed at least as prominently as the partial price. This means customers should be able to identify the total price in the advertisement at least as easily as prices for any component parts.
Also relevant: subscription traps: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/accc-warns-consumers-t...
I am unfamiliar with consumer protection in DE, and publicly owned services like the railways may have special pricing legislation, but new EU harmonized laws are being introduced for digital services: https://www.linklaters.com/en/insights/blogs/productliabilit...
Sadly, the EU system prevents any member state from having stronger protections.
For subscriptions there are already strong rules about clearly indicating the total price, and the amount that is fair for early termination: https://www.osborneclarke.com/insights/distributing-games-in...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
So, how do they motivate people to buy the annual subscription when there is no monetary advantage for binding yourself yearly instead of monthly.
In Berlin, if you get an annual subscription instead of a monthly one, you will get two months for free.
And if you cancel early instead of waiting for the whole year, you pay the difference between the monthly and yearly subscription for the months already used.
I don't see anything scummy or illegal here.
Same in the UK - "it's discounted to 10 months cost"
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.
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.)
I'm surprised they haven't started suing people over range check functions yet.
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.
While there may be open-source alternatives however Adobe is kept alive via media & enterprise where there is no alternative.
edit: downvoted?
Adobe has enough momentum and moat that their demise will stretch over decades, and they could halt their fall at any point. Retaking market segments that are lost is hard, but regaining the trust of those about to leave is a lot easier. But if they keep course their eventual fall into irrelevance is inevitable.
I don't think that this is still true - most artists switched to CSP, Procreate, various other programs. There isn't really an industry standard any more.
It is utilized heavily within Animation. Universal, Disney, are all heavy users of Adobe, unless that's changed in the past two years.
source: I had a gig for an medium sized animation studio, a large amount of artists all wanted and used adobe.
Never underestimate it.
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.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-27/forget-ph...
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."
Me 1: Adobe 0
Curious, what did you choose as a replacement for raster graphics? GIMP is a no-go, as its slow and buggy as well.
It has been a good replacement for my limited needs, give the free trial a go and see if it has all the features you want.
As a bonus it is also super cheap compared to photoshop. A permanent license right now is only $25.
I use it in combination with Capture One, but if Serif ever release a tool that can manage my ~30k photos I'll definitely consider switching.
Raster graphics - Affinity and an older Mac with Photoshop CS something :D
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.
If you choose the annual contract, that will run for a full year with you paying monthly installments. If you want to cancel early, you will have to reimburse them. That is exactly the same as phone plans, gym plans (with the exception that gyms often don't allow early cancellation at all), etc. Now if you don't cancel what do you think will happen with an annual contract? Of course it will prolong for another period of time that you chose, in this case a full year again. This is literally hoe contracts work.
If you get a monthly subscription of Netflix, you don't need to manually prolong it every month, do you?
12 months binding is fine. Cancellation fee before the 12 months are up is fine.
Automatically binding your customers for another 12 months every year is insane and extremely hostile and abusive behavior. And I will have no part in such things so even though I love the software that Adobe makes I quite frankly will avoid doing any business with them ever again now to the extent that I am able to.
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...
Tons of people will be so naive as to either not read closely, or just not know that the cheaper one comes with a catch.
People should spend some more time in the community, talk to the old people at the library, do some volunteering. The immense difficulty many people have in filling out a government form is almost traumatic to witness.
Like, some basic due diligence when spending a lot of money is normal right?
Because it’s common sense and practice.
Why would anyone commit to a yearly contract otherwise?
Terms should be easy to read and understand, that is one part of accessibility.
If you have an actual mental handicap that's keeps you from understanding, you are usually not entitled to sign contracts without a supervisor anyway.
> or just tired and not paying enough attention.
Then you shouldn't be signing contracts in that condition. It's like complaining to the police that they caught you speeding and then excusing that with tiredness. I'm pretty sure the officer won't accept that excuse.
> Terms should be easy to read and understand, that is one part of accessibility.
They are. It's your duty as a grown-up to read a contract before signing it.
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.
What IS frustrating is that some of their products don't offer a monthly plan. I want to use Lightroom about once a year, after going on a big vacation, but there's no cheap plan that just includes Lightroom.
There's a $10/month annual Photography Plan that includes Photoshop and Lightroom (exactly what I want), but no monthly option. I would pay $15 for one month of this, but the only way to get Lightroom for a single month is with the All Apps package, which is $80 for a single month.
I obviously don't endorse this, but in the US you absolutely can ignore it forever as long as it isn't student loan debt. Anything else large enough to sue for can be discharged through bankruptcy (which is comically simple in some states), and debts below that[1] will fall off your report after 7 years.
Your credit will tank for a bit, of course, but otherwise there are no real consequences.
1. I think FICO even has a minimum amount for negative items and doesn't consider medical debt at all, but don't quote me on that.
At any rate, I'm just pointing out that it's a thing you can do, not advocating it as one you should do.
As an aside, I think a lot of the HN audience would be surprised at just how many people in America do take advantage of this. Being constantly broke really changes your decision making paradigm.
I'm not sure why it's so controversial to point this out, but c'est la vie.
Coïncidentally (and anecdotally), I was recently proximate to a situation where a new hire had their offer cancelled on account of their credit report. It became clear they had a habit of entering into and defaulting on small contracts. Nothing obscene. But enough that, as a financial services firm, the employer found it to be an unacceptable risk. If that person were sued in any capacity, that fact pattern would come to light and illuminate them in a negative light.
I do think everyone should be given the chance to contextualize and explain things, though; going through a rough patch and defaulting on a couple of credit cards is different from habitually refusing to pay legitimate bills, for example, and absent some other negative indicator shouldn't be disqualifying.
If someone owes me money in the US, I don't have any means to send a legal request?
I Germany, I can just go to court without needing a lawyer and the court will eventually send a bailiff if my claim is justified.
Once it's on the credit report it can then be disputed.
Good luck getting a court to uphold a contract where the terms weren't clearly understood by both parties.
Best part is it goes through Apple’s payment system so no shady business.
As a point of reference, World of Warcraft offers about a 10% discount for their 6 month subscription plan compared to the month to month plan. Additionally, they have pretty consistently offered one free item from the store (which they choose) for players on the 6 month plan. The last such item was a mount which must otherwise be purchased for $25 (obviously the true value to 6 month subscribers is lower than $25 due to bundling and since subscribers don't get to choose which item they receive).
What should they do instead? Not have the annual payment option and screw over all the people who do want to pay for the entire year and are happy with the discount?
Take video editing as an example. The tech it involves (such tracking or object detection) usually improves pretty quickly and the improvement can be drastic . Not having to shell out hundreds of dollars outright every new CS version just to keep up with the tech is a pretty big benefit for a lot of people and makes the ecosystem more accessible. That's true for almost every other software included in the Adobe subscription.
Now, it's absolutely okay to still dislike subscription based business models (I do too) but in this case it's non sense to argue it's rent seeking.
If the updates and support were valuable to people, then Adobe could simply charge for them directly (e.g. by requiring users to periodically pay a fee to upgrade to the updated version). Instead they only allow people to buy a subscription.
We also can't ignore the environment around subscription payments. If many other SaaS companies offered similar yearly but paid monthly plans, I think Adobe CC plans would be less problematic.
I'm definitely not against yearly plans, but this is unnecessarily confusing. If the advertising were honest, it would be more clear that this is a loan/lease agreement or they would advertise the real yearly cost/real monthly plans instead of this weird hybrid plan.
After Effects has 3 tiers
1. Annual Plan paid monthly ($20.99 * 12 = $251.88)
2. Annual plan prepaid $239.88
3. Monthly Plan $31.49
https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html?filter=video-...
For Photoshop they only offer 2 plans
1. Annual Plan paid monthly ($9.99 * 12 = $119.88)
2. Annual plan prepaid $119.88
So no discount. The wording might have been poor before because I remember when I first signed up i didn't know they only had yearly plans but at least now it's pretty clear
https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html?filter=photo&...
It think it's deceptive, at best.
if you click the drop down, it shows you not only your other options but also the prices.
The annual prepaid amount is different from the annual, paid monthly price.
They could be clear and upfront with it, but aren’t... can’t imagine why.
This right below the button you press to start your subscription.
By clicking "Agree and subscribe," you agree: You will be charged US$52.99 (plus tax) monthly and at the end of your one-year term, your subscription will automatically renew monthly until you cancel (price subject to change). No annual commitment required after the first year. Cancel anytime via Adobe Account or Customer Support. Cancel before Apr 26, 2021 to get a full refund and avoid a fee. You also agree to the Terms of Use and the Subscription and Cancellation Terms.
They made a mistake, adobe honored the subscription, and they should too, take it as a life lesson to pay more attention before obligating themselves.
People need to learn to treat transactions and contracts as a hostile situation and they can easily do themselves great harm by blindly ignoring the terms of a deal and some how thing it will be to their benefit.
> “ Your subscription will automatically renew annually without notice until you cancel. You authorize us to store your payment method(s) and to automatically charge your payment method(s) every month until you cancel. We will automatically charge you the then-current rate for your plan, plus applicable taxes (such as VAT or GST if the rate does not include it), every month of your annual contract until you cancel.”
Adobe will renew it for another year at whatever rate they choose without notice.
I agree people should be more responsible in general with contracts, but it should be standardised. Australia’s design for the critical information sheet is great, it clearly shows what your paying, for how long, and for what. It’s got a similar design across companies too.
I believe with any contract that involves money over time, the total amount (including any fees) should be clear. I don’t think Adobe has made them clear.
I do note that the contract terms differ country to country so this might be more/less applicable to some. The part you quoted seems more reasonable.
Nope, perfectly normal business practice and not even unethical.
Please learn and understand how contracts work. They are a legal _obligation_ and you cannot just unilaterally change the conditions after signing a contract without provoking a contract penalty.
It’s really just how contracts work, everywhere in the world.
The fact that you defend this practice shows where our ethics differ. I do not know how you can justify: A company signing you up for another year at a higher rate without telling you.
Im no adobe apologist, but this entire thread is a witch hunt.
"adobe charges subscription cancellation fee" — Adobe do not tell you how much the fee is ahead of time. In the conditions of the Australian purchasing page, the monthly price isn't even written in them. They can also renew it for another year while increasing the price without telling you.
"adobe doesn't show the difference between monthly and annual", and "adobe doesn't display the annual total on the payment page" —
They don't show you total price that you are committing to, they don't show you minimum amount to you must pay if you cancel.
All of this could be solved by saying "You are agreeing to pay a total of $923.88 over 12 months at $76.99 per-month. If you cancel, the minimum cost to you is $461.94 (50% of the total Annual plan), this decreases evenly each month.
And presumably this must be on primary pricing page, not below the fold, have different options for with and without vat, and they must display this for the up-front annual sub, pay-monthly annual sub, and monthly sub with no commitment? The monthly sub needs to be clear that you're actually not signing up for 12 months, because you may only want/need it for 6 months rather than 12, so the other options need a monthly equivalent breakdown for comparison? FWIW, I did a super quick inline edit of Adobe's HTML to show what that looks like [0].
Also, the $461.94 is actually the _maximum_ cost, not the minimum.
> Adobe do not tell you how much the fee is ahead of time.
Yes, they do. [1] clearly says " If you cancel within 14 days of your initial order, you’ll be fully refunded. 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.". There is so much detail in that page, it would be impossible to put all of that on the purchase page without being accused of burying it in the fine print.
> They can also renew it for another year while increasing the price without telling
This is exactly what I'm talking about - you're moving the goalposts here. We're talking about adobe's cancellation fees, not their renewal policy. I'm not defending their renewal policy, it's awful, but it's off topic.
> They don't show you total price that you are committing to, they don't show you minimum amount to you must pay if you cancel. You're right, they should show it. They _do_ have it linked at [2]/[3] where they clearly show the annual cost, and the option to pay it monthly.
> they don't show you minimum amount to you must pay if you cancel. Lets assume they _did_ show that amount. Reading this thread, are you telling me that people wouldn't find another axe to grind? e.g. "They don't make it clear that they can autorenew at a higher price". So now they need to add _every_ detail to the purchasing pages, where they're now accused of burying it in the fine print. But the reason they don't is because the amount is "50% of your remaining obligation", which is a minimum of 1/24th of the annual sum, which is misleading to display. What they _do_ do is clearly show you how much they'll charge you to cancel before you actually do so.
[0] https://imgur.com/a/C2fnRvg [1] https://www.adobe.com/uk/legal/subscription-terms.html [2] https://www.adobe.com/uk/plans-fragments/modals/individual/a... [3] https://imgur.com/a/YRwoaB6
It just has to be before you commit to the contract.
> Yes, they do. [1] clearly says
No, that page shows no prices whatsoever. Your minimum commitments should be shown before you agree to the contract.
People keep making it out like it's some huge imposition on companies to tell customer how much money they'll pay. Here's an example of a more complicated flow from an Australian phone carrier Telstra, purchasing a phone over 24 months: https://imgur.com/a/XycFkyP — it's possible, Adobe are lazy and this is a dark pattern.
But then the other half [0] of this thread that claim putting the dropdown on the second page isn't enough.
> No, that page shows no prices whatsoever.
It states you can cancel and will be charged 50% of the remaining balance. That number depends on when you cancel, so it's not possible to give an actual figure to it. Could that flow be improved? Sure, you could have a page per product, but I do'nt think it's deceitful to have a clear link to the cancellation terms of the contract from both the marketing page _and_ the purchase page.
> Your minimum commitments should be shown before you agree to the contract.
One click on the purchase page shows this [1] which shows three options, one for prepaid, one for annual for paid monthly, and one for monthly. How much clearer do you want it?
> Here's an example of a more complicated flow from an Australian phone carrier Telstra,
That flow is almost identical to Adobe's - it doesn't show you the actual cost to the customer, it shows you the cost of the device, and separately the cost of the subscription. On the cancellation terms page, it also tells you you will be due "the full amount" - not what the amount is. (Unrelated, that's a nice recording).
This stuff is _hard_, yes adobe could do better, but at a certain point, you have to accept that the user understands the terms of what they're agreeing to. An "Annual Plan, paid monthly" couldn't really be any clearer.
There were screenshots in the Twitter thread that showed that this is actually the case.
Adobe would be outright crazy not to present the total costs upfront as it would be super easy for any customer to sue them over deception for that.
It was shown in screenshots in the Twitter thread that Adobe _actually_ does that.
> The fact that you defend this practice shows where our ethics differ. I do not know how you can justify: A company signing you up for another year at a higher rate without telling you.
So, you think it's justified to punish Adobe for the negligence of the customer?
Both Adobe _and_ the customer have the duty to study a mutual contract before signing it. Not reading what you are signing can also backfire for companies:
> https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/updated-russian-man-turns-ta...
It seems that a lot of people in this thread don’t seem to know the fundamental principle of contracts: Pacta sunt servanda, i.e. contracts are supposed to be fulfilled.
Apparently the early cancellation fee is 50% of your remaining subscription fees. In other words it's an improvement to the actual terms I signed up for when I agreed to be committed for 1 year. I dont see why Adobe needs to explicitely "warn" customers about an option that is actually beneficial to them (the users, not Adobe).
If fact, when I think about things I currently pay for, none of them work like Adobe's contract.
- I have a 1 year contract with my energy provider, the cancel fee is ~$45 and I must give them 20 days notice
- My phone has a 24 month plan, to cancel I pay any remaining phone/accessory payments and nothing for the plan, that's it
- My car insurance is paid annually in advance. If I cancel 6 months in they charge a $40 fee and refund me the pro-rata amount for the remaining six months
My point is Adobe could be upfront and clearer with the overall pricing, terms, renewals, and cancel fees — I don't think they are at all.
Edit: fixed some formatting issues
> In Australia it's quite common to have phone/power/gas/insurance plans that are 1/2 year contracts, but to cancel it you pay a small fee.
> - I have a 1 year contract with my energy provider, the cancel fee is ~$45 and I must give them 20 days notice.
Depending on how small the fee is it sounds as if this renders the concept of a half (or full) year contract worthless.
> My phone has a 24 month plan, to cancel I pay any remaining phone payments, that's it
Doesn't paying the remaining payments mean that you actually pay the full price as agreed to when you signed up? If so, how is Adobe's cancelation fee not an improvement? It is smaller than the remaining payments after all.
> My point is Adobe could be upfront and clearer with the overall pricing, terms, renewals, and cancel fees — I don't think they are at all.
I still disagree. If I sign up for an annual subscription I have no expactation of getting out of it early. That's what the monthly subscription is for. If they offer a way to cancel early despite my annual commitment that's a bonus which can be advertised, but doesn't have to be (again, why should they? That's what the monthly subscription is for).
The word "annual" doesn't even appear on the first screen anywhere. It's even very easy to miss the word "annual" on the little dropdown on the checkout screen (2nd screenshot). If you are in a rush, it's VERY easy to see numerous line items for "$___/mo" and miss the single instance of the word "annual" in this entire checkout flow.
Where is the link to an agreement that the user has to read to even complete this purchase? Is it just on another step elsewhere in the process?
In the interim I misplaced my credit card and had to cancel it - my adobe account subscription was automatically suspended when the payments didn't go through and I never heard another word from them (I deleted my adobe account just to be safe...).
For an unexpectedly joyous role-model, Microsoft Office subscription plans are delightfully drop-in/drop-out - I've done several one-month office subscriptions to do stuff in excel.
Serves the 80% use case. Is in some areas (Live Filter, real time zoom, startup time, one fileformat for Photo, Vector and DTP) even better.
And best of all: no subscription!
Hitting this experience after paying them $500 over the years turned me from an infrequent user of their products into a scorned customer who swore to never to do business with them again.
Fuck the MBAs who came up with this bullshit. I hope Adobe dies in a fire.
This is the kind of behavior you see with ossified or dying companies that no longer innovate.
- Informercial "Jelly of the month"-type memberships
- Gyms
- Comcast
Adobe is toast. I'm going to look into more metrics and consider shorting it.
Haven't looked back.
Also, something being common doesn't necessarily mean it's good.
Cancelling the subscription over the phone was an absolute shit-show.
I truly resent Adobe as a company, but they have a monopoly on certain applications.
And first of all, as the OP noted in the twitter thread, they believed they were doing a monthly subscription as advertised; the "yearly plan" interpretation is Adobe getting creative in the terms of service.
https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html
... from my perspective, it is clearly written "annual plan". You can choose to pay on a monthly basis, or in a lump sum. There is no "monthly subscription" or similar.
Now it's possible that this page has changed since the OP subscribed, but I don't think it's changed that much - I remember this clearly from when I signed up which was many years ago.
The OP might be unhappy that their expectations were violated but I really don't think Adobe is trying to hide the nature of the product and its annual commitment cycle.
All Apps
US$52.99/mo
with a button that says buy now. It says its an annual plan billed monthly in the item description after you put in in the cart for one screen prior to you paying for it with the description in small print off to the side wherein most users will see the form they are supposed to fill out and the brightly colored button below "continue to payment"
They get more clicks by not listing it as n dollars a month in one page, putting the description in small print on the side in another page, and mentioning the fee vaguely faded 6 point font on a third page.
If they believed that they were signing up for a monthly, they did not read, what they were signing up for, its clearly stated on the sign up screen.
There is a final: 'By placing my secure order, I agree to Adobe's subscription and cancellation terms and Terms of Use' but you don't have to check a box. I think it's a bit deceptive.
I never did do a lot of graphic work and most of what I need to do now can be done in Pixelmator. I think I paid $30 for that over 5 years ago.
If you can afford Adobe subscription, just cancel it and pay the cancellation fee. Or run it into the end of the period. The costs are minimal. Definitely smaller than the costs of a collection.
I emailed Stripe (my payment processor) to find out how my subscription had migrated to the new card and they said that the feature had been added some time back. So even if you get a new card number, don't be surprised if your subscriptions follow you around.
Did you report your old card lost or did they issue a new one because it expired/etc?
Recurring subscriptions transferred for about 12 months then I had to update the card number.
I’m not a payments expert but presumably the subscription is tied to some authorization and not necessarily the number itself.
I wouldn't be surprised if Stripe enabled this functionality because with the chip migration, they would have otherwise lost tons of revenue (as would their vendors).
Switching banks frequently can mess with your credit score, so I'd try not to do that too much (especially if you're considering buying a home/car/etc.).
They do report to a separate group of risk-scoring companies, but this is mostly to gate fraudsters. Frequently switching checking/savings accounts will have no bearing on your ability to make large purchases on credit. If you happen to close credit cards frequently enough, regardless of whether they are issued by banks, your score could be impacted by reducing your average account age.
I had this occur with Capital One and a scam fax-to-email company who refused to accept a trial cancellation. Even after lodging a dispute the scammers could still bill more charges, and I'd have to dispute each one until the bank made a ruling.
You could assemble the finest legal minds in the world and they'd never convince me that this shouldn't be 100% illegal.
Because now we have math and computers. I am looking forward to Ethereum scaling out with 2.0.
In Germany, the creditor can just go to court and they will send a bailiff to get the money from you.
If someone legally owes you money and they don‘t pay, you can always have the court send a bailiff for you.
You don’t have to be a multi-billion Dollar company to have the right (not privilege) to have your debitors pay their debt.
I have another good example. I bought an Adobe license few years ago, and as a business in EU, I had to bought in excluding VAT, and pay VAX tax here locally. I provided my valid EU-VAT, price dropped to net price in interface (let's say 100 EUR), in confirmation, and even in invoice I get. However, to my surprise, my credit card was charged with full gross price (123EUR), meaning I lost 23% of purchase - as I was obligated to pay VAT anyway second time, as there was 0 VAT tax on the invoice.
Well, such things happen, you may think. This should be childishly easy to fix with support, as clearly amount from the invoice and amount charged simply didn't match. However, after dozen attempts with support, dealing with various support level people from Adobe support from India, not knowing even what the VAT tax is, and without any interest on helping me out, I had to give up. I decided to use PayPal protection for buyers, as transaction was made through the PayPal. Tu my surprise, despite clear evidence, they rejected claim after consultation with Adobe, without providing any reason. So I decided to not deal with those thieves any more and called my bank to fill chargeback request. It was so clear, that they recognised the request the next day and returned the money.
Takeaways are: - Adobe is a shady corporation focused on robbing their customers, with other examples you can find online I cannot call that otherwise (among others, deceptive offers, blocking perpetual licenses, and as in my case simply stealing money from customers credit cards) - PayPal protections are completely useless, even with so clear cases - It's good to make transactions with shady companies with credit cards.
I'm not affiliated with them, but I'm a fan of their product.
[0] - https://imgur.com/qyAWTXw
(mirror, source, dead link)
I contacted customer support and asked to upgrade to a more expensive SMB plan for a different but related product (Adobe Sign). I also demanded the first 14 days free, as that product advertizes a 14 day trial.
As I suspected, they could not make this complex change with their internal tools, so they offered to cancel Acrobat DC for me so I could sign up directly for the trial of the more expensive product.
As it happens, I changed my mind after the cancellation was completed. ;-)
If they had been able to do what I asked, I might have requested a change in billing country into or out of the EU or US - this is often complex for tax reasons. If their tools are capable of everything I could think of, I might still change my mind around the final confirmation stage.
Here is the pricing page: - https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/acrobat/pricing.html?promoid...
It does mention "Requires annual commitment.", but in a vastly less noticeable style than "Best value".
(Legal theorizing, IANAL and all that)
Contract law requires a "meeting of the minds". Ordinarily, a written contract is evidence of where exactly the minds met - but there are exceptions. For instance, website ToS are not really enforceable. ("By using this website, you agree to sell me your house for $1?".)
I would argue that for most people buying Adobe products with an easily missed cancellation fee, there is no meeting of the minds and the contract should not be valid.
A good test for this might be to ask 100 randomly selected customers about the terms of the contract. If a majority aren't aware, it is reasonable to conclude that this information isn't conveyed adequately and that part of the contract should not be enforceable. I've never heard of anything like this happening in practice, though.
I also just went half way through the cancellation process and got the next two months for free to take away some of the sting.
"Monthly Plan - £75.85/mo"
"Annual plan, paid monthly - £49.94/mo"
"Annual plan, prepaid - £596.33"
Also I just upgraded from Premiere Pro to the Creative Cloud and was given the full upgrade T&Cs, including that there'd be a cancellation fee to pay if I signed up for the yearly option and cancelled mid-way through.
Again, a genuine question: am I missing something?
https://responsivedesign.is/articles/cancel-adobe-without-pa...
Happened to my daughter she needed InDesign in order to do a once off college project. She missed the small print and signed up to an annual sub (€300 total). She managed to get out of it using the method described above.
This was unacceptable to me, so I simply got on the live chat and (politely) bothered their sales reps until they stopped it for me. As a last "screw you", they cancelled my entire sub, rather than just the renewal. But, hey, good enough.
Adobe: Never again.
I guess their model is bit different than the a lot of other software subscription offerings, as the most I encounter out there are prepaid for certain duration of time with no commitment. (You pay monthly, or yearly -- with some services offering something between, like 3 months or 6 months.) If you choose to not renew (or cancel the contract) your contract continue to the end of the term. (Though, time to time, particularly some Japanese services, I do encounter model where your service terminates at the moment you choose to not renew -- even if you had 364 days out of 365 days remaining on your contract.)
It definitely is pretty much same as if you are paying for something up front. If you stop using the product in the middle of the term, you generally don't get refund for the remainder of the term, but it definitely feel bit different.
The Affinity suite is great and affordable for me as a hobbyist. Many of the open source packages are also excellent.
Few years down the line they will turn legit (guessing most are poor students who will graduate and get jobs) and will have to pay or pass the cost to their employer.
"Free for educational use" is the legitimized version of the same scummy tactic. I wish universities would not fall for it.
As a few folks noted below: This feels like a pretty intuitive presentation of pricing, with 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)
The soundbite of "oh they made me pay to cancel" is so easy to virally hate on, but the fact is that purchasers chose an annual contract. That being said, would be nice to see a confirmation message along the lines of "Early cancellation of a massively discounted annual plan results in an early termination fee." Always room for improvement.
The guy took an annual license which is cheaper than a monthly one, and paid with monthly payments.
As such, he engaged himself by paying the whole year, not only few months.
Cancelling out means he has to complete the annual payment, which is of course due, according the what he signed for.
Capture One Express is a free and highly functional alternative to Lightroom if you have a Nikon, Sony, or Fujifilm camera.
So i had an account which looks like they renewed my account in November 2021 without asking me.
Logging into my account there is NO refernce to the start and end date of the contract i agreed to, i never agreed to renew. I tried to cancel and says £178 to cancel.
Adobe you are now the worse company for this crap.
I signed up to YC to tell you this:
After half an hour or so on their chat, I managed to make them waive the fee.
I'm pretty sure their practice would be deemed illegally misleading by Danish consumer laws. What worked in the end was threatening to file a complaint with the "Consumer Ombudsman".
But here is the problem, much like Microsoft Office, the competitors for Adobe's CC suite really are meager by comparison.
I know a lot of people are going to stomp and yell and say they are not, but everyone knows the reality.
But that doesn't give Adobe the right to be assholes about it.
Anytime I start a trial, or pay for a service provider with a high likelihood of screwing me over—Privacy.com virtual card.
Privacy.com is amazing.
Any sort of trial though, 100% of the time.
Account is cancelled, so there’s nothing to log into.
No choice but to chargeback or attempt to engage via Twitter. Seems like a well established occurrence.
I recently discovered the Affinity suite of tools to replace much of the use/need I have for creative suite.
Perhaps there's an opportunity for arbitrage of the unused period of subscription by pooling the remaining time and then allowing others to be connected to the individuals who have time remaining and use their accounts.
Basically buying up the unused time and reselling by treating it as a marketplace.
Just checked and it seems I can only cancel my subscription during a fixed period around the renewal date - if I miss it, I get to pay the remaining term as a cancellation fee!
e.g. if monthly is $10 and yearly/m is $8, and I decide to cancel after only 7 months, Adobe should just charge me $14 ($2*7).
It's basically your standard mobile phone contract.
Moreover, the pricing structure itself is misleading. Unlike, say, an apartment lease, there's no intrinsic reason for having it be an annual price billed monthly. It's not like Adobe has to buy extra servers that just sit there empty if somebody cancels. It's pure exploitation of cognitive biases.
You can cancel the trial and bingo, you've exited the plan with no costs :)
When offered a discount or to switch to another plan, choose the cheapest new plan (for me it was photography)
Once your membership is updated, start the cancellation process again immediately
The cancellation fee is now $0.
Or in 2021 is Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo just the best single-purchase option right now?
You can also choose to subscribe by the month, and can cancel at any time.
I understand why companies like to do this. I get it. However, if we went along with every single one of these transitions to monthly subscription models we would bleed money every month unnecessarily.
What happened since then? The CS6 suite works just fine. Tools such as GIMP have become better and better. There are a number of good video editors, file converters and other tools out there.
We used to also update our Corel tools every year. Now they want subscription. We are done with Core.
The next victim will be Altium Designer. We have probably put somewhere in the order of $30K per license into this tool over the years. Annual maintenance is in the order of $1,500 to $1,800 (can't remember). No more. I have decided we are going to switch to KiCAD by the end of the year and donate half of our Altium maintenance fee towards KiCAD development (as well as contribute with software development if we have the time).
It isn't that I have a problem with subscriptions. We subscribe to Jetbrains tools and will continue to do so. It's more of a question of what you get incrementally for your money. And, in addition to this, getting cutoff if you stop paying.
As everyone on the planet knows by now, shit can happen that can put a serious kink into your finances. The old model meant that we could keep using our software until things got better and update when it made sense. As an example, we've done this kind of thing with Solidworks. Went a couple of years without updates and then updated all seats to the latest version when it made sense.
The Jetbrains subscription model is great. If you stop your subscription you revert back to the version from one year ago (I may not have put that exactly right, but it's close). That's fair. I can work with that. If I need to save money for any reason at all I can put it on ice, keep working and get updated back to the current version when it makes sense.
Adobe and others seem to be very different, brutally so. If you stop paying you lose your ability to work. To repeat myself, that is brutally painful. Others have things like cutting your off from bug fixes to even your last licensed version and cutting you off from accessing their peer-to-peer support forum.
I can't claim to know the internals of their business equation. All I know is that, as a customer, I dislike monthly subscriptions that cut you off like and make the very tools you need to do your job evaporate instantly. That, I think, is wrong.
These are tools. I need to own my tools. That's why I buy equipment instead of leasing it.
Did Adobe change? Do you get to keep and use any version of the software at all if you stop paying?
I believe Microsoft Office 360 is the same.
I know this kind of software can be a tough business due to piracy.
Frankly, I feel the same way about stuff like Gmail for business. We have always hosted our own email (which isn't that difficult) and have archives going back a couple of decades. Full access with a number of email clients, including Outlook, which is what I tend to use.
We've actually had a large effort to move towards python which has been successful in preventing unnecessary MATLAB. Holding the cancer at bay.
Re Excel, they are making offline installs increasingly difficult and expensive, and yet their online version can't do many things (like, Solver doesn't exist, you have to licence it separately, which is essentially impossible in a corporate setup).
Gmail at least has Takeout that works. The problem is that going back to Postfix + anti-spam would require using muscles that have atrophied, and I'm sure I'd have to outsource the problem of getting mail delivered anyway.
Yes. I had an ugly experience with a customer who insisted on using the Excel online version. It was a mess.
We are trying to avoid creating tools using Excel any more. Same as you with MATLAB, we are shifting as much as possible to Python. We are using an internal Django site to collect all the tools as apps when it makes sense. In some cases it's stuff that connects to laboratory equipment to take measurements, etc. and it might not make sense to tie it to Django.
That said, you'd be surprised the kinds of things we've contorted Django into doing. We built a robotic test and manufacturing system that runs from Django. It was very interesting to figure out how to use the database for journaling and to maintain state. The last thing you want on a system like that is for the machine to lose state for whatever reason. It worked really well. Not sure I'd recommend it. I wanted to see if we could standardize on Django for the UI and data management on custom automation solutions. No verdict yet.
This scummy behavior is not OK.
1) Adobe stops offering the annual paid monthly plan. This sucks because the consumer gets fewer options.
2) Adobe advertises the price of the true monthly plan. This sucks because Adobe is unable to advertise what, for many, is their best deal. If I intend to use this software for more than a year, which is a very common use case, then I want to know the best price on a long term basis.
3) Adobe keeps the advertised price as-is, but must add some kind of disclaimer or note which indicates the terms. I think this is pretty reasonable, and maybe should be implemented. Still, this sucks a little bit, not just because it’s more legal red tape, but also because it is visual noise in the same vein as the © and ® symbols.