Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract | Hacker News Reader

Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract

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1,607 pointszdw565 comments

For anyone stuck in this dark pattern here is a trick I've used in the past:

Adobe won't let you cancel without paying the remainder of your subscription fee however you can switch to a different plan. As soon as you switch you'll have the ability to cancel your "new" plan within 14 days. If you cancel after 14 days they'll charge you the early termination fee.

In other words, they are hopelessly broken and you have to social engineer a loophole?

No, they are purposefully evil but not competent enough to close all loopholes (or leaving it open on purpose to have an escape hatch for the most litigious customers).

Agree. It is a constant wonderment why Adobe is not called out ‘evil’ more often like its other SV brethren.

They are not even good at software engineering and UX.

They used to be but then competitors sprang up so Adobe got less attention.

Back in the early days they were really good, I remember phoning about some PostScript problems I was having and whoever I spoke to clearly knew it inside out. Now I can't even get a response about obvious bugs in their software.

It's not just Adobe though, this is an industry wide problem.

Evil is thrown around way to much. If you are going to use it for dishonest business practices what’s left for ISIS?

A gradation of evil is still evil.

I love living in a time moral absolutism and self righteousness. Nothing better than having conversations with people that have zero doubts about the correctness of every single one of their many, many ethical positions and that anyone who disagrees is evil.

Good times. If only I could have witnessed the Spanish Inquisition.

It is not a very ambiguous moral stand versus Adobe here.

Ironically, the point is that evil is relative and there are different scales of evil. That isn’t absolutism.

“moral absolutism”

How dare people make judgement calls on actions they feel are morally wrong! Why, that’s like burning people at the stake!

ISIS' actions are far far worse, but most Daesh are motivated by the desperation of being a religious minority associated with a deposed dictator in a resource-constrained desert infected with religious fanaticism.

Daesh's actions require a more drastic response, but I'm more confident that the average Adobe CSR, rather than the average drafted Sunni kid from Al Qaim, is going to hell.

> most Daesh are motivated by the desperation of being a religious minority associated with a deposed dictator in a resource-constrained desert infected with religious fanaticism.

Eh, not really. They are pretty much all a religious majority in the regions they controlled and moreover Syria is pretty predominately Sunni.

Communications have context. To apply a word to Adobe (as a loose refernce to "Don't be evil.") and then say ISIS is evil, doesn't mean or even imply Adobe === ISIS.

Context, it matters.

Let’s do literally evil next. That adjective doesn’t get nearly enough use.

Well, blame Google. Knowing about historic references to Axis of Evil and such they should have left the word out of SV / start up lexicon.

As it is, they didn't. The best the rest of us can do is further develop our capacity for context.

https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Axis_of_evil

There's not a limited number of slots for who gets to be called evil.

It's a threshold, not a competition. Sometimes the threshold changes, but crossing it is enough. No matter that other people might be even worse.

Indeed not. Contemporary society has infinite capacity for moral condemnation.

Is black and white thinking considered a compliment now?

It's not black and white thinking, it's a threshold, as stated.

For an average income person

- A Porsche is expensive - A Ferrari is expensive

The fact that a Ferrari costs a lot more than a Porsche does not make a Porsche "not expensive", because there is a line (for the buyer) beyond which they consider a car expensive. There's problem a grey are below that line in which a car may cost more than they are comfortable spending, but have enough useful features that they will consider sacrificing for it. And there is a large area to the right of the expensive threshold where a lot of such cars lie.

The fact that lots of cars are past the "expensive" threshold for someone doesn't mean they're thinking in black and white.

This is true. It’s a threshold. So sometimes when I think to myself “Should I be spending time fighting to ensure people are not dying at the hands of a fundamentalist religious organization or should I be spending my time lowering prices for a high end graphics editor?” I always try to remember that these are equivalent tasks. It doesn’t matter which I do. I am bringing the same amount of good to the world.

Pears are sweet. Yet Coca-Cola is sweeter. Both deserve the label, that doesn't mean some things can't be even sweeter than other.

Similarly, there are shades of evil. Inventing some new greater evil does not invalidate the regular kind.

A fair point, and I must concede to it.

Were I to crack Photoshop and provide it to 10s to 100s of business in my local city, should Adobe stay quiet and not complain, because there are people doing the same and uploading it to pirate bay where it's available to millions?

I think the answer is clearly not. There is no reason why it should be invalid to criticise any act, just because it is not the worst act.

You are evil for saying “doing to the same”. In a categorical sense, you and Hitler are similar: eeevilll

If you're going to use evil for ISIS, what's left for the Nazis?

If you are going to use evil for the Nazis what’s left for the Romans?

What have the Romans ever done for us?

Inform yourself on what happen to Yazidis recently and you will not do this sort of humor anymore.

What sort of humor? I'm showing the ridiculousness of the claim. The Nazis can be evil as well as ISIS.

Sorry if I misunderstand you but you could just say that it's ridiculous if you think it's ridiculous. I personally don't like there is comments with "isis" and "nazi" inside in a discussion about Adobe (and I don't specially like Adobe at all).

Yes. It’s all rooted in narcissism. Calling something “evil”, makes you a hero when you fight it, whether that means going on patrols in the streets of Raqqa or calling out a shitty SaaS pricing scheme on an internet bulletin board.

Bad take. Calling something evil is a moral judgement and that’s it. I do t need to fight it, be a part of it, or hell, I could be evil myself. It’s a judgement call and nothing more.

You may disagree with my moral standards, and that’s cool.

It's an adjective. Adobe is bad. ISIS is bad. That doesn't equate the two (or imply that it's the same degree) any more than calling them evil is. Evil is just an adjective that means "deliberately very morally wrong".

You could easily make the argument of ISIS being less evil than Adobe, given that many of them have conviction that they're doing the right thing, but Adobe couldn't possibly believe that this is anything but duplicitous, misleading, and scummy. Killing for religious beliefs is much more complex than simple "evil". Scamming your paying customers by intentionally misleading them with dark patterns is a very simple and obvious evil.

“Evil is thrown around way to much. If you are going to use it for dishonest business practices what’s left for ISIS?”

I love captain crunch cereal. It is so good— “NOW I HAVE NO WORDS TO DESCRIBE CHARITIES!”

They aren’t evil, it’s just when companies move to subscription they turn into mini insurance companies focused on the spreadsheets. They model out your lifetime value and know that every $1 they chisel out of you is worth $1.40 in 5 years.

They are brutal in the enterprise space, looking for 10-15% price escalations. They also turn over sales leadership so if you are big enough you can pull stunts for concessions. Just do some recon and figure out what they get paid the most on. Last time, we hired a few interns specifically to do a public PoC of how we were getting rid a key product in the portfolio. Made sure they heard about it and got significant confessions. Basically 10x the intern and PoC investment. We ended up hiring the interns as well for an extra bonus.

As a consumer, you need to be really aware of the motivations of your suppliers business model and model your business accordingly. Understand your costs and use OSS strategically, or understand where you just need to take what they offer (ie AWS). Things in the middle, like Adobe in my case, you need to be ready to walk away or play chicken and make a deal at the 11th hour.

"it’s just when companies move to subscription they turn into mini insurance companies focused on the spreadsheets. They model out your lifetime value and know that every $1 they chisel out of you is worth $1.40 in 5 years."

The term for that is "evil".

"Evil" is normally used for people that do worse actions than overbill their customers. "Fraudster" applies better here.

Nah, evil is fine. It's a low grade evil, sure, but it's still evil. To cite a lovely paragraph from Carpe Jugulum that feels appropriate -

“There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’ ‘It’s a lot more complicated than that -’ ‘No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

― Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

> They model out your lifetime value and know that every $1 they chisel out of you is worth $1.40 in 5 years.

Even more. Every $1 in MRR is worth around $216 in company market cap. (assuming their current multiple)

The CEO can also claim credit for the stock price increase and get his bonus. Fixing it would reverse the effect and put the bonus at risk. So not only will such ‘small evils’ become intrenched there is also a powerful insensitive to find even more of them.

Thank you so much, I was able to successfully cancel my plan for free!

That's awesome! I'm glad it still works. I stumbled upon this work around 5 years ago when I was in college and Adobe quietly switched my subscription from the student version to the full CC suite. I contacted support because I genuinely couldn't afford to pay $60 a month and support was no help whatsoever.

How did you get the above mentioned 14 days to pass in 40 minutes?

You need to cancel BEFORE the 14-day period, after that you’re locked in again.

There’s money in confusion.

Or you can just block the recurring payments and wait for them to come at you?

Anyway a "free" trial that asks for your cc number is obviously not free. Better to stay away of those to be on the safe side.

They didn't "come at me" when I've done this a few times in the past, but thankfully I haven't been in a position to put their akin-to-malware on my system in a few years.

There are stories when Adobe charged for several missing years as soon as credit card were linked.

CC chargeback time

Chargebacks aren't the magic spell people think they are.

The credit card company may elect to side with the merchant, or the merchant may decline to do business with you again in the future (not ideal if your income relies on access to these tools in the future), or the merchant may take legal action against you, or the credit card company may decide to close your card account.

You can't just do whatever you want and then claim 'chargeback!'

I use privacy.com for throw-away cards and you can set spending limits and close them at any time.

> close them at any time

Closing your card doesn't have any impact on legal obligations you had, or a merchant thinks you had, or any impact on whether a merchant will choose to do business with you in the future.

Yeah, and a software provider hiding a non-cancel clause somewhere in a dozens of pages after the deal "contrat" doesn't impact on your legal obligations either.

I would guess that ‘annual plan’ is presumed to be clear enough, you didn’t have to read the contract.

Hum... Annual plan is not stated on any of the large text. It is stated on the "review order before you buy" as part of the name of the product, what makes it nothing any similar to "clear". "Completely confusing" is more apt.

Near it the price information carries the monthly price only, with no indication that you are signing up to 12 times that amount.

The only saving feature is that you don't need to read dozens of pages. If you open the contract, it is confusing from page 1. But it's also not clear at all what is going there.

In terms of legal obligations, sure - however, for SaaS, it's almost never worth it. If it's "we charge you at the start of the period", then you received no goods, they received no payment, there is no legal obligation. If it's "we provide the service and charge you at the end of the period", then there is a legal obligation, but the cost to them to collect is probably too large; they could always send it to a debt collector, but good luck proving that debt ("the issuer of the debt provided access to a service" "...that I was unaware of and never used? Sounds fraudulent").

In terms of merchant choosing to do business with you in the future, they may or may not have a choice; depends what they use to identify you with. Certainly, if they don't make canceling easy, it's probably not the kind of business you want to deal with.

All that said, this is why anything that auto-renews, that I don't know if I want to keep renewing (i.e., will I still be using it at the end of the trial period, end of the month, end of the year), I immediately cancel. If it's a trial and that terminates access, I will take that as a sign not to use them. If it's paid and that terminates access, I will also take that as a sign not to use them, but I'll also email them and basically say "hey; I paid for X period, wish to use it for X period, but am unable to use the service for X period. I either need you to reinstate my account, sans auto-renewal, or I expect a refund". That tends to get a response, since otherwise -they- are legally on the hook.

kind of hard to have legal obligations when you use junk PII (which Privacy accepts; they allow any address and zip to be used)

No, that's just fraud, and it'll get you in way more trouble

That's not correct. At least not in this context.

This will invariably lead to a terminated account and a bunch of declined emails , but thats as far as it goes.

As a [small] SaaS owner, I immediately refund, cancel, and block the user from reactivating their account until they reach out to me. In more than 10 years, I’ve seen less than a dozen “accidental” chargebacks. Most are from users who are too lazy to login and hit the cancel button.

I don’t believe in using dark patterns as a retainment strategy, so I make it very easy to cancel from the same screen they signed up on. The domain is listed on their CC statement. I also send out reminders well before annual subscriptions renew with a link to update or cancel their plan.

I used to dispute chargebacks when the user was very clearly using the service actively and provide screenshots, logs, and written evidence, but what usually happens is the bank takes 30+ days to complete each interaction and almost always sides with the cardholder anyways. In the meantime, users get frustrated because their money is locked up in limbo and I can’t even refund them until their bank responds.

The only chargeback I recall “winning” was one where the user accidentally canceled but still wanted the service. They called their bank directly and the bank canceled the chargeback.

It’s just not worth the hassle, so immediately offloading the responsibility of chargebacks to the user is well worth the $15 chargeback fee. They’ll let you know if they want to come back.

Big companies, I’ve heard, may put you on a block list and if you’ve submitted any identifiable info (address, phone number, etc.) they’ll know when you create a new account.

I've never had Amex side with the merchant.

https://twitter.com/controlflow/status/1469253842109968385?t... Finally managed to find source

Not a good idea if you, in the future, may actually need Adobe's services again.

At this point I intend to avoid Adobe's services for the rest of my life. If I ever feel like I need Photoshop or Illustrator I'll find an alternative. There are a lot alternatives to these, both open source and proprietary from small businesses.

I use Linux but I'm mostly content with Gimp and Inkscape.

I know Photoshop have some "content aware fill" and things but that's just their re-branded name for neural networks that are already open source, it's just a matter of time before it's available in Gimp. I might even consider writing those plugins too but my time is limited.

I thought the big problem is that gimp uses only rgb color encoding, which is fine for non-print, but if you want to print something professionally you need at least cmyk.

Yeah if you need to work in CMYK you're kind of stuck. Personally, if I needed to do a lot of print work then I'd pick up an old Mac and an old license for Photoshop CS6.

For desktop publishing, Scribus does CMYK.

RGB color in Gimp is fine for me because I only use it for photo processing, and cameras shoot in RGB so you aren't losing any information by doing your photo processing in 16-bit or higher RGB.

You can do color space conversions to CMYK after that stage.

On an interesting side note, realistically though, I've found the vast majority of people I've had to work with don't understand the difference between RGB and CMYK and just want "PDFs" and don't necessarily let me choose or interact with the printing agency directly, or the printer is some friend's wife's father's friend's friends' friend's company on WeChat that is going to be doing the printing at 1/10 the cost of every other commercial printing agency out there and they've chosen to use that company and it would look silly of me to suggest to use a company that costs 10X more just so I can get proofs. In those cases, I've found that if I don't have access to proofs, these days, RGB PDFs often seem to get more consistently rendered than CMYK PDFs.

There has been a GIMP plugin for this for a long time - no idea how the quality compares to Photoshop's content aware fill though: https://github.com/bootchk/resynthesizer

See https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/

As a multi-decade Photoshop user, I find Affinity unusable. I know it comes very highly rated, but my muscle memory is so ingrained that I don't think I can make the switch. Not a single thing worked the way I'd expect, and trying to adapt to it was hours of constant digging through forums to do the most basic things, like move the canvas.

I started using Krita instead, and it's a good replacement without being so utterly different.

Sure, but if you are a design professional they are pretty much indispensable.

>Not a good idea if you, in the future, may actually need Adobe's services again.

#Monopoly

Any advice, alternative PDF editor for Windows?

PDF editor? I have always regarded pdf as a terminal file format, the place data goes to die. Only half joking but pdf was always the final form from some other program, the internal editable data was never pdf. I have never seen a program works on the pdf directly, Probably because I have never had that much exposure to adobe software. the few times I have needed to do so I had to use a pdf programing library.

If you mean desktop publishing software that outputs a high quality pdf scribus works fairly well.

https://www.scribus.net

thank you for the link, never came across scribus before!

When I deal with government documents, visas, etc. I frequently need to produce 200-page PDFs that contains bank statements, utility bills, or other documents that arrived as PDF or were scanned into PDF. Some of those were scanned upside down, and then you might need to compress or split the resulting doc because of file size limit. So I need serious PDF editing software to deal with this - converting from PDF and back ruins all the official documents and leads to problems.

If you don't need to edit the actual text or content of the document there's a lot of tools like pdftk and ghostscript that can flip, resize, compress and split PDFs.

If you're on a Mac then the built-in Preview app works pretty well for this type of thing. The only problem I've had with it are accessing signed PDFs from AWS SOC2 attestations.

You may get sent to collections and thats a whole pile of misfortune.

Most online services just terminate your service after a couple warnings and don't bother with collections.

In any case just set it as your policy that you don't talk to collectors, you only engage with businesses directly.

Send Adobe a written notice of termination of the agreement, stop payments, and I believe that's all you need to do, but IANAL.

IANAL but if you agreed to a fixed term contract you can't just inform the other party that you are leaving early. You need to use an exit clause within the contract or somehow invalidate it. (For example by saying that you didn't knowingly enter into a 1 year contract.)

> IANAL but if you agreed to a fixed term contract you can't just inform the other party that you are leaving early.

Also IANAL, but he whole point is that the user is still in the 14 days "free trial, just cancel", and Adobe is refusing to honor the "cancel" part, right? This approach can be handy, specially in countries where there is a way to send legally valid electronic notification letters.

No, during the first 14 days you can actually cancel for free. This is talking about months later when you discover the "annual commitment" part for the first time. It's a perfectly legal contract, just deceptive.

> It's a perfectly legal contract

Is it? You can't actually just write whatever you want in the fine print and then claim that that is what was agreed to.

> (For example by saying that you didn't knowingly enter into a 1 year contract.)

I'm also not a lawyer, but I don't think its ever a reasonable defense to say that you didn't know the terms of the contract if you've signed it (or agreed to the terms online - which I'm sure is provable by Adobe)?

I'm pretty sure it is. I believe the technical term is "Misrepresentation". I don't think it would be an easy fight but it seems that you could try to make an argument that they represented the contract as monthly. There are also examples of ToS being declared invalid because no reasonable person read them, this sounds similar where no one is actually reading the fine print.

While this case may be hard I'm pretty sure it isn't "never". For example if you are buying a subscription to a software suite and they sneak into the contract "You also give us your house" that isn't going to fly, even if you signed it.

I get your point - and also that 'never' is not the right word - but I don't think the defense is that you didn't read the contract. There are plenty of cases where people get screwed over for not reading a contract.

E.g. if ToS said I needed to give up my first born to Adobe, the judge isn't going to side with me because I didn't read the ToS. They will side with me because the clause isn't valid.

To build on that, allow me to offer a real-world example: a General Contractor I worked with set up as his standard contract as a triplicate form, so you'd sign once and you'd keep one of the triplicate copies as your copy of the contract. The trick was that the back of the triplicate form was where he put the penalties for breaking the contract, but the signature section was on the front, so there was no indication that there were more terms on the back. One of his customers got fed up with his misbehavior, and he lost the ensuing court case because the contract was deemed to be misleading (hiding more clauses after the signature).

I'm not sure if this would fall into the same boat, but if the dark patterns get misleading enough, there is a real-world risk that the contract would fall into the same situation: misleading enough that the hidden portions of the contract can't be applied.

IANAL but I've successfully done exactly this. Told them I wouldn't be paying any longer and denying the charges on my card. Support sent me a grumpy email that I violated my contract and that's it.

According to them I won't be able to resubscribe with that email. Oh no! Anyways...

> In any case just set it as your policy that you don't talk to collectors, you only engage with businesses directly.

Are collectors so toothless over there? Here a valid collection is an easy win in courts if it's not paid, and then it can be garnished from wages, pension, other income, or your property. Collections absolutely can not be ignored here.

Um, if a business wants to charge me and I disagree with the charge, they need to duke it out with me directly. Over e-mail, which is my official means of contact. Or in court, if it comes to that.

I'm not going to engage a collector. They aren't part of the 2-party agreement, they have no rights to any information about me, and I'm not going to give more of my personal information to some 3rd party idiot just because they asked for it.

Pro tip: Never give private businesses your real address or phone number. Make sure they only have your e-mail address. They aren't the police, and don't need to know where you live. If there is a dispute they must engage with you directly by e-mail. If a business needs your credit card billing address, change the street address, as long as the city and zipcode are correct it will usually work.

Sure, I'm not going to tell you otherwise. Just that "ignore debt collectors" might be very bad advice with real-world consequences following people for years. Around here a mark in your negative credit report from courts means you're last in line for rental apartments, can't get a new mobile subscription, and a plethora of other nuisances.

Couldn't you just freeze all your credit reports and never give Adobe your real name, address, phone number, and they wouldn't be able to affect your credit.

I see Adobe as equivalent to a grocery store, they're just a business and don't have a legal right to any personal information, I could totally manifest to them as an avatar and pay for services with an anonymous Visa gift card.

Sure, I don't think Adobe would pursue this and you could just try and stay anonymous to most contracts. But you can't do that to all your payment obligations, so I thought "don't talk to collections" might be a dangerous advice to give out for others. Strictly following that could lead to real negative consequences in some situations.

If all Adobe has is a throwaway email and fake address, what exactly are they gonna do?

They have your CC/Debit card info on file.

Privacy.com

Privacy numbers don’t work for Adobe trials. As it happens, I attempted that earlier this evening.

As a last resort I generate a temp number with my actual credit card.

I haven't worked at Adobe, but I have worked at other places with somewhat similar subscription policies, and I highly, highly doubt they would send it to collections:

1. There is an extremely low chance they would collect anything anyway, so it's not worth it to them.

2. If someone actually challenged their collection, there is a good chance, of it went that far, that the judicial system would find this type of agreement invalid given the dark patterns involved.

Basically, what Adobe and other companies are trying to do with these onerous auto-renewal and ridiculous early termination fees is just to make more money from people (a) forgetting to term their subscriptions and (b) not wanting to go through the hassle of fighting the early termination fee.

I can confirm from experience they don't.

A person meeds to have a cc where transactions are disabled. ( My bank via its online customizer accounts - allows a person to turn this on / off for security )

I got a X1 credit card a little bit ago. You can have unlimited "virtual" credit cards, trial subscription cards, and one time use cards.

I now use it for everything, with a different "virtual" card for every business. I wish more credit cards offered this.

(not affiliated with x1)

CapitalOne offered this feature too, which I used heavily. Then they _got rid of it_. Blows my mind, it was incredibly nice.

They're still offered through the Eno extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/eno%C2%AE-from-cap...

Is there a way to use this outside the Chrome browser?

Citi also offers this, for those who didn't know.

I do this with privacy.com. Every site gets a unique credit card with a custom limit.

this is very bad advice

> Anyway a "free" trial that asks for your cc number is obviously not free.

There is a legitimate reason to do that: to keep people from making a bunch of accounts and getting free trials with them forever.

I always just create a virtual number through my CC, set the maximum to $1, and have it expire within a couple months. Works like a charm.

If you don't have a card that allows that, you can also buy a prepaid card, though I believe such cards may have distinctive numbers and it's possible a vendor may disallow.

I use https://privacy.com/ for this.

One of the best discoveries I found on hn a few years ago

Thank you. Never knew about this service, was looking, obviously not hard enough, for exactly this. But really do think they should advertise better. This would help with managing expenses too.

I had to sit on a waiting list for a few weeks to get invited to it about 1 year ago. I don’t know what that was all about but it seems they aren’t in a rush for more users.

Btw their numbers don’t work with Adobe, but I used Privacy for a Microsoft Office trial about 6 months ago and I got an email every time Microsoft attempted to charge me, which was approximately once/week before I just deleted that card.

Thanks for the pointer!

Looks like it’s US-only.

I haven’t been able to find a service like this that supports Australian users, so looking for suggestions!

I'm in NZ, but I can use https://statescard.com/ and they seem to be pretty good.

I use this for signing up to watch HBO Max and some other subscriptions. It's pretty handy.

wise also offer virtual cards, which works in NZ, possibly in Aussie too? https://wise.com/nz/virtual-card/

They are the best. They're big issue used to be that they gave out _debit_ numbers, which a lot of things would not accept. But, this year they transitioned to credit, so even that problem has gone away.

The “personal” plan is free. I’m always cautious with free things that use my personal data - if you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

How are they able to keep this free?

Like any credit card company, they charge fees to the vendor. Something like 1.5%+$0.30 of every transaction. It even says on their website,

> we make money from the interchange paid by merchants

I don’t use it for everything. Only things I want to place a limit on. The data can’t be worth very much.

Sadly it is only available to US residents :(

Yeah, I wanted to sign up for Oracle's free cloud, I tried a pre-paid credit card and it was disallowed.

Patreon, for example, will not accept a pre-paid card.

I use Privacy with Patreon. It works great.

How do you do that?

Not sure about the US but in Europe there is Revolut that allows you to create virtual credit card numbers tied to your main account. They can be deleted/disposed of at any time in the app.

About 6-8 years ago, all major credit card companies in US has the virtual CC service: BoA, Citi, Chase, you name it. Passing one period, they all started to shut down the service, saving Citi.

I don't know why Citi still has this service, and seems to keep developing it (it used to be a Flash page, and since Flash is out commissioned, they rewrote the whole service into HTML).

So if you are in US, get a Citi CC or something like privacy.com.

Does citi let you create any no. of virtual numbers and can you set limits for them ? I sorely miss the BoA flash feature and haven't found a replacement. I would sign for citi if it's the same.

I just tried generating 5 numbers without problem. It seems you can generate as many as you want.

You can set expiration time and daily spending limit for the numbers. Also optionally assign a name for each number.

Note that I have two Citi CC but only one card has this service. So some card may not. The one available to me is the double cash card.

Couldn’t you make the free trial useful enough to show off the product, yet _incomplete_ in such a way that continually making new accounts is not viable?

An example.. a marketing mail app where the trial only allows you to mail 1 or 2 campaigns with a max of 5 email addresses (recipients) for each. In that scenario you’d see the full capability of the product but couldn’t use it for a full email campaign. Creating more accounts wouldn’t help you game the trial.

I think not taking people’s CC is important.

But you'd want to test that the mail campaign manager handles large campaigns efficiently, etc.. I guess there's a suggestion here that two trial options should be available a "trial with CC" where you get access to the whole product and a "trial without CC" where you get access to a simulcrum of the product, like you can use Netflix but it only shows the first 5 minutes of all shows or something.

I'm moving web/email hosting providers at the moment and the range of trials available is interesting. Two examples to highlight the range: Linode offers a $100 USD value to use in a time-limited trial (one month IIRC); OVH wouldn't even give me a trial on request and have a minimum 12 month upfront charge (I can't believe they're serious, every provider has given a free trial in the past even if only for a week or two [which is not long enough for me to get a proper view of someone's service]).

sounds like a lot of dev work for little to no value..

Anyone with a legitimate use isn’t going to create large numbers of emails just to do this. It’s a complete waste of time for any professional.

You don't need to create a bunch of emails, just unique enough addresses. I've got a catch-all on my domain, that's unlimited address. Gmail will let you alias with anything using +, and ignores periods last I checked.

Bots are an annoying adversary to have, I'll tell you that much. If there is any way to make money out of it - including those you couldn't have imagined - someone on the internet is going to figure it out and it will be worth their while

My engineering manager at my old job made double my salary and yet bragged about how every month he was on a new Netflix and Amazon Prime 30 day trial.

It also means you’re more serious about paying for the service

Virtual credit card numbers where you can set a low limit + early expiration date can be useful for avoiding the dark pattern of "free" trials that you can't cancel.

Part of the problem it could be argued is the CC card here - you want my CC number? Fine. I should have to initiate the transaction, hit "Go", not the other way around.

I can block charges, but this would be a more valid reason if it really were just about limiting "freebies".

Actually for this reason I prefer to use a small account with limited liability e.g. Paypal or a low limit CC, precisely because there's less risk for me. Why should company XYZ have unlimited power to randomly charge me tens of thousands of dollars? They shouldnt.

>Anyway a "free" trial that asks for your cc number is obviously not free. Better to stay away of those to be on the safe side.

A few years ago I signed up for a "free" Audible trial and later forgot about it. They rolled it over into a paid subscription somehow and charged me money despite never giving them my card details in the signup process. I believe what happened is it got linked to my Amazon account and charged the card connected to that.

They refunded me after I contacted them but I didn't get the entire amount back.

This is exactly what I did, worked a charm.

I signed up, but their product kept crashing - it never worked.

I called to cancel, they asked for 50%. I said, I don't owe it because the product didn't work - contracts require consideration by both parties. CSR said I would pay. I got his contact info and told him that not only I wouldn't pay, but that Adobe would cancel my contract for free before a year.

Anyways, I blocked the transaction. Within 2 months, they cancelled my subscription. I sent a screenshot to the CSR email. Never heard back.

Or you can threaten to report them to the relevant consumer body in your country. I did this after arguing with one of their sales people about cancelling a subscription for half an hour and they immediately relented.

Just speculating, but i suspect they know what they're doing is dodgy and want to avoid as much scrutiny as possible from any regulatory bodies so their support script says to cancel if the customer mentions reporting them.

Of course, you then report them, anyway.

and should

This also works for American Express. They won't pro-rate the annual fee after thirty days, but you can drop from Platinum or Gold to a Green card and get back the difference.

Also pirates, be reminded that Adobe indulges in very aggressive practices to target you.

At least in India I've met people on unrelated events working for companies claiming to be contracted by Adobe to target small-business, raid their office and make them pay huge sums of money on the pretext of suing them for piracy of their products.

One such person, told me that they got their previous employer into trouble with Adobe due to bad blood. It's definitely not legal for a private entity to raid a premise in India, But I guess these companies have 'what it takes' to make that happen.

So it's not worth it to pirate adobe products, Especially when there are better tools available[1].

[1] https://startuptoolchain.com/#design (I maintain this).

It’s not worth it to pirate Adobe products... in India. I’m not sure how this story translates to countries that don’t have anti-piracy mobs that raid offices.

True maybe more subtle elsewhere, But the risks of piracy is not zero anywhere.

I wonder how long it'll be until they tie up this loophole.

I just used the chat to cancel my subscription and they waived the early-cancellation fee without any issues. Maybe its some sort of damage control.

For Adobe specifically, I threatened a chargeback for any amount I’d be charged after I let them know I wanted to cancel, including the cancellation fee.

But for vendors like these, usually I use debit cards which I only load when I want to pay for the service. Send their payment failed emails right to spam.

I’ve mentioned it before here. They have something called “yearly contract monthly payment “. I saw the trap as soon as I saw it and bailed out.

Just yesterday, on a local streaming platform that has a series that I want to watch I was offered "7 days free". Great, I can watch the accumulated episodes and if I still feel like watching the new ones that come weekly I can keep the subscription, right?

Nope, the "7 days free" wasn't a a trail but 7 extra days when you purchase a full year subscription. I was considering to get a monthly subscription to try it out but since they tried to trick me into a yearly one I simply decide to Torrent the crap out of their content. Sorry not sorry.

That's one of the things that's great about Apple's iAP and Apple being the handler of transactions. There's no tricks, it's standart on every app: If there's a trail period you get the trail and if not you directly start paying. Also no tricks in the cancelation process, it's all in one place so you can review and cancel easily. You can also change plans right from the same screen. If somehow you manage to purchase something you don't want, get refunded easily.

I really hope that if Apple is forced into allowing 3rd party payments, we end up getting a standardised interface like the one we have currently on Apple's platforms but with an option to choose the alternative payment method(in the same screen but a different card or account kind of thing, like choosing a card in Apple Pay).

> we en up getting a standardised interface like the one we have currently

Of course you won't. Apple will do everything in their power to make third party payments as painful as possible for both the consumer and the merchant. They'll do things like preventing those apps from auto-filling credit card numbers, and denying them camera permission to scan cards. They'll insist credit card data is sent to an in-country server owned by the same company as the app (for privacy reasons obviously, but knowing that for a small app developer hosting certified credit card processing servers in every country their app sells in is very hard).

So, if that's Apple fault on Android it must be really good, right? How is the Android side of things going?

BTW, there's this thing called MasterPass. It's MasterCard's payment system that applications can request you to authorise the use the cards in the MasterPass wallet.

It's quite good experience, they are also very aggressive to collect all your cards in there so if you don't already have a MasterPass there's a option(on by default) in the CC entering screen to add the current card in the MasterPass wallet. There's no explicit account creation step or anything like that, if you tick that option the next time you encounter a payment you will have a MasterPass(At least that's how I remember). I think they must be using some kind of keychain magic to make it possible because it's almost as frictionless as Apple's. You only enter the SMS code if you choose to give access to an app.

The only problem is, there's no easy way to manage your payments and cards in the MasterPass. The payments are credited to your cards so it's good as your bank UI. There's a website that claims to be an UI for MasterPass for managing your cards but it's not on the main mastercard.com domain, therefore I never tried to use it as I can't tell if it's a phishing attempt or a legit one. I guess if I call them they can tell me but I would have expected to see at least a link to that website from my bank website or mastercard website.

He not talk about android. Why are you bring that up?

Because Android is the free alternative where we can observe how "If Apple allowed that" theories will pan out?

People really don't realize how much of a clusterfuck is prevented by Apple's platform lockdown, like, my god its another level of quality in my experience and I was an Android user for most of my life. Even those things that can be annoying to a Web Dev like Apple's control of full-screen video content is so much better than gambling on any ol' web video player's UI being non-ridiculous with hard to hit elements, etc.

Not sure why you are bringing in android into this, but things are fairly okay in android-land thank you very much.

Have been scammed twice, both times on App Store.

(Funny enough, best support experience was on Microsoft store when I wanted to return something, but maybe that time was an outlier)

> Not sure why you are bringing in android into this

Because Android has fewer restrictions and can act as a guinea pig.

a local streaming platform

You should name and shame, so that others don't fall into the same trap.

Maybe it was their marketing department screwing up with the wording.

I also torrent their shows, so...

The main reason why I used Netflix (despite not having most of the content I want to watch) is how straightforward the cancelling is!!

There need to be laws that you cannot advertise anything as "free" or "introductory price" if it's amortized into a longer contract. A common tactic in Canada is to say "$4/mo for the first three months" but when you sign a contract for $12/mo over a year commitment. This should be treated as straight-up fraud. The price is clearly $10/mo and they're just deferring some payments.

I don't mind too much if the continuing price is obvious. But most of the time the ongoing price is in the fine print or completely missing. I wouldn't mind a law that says the continuing prices needs to be at least as visible as the promotional price.

Really it should be required that the most visible number is the minimum amount you will pay in total if you cancel right away.

Quebec has separate civil law from the rest of Canada and our consumer protection act prohibits this kind of behaviour (with very clear case law and precedence siding against companies).

As a result though there are a fair amount of companies that will have these trial offers everywhere except Quebec. Spotify is one that comes to mind.

Indeed, yet it sometimes gets annoying; you see a nice promotion somewhere only to find out "not available in Québec" :(

Which often means that there was some dark pattern in the offer which violated Quebec's law (or possibly they did not want to bother dealing with Quebec's language law...all content must also be available in French...which can be a deterrent as well)

If other states/provinces in North America had the same law, those companies would be forced to propose really free trials.

Some big companies (Amazon or Apple) breaks the law by offering a free month of Prime or Apple Music in Quebec.

What if it’s $4 for three months and then $12 in perpetuity, with no commitment.

Then it's not lying and I have no problem with it, as long as the continuing price is clearly presented at the time of sale.

Recently subscribed to a free seven day trial. Wrongly assumed that I could cancel up to the seventh day. Unfortunately, the Trial required cancellation to occur before the seventh day.

I agree with you on all points, I would just like to point out that Apple does not follow the same trial rules as they do for everyone else, unless something changed. When I first was trying out Apple Music with the trial period, there was a notice that access to Apple Music would end immediately. I don’t think they do this same thing if you were outside the trial period.

So while I applaud Apple for standardizing the subscription rules for most apps, I would love if they applied it to themselves and their apps the same way.

Yes, Apple Music or Arcade cuts access the moment you end the trial. Apple gives developers API to detect cancellations too but I'm not sure if the developers are allowed to cut access, haven't looked at it. I know some apps that do cut access though.

>That's one of the things that's great about Apple's iAP and Apple being the handler of transactions. There's no tricks

If you don't cancel a three day trial before the end of the second day, you are automatically billed. That's not a three day trial, that's a two day trial. A full 33% less than what you are explicitly promised[0]:

>If you signed up for a free or discounted trial subscription and you don't want to renew it, cancel it at least 24 hours before the trial ends.

>If you cancel during a free trial period, you might lose access to the subscription immediately.

(Note: Although it says you "might" lose access immediately, in my experience you always loose access immediately)

That means it's basically impossible to "trial" software for the period Apple advertises. No matter if the period is 3 days, 7 days or 3 months. It's a dark pattern, a dirty trick that is blatantly consumer hostile.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202039

Yes it happens but you get the refund easily. You also get an e-mail before that happens.

Well you don't get the refund at all if you try to cancel less than 24 hours out. As technical users, you and I both know there is no technical reason for this. None. It's designed to catch users off guard, plain and simple.

There's also this (emphasis mine): "3 months free. Apple TV+ is included for three months when you purchase an Apple device and redeem the offer within 90 days"[0].

What does included mean in this context to you? It means included in the purchase of the device. Right? As in, we are giving you a bonus incentive over and above what you would normally get.

Sorry, no. If you cancel or decline autorenewal, nothing is in fact "included". It's a deception. It's conditionally included.

Sure, it's all covered in the fine print, and everybody is doing it but come on. Apple is engaging in dirty trick after dirty trick.

[0] https://www.apple.com/ca/apple-tv-plus/

For the record, I use Apple devices exclusively and happily pay for many services (including AppleTV+) but this stuff still needs to be called out.

I got a refund and I know my friends who got theır refunds when they forget to cancel subscriptions in time. It's also well known policy of Apple to refund you right away.

I'm having hard time understanding why are you so bitter about. I got 3 months of Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade trial with my purchase and Apple keeps reminding me to active it because the offer is valid within the 90 days of the decice activation. So what? Where's the deception?

The cancellation policy is not in the fine print at all, it's right there next to the cancel button. Where exactly it needs to be?

Just return the device if this doesn't work for you.

>I got a refund and I know my friends who got theır refunds when they forget to cancel subscriptions in time. It's also well known policy of Apple to refund you right away.

That doesn't excuse deceptive tricks used to prematurely start subscriptions. Many people don't bother chasing refunds. Anyways, you didn't address the issue: Apple says it's a three day trial, but the fine print says it's effectively a two day trial. Is that not an accurate assessment?

>I'm having hard time understanding why are you so bitter about

Sorry if I wasn't clear. The page I linked previously[0] says "3 months free. Apple TV+ is included for three months when you purchase an Apple device"[1]

Now, let me ask. When referring to purchasing products or services what does the word "included" mean to you? If english was your second language, what would you take "included" to mean in this context? Maybe you'd look the world up in the dictionary? Let's see -

Google says 'comprise or contain as part of a whole' and gives the example "the price includes dinner, bed, and breakfast". Merriam-Webster has a similar definition and gives this example: "The price of dinner includes dessert." Cambridge gives this example "The fee covers everything, babysitter included."

And so on. See the problem?

>The cancellation policy is not in the fine print at all, it's right there next to the cancel button. Where exactly it needs to be?

Again, refer to the page I linked with the ad copy regarding AppleTV+. I'm not sure what page you're referring to(?)

>Just return the device if this doesn't work for you.

That's not the point. The topic was (generally) about dark patterns and misleading wording. I'm just giving two examples which counter the notion that Apple isn't also guilty of it. I'm not "bitter", and as I mentioned I generally love Apple's products and services.

[0] https://www.apple.com/ca/apple-tv-plus/ [1] https://imgur.com/a/jwAJANz

I don't know what to say really, go buy something else. I have no issue reading the offer details and IMHO the terms are clear and easy to understand but if that's not the case for you get a refund and buy from somewhere else.

In my opinion, the wording is not intended for deception but for mood uplift. It answers the following question: Interesting device but what I'm going to watch on this? Answer: No worries it comes with this service so you can start using it right away, go to the bottom of the page for the details.

> That's one of the things that's great about Apple's iAP and Apple being the handler of transactions. There's no tricks, it's standart on every app

And that is exactly what user-hostile companies and devs want to undermine.

Just look up Match.com (parent of Tinder and part of the “coalition” against Apple) and the shit they pull against people, as an example (like charging certain demographics differently for the same service and using artificial matches to bait new subscribers)

If you get screwed by such a scummy actor via Apple’s IAP, Apple will give you a refund without asking any questions, almost immediately. That’s what they want to sidestep, it was never about the users.

> I really hope that if Apple is forced into allowing 3rd party payments, we end up getting a standardised interface like the one we have currently on Apple's platforms but with an option to choose the alternative payment method(in the same screen but a different card or account kind of thing, like choosing a card in Apple Pay).

If they are forced to unbundle payments, they should be made to unbundle them fully. So not only third-party payment processors in Apple's App Store, but third-party app stores like Cydia (or even Google Play and Microsoft Store) should also be able to use (for a fee) the same payment system as Apple's App Store. If we go by Apple's current 27%-3% split, it could compete against alternatives such as Stripe even on other platforms.

Sorry, but I need to point this out: The word is "trial", not "trail". The consistent misspelling really hindered reading flow for me.

If you’re on macOS and just want a good and convenient image editor, I warmly recommend Acorn. The Muellers (owners of Flying Meat Software) have put a lot of effort to make it feel like a really solid Mac application. The price is good and from time to time they offer discounts. The whole experience reminds me of using good old Paintshop Pro back in the late 90s (^_^)

Other options are Affinity Photo from Serif Ltd and Pixelmator. IMHO Acorn has much better GUI though. (FWIW, Affinity works fine on Windows too.)

I realize that some people need the features from Photoshop and then I guess they have to pay the “Adobe tax”. But if you’re not a photo/graphics professional, you can come a long way with the above options.

AFAIK there are also lots of good alternatives for Illustrator and InDesign.

I can strongly second the recommendation for Acorn. I'm not a graphics professional, but it is very often useful in my job to have access to an editor on par with Photoshop—which, aside from some of the more advanced stuff, Acorn definitely is. It's extremely polished and well-put-together—and can also both read and write Photoshop PSD files.

Thank you! Acorn looks pretty solid, I've got Pixelmator on my iOS devices, so I was wondering if i should go for Pixelmator pro on macOS.

For very lightweight stuff, I've often used https://www.photopea.com/, even when i had photoshop installed. Works pretty well for å browser image editor

I've moved away from Adobe recently, both because of their scummy business practices (but when you know how it works, its predictable at least) but moreso because creative cloud is such a resource hog. Core sync often was listed as a process using significant energy, even though file sync was turned off and the finder extension disabled.

Pixelmator Photo on iOS is also the mutt's nuts; I have been cynical about Pixelmator on the Mac until recently but Photo really makes the point that they intend to compete.

Stay away from the Skylum stuff, IMO; it's usually half-baked and instead of evolving the product they have a habit of abandoning it and launching some new product, which is maddening.

Affinity Photo is very very good too (bit confusing on the iPad).

I am curious if photoshop is better installed from the App Store instead of through creative cloud so all the extra apps aren’t added. Core sync drives me mad.

My pleasure!

I’ve tried both Pixelmator and Acorn on macOS and IMHO Acorn’s GUI is cleaner and more Mac-like. YMMV.

I resisted moving to Pixelmator Pro for a long time since I was a bit miffed at how they handled the original Pixelmator to Pro transition, but it is genuinely a better product, and I now understand the rationale for getting charged again.

Ultimately, it’s okay as a consumer to get back to the old “pay for healthy updates” model that I’m sure software developers are very hesitant to try anymore. So long as the value’s there, this is a healthy approach for all parties.

Acorn looks really great! Thanks for the recommendation.

Convenience link: https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/

I also loved this bit from their FAQ:

  Does Acorn use a subscription?

  Nope! We have a simple philosophy- you buy a thing, you get a thing.

I have no affiliation with them (not even a user yet).

Another point of view I’d like to offer is that very few people actually _need_ Photoshop/Illustator. I thought I did, until I discovered Canva and PlaceIt. Sure, they’re not super flexible but you can usually find some template that works and just use that and be done with it before Photoshop has even finished loading.

(No affiliation, just a pleased user)

Indeed. In my life I haven’t used Photoshop more than like two hours or so. In my youth I used Corel Photopaint and PSP. Then Gimp, and now Acorn.

Affinity do their own illustrator, photoshop and InDesign without subscription. Excellent quality and fast.

I use Affinity Suite professionally, absolutely possible to switch. Have done for three years, it’s really good.

As soon as Affinity releases a Lightroom replacement I will buy it. I've tried using the open source apps and it just doesn't feel as good on a mac.

Definitely a limitation, though I'd imagine we will see a Bridge/DAM type product before we see a specifically Lightroom-type product.

Perhaps we'll see a Lightroom-type persona in Photo and integrations with some sort of DAM.

It is a missing piece, but there are a few alternatives out there. Examples are Raw Therapee, Darktable, Capture One, and Luminar. I cannot give a recommendation on quality, but do have the first two installed alongside Affinity Photo for occasional use.

Same here. The only Adobe app left that I am using is Lightroom CC.

Same here, on about the same timeline. I miss a few things from Photoshop, but some things are much better in Affinity Photo. Especially love that Affinity isn't a subscription.

I've bought both Acorn and Affinity over the years. W/ Affinity they're license is only good for the platform you purchased it on e.g. you can't use a windows license on your mac - you'd need to purchase 2 separate license. Considering I have a work mac and a work windows this was kind of annoying but whatever.

The thing that I encountered w/ Acorn was their license was tied to a particular version. For example a new Mac OS version came out, the version of Acorn I purchased wouldn't work w/ whatever version that was so continue using Acorn I need to purchase a new version. The part that irked me here was I only got like 1 years use out of the software. Feel like they should support n-2 or something to that effect. Not sure if things have changed.

Yes, either you pay for a subscription or you once pay for a specific version and have to pay again if you want to use a later version. You can’t both, that is, you pay once and get upgrades indefinitely. Even developers have to eat.

>W/ Affinity they're license is only good for the platform you purchased it on

I threw my Affinity Designer macOS key into a Windows trial and it worked just fine, you just have to download the trial for the other platform.

> The part that irked me here was I only got like 1 years use out of the software.

Surely it doesn't actually stop working after a year? ie. You can keep using the version you bought after a new version comes out. I presume it still does what you bought it to do?

Photopea is also a great ‘alternative’. Free, online, and written by one guy. Quite amazing feat. https://www.photopea.com/

> Paintshop Pro

Now that's the name I haven't heard in a long time :)

I still have PSP7 on one of my machines and even use it occassionally!

Corel PaintShop Pro is alive still and works great.

Gimp also works somewhat on Mac.

Krita is exceptional (and it's FOSS):

https://krita.org/

It's targeted at drawing more than image editing (though Krita handles both raster and vector in one document), but more than any other graphics application, they make relatively advanced features[1] discoverable and usable. And being FOSS, it's extensible and has an apparently active community.

Really a gem of usability among FOSS applications. After I tried it, I was surprised I hadn't heard about it. The best graphics program I've ever used, especially in respect to UI (for context, I never really dug into Photoshop and I now despise other Adobe interfaces I am forced to use). Great documentation too: clear, succinct, detailed, easy to find what you need. I rarely use graphics applications, and I didn't need to post one question, and maybe looked once or twice beyond the documentation.

And being FOSS, no dark patterns to worry about at all! I find FOSS to be a relief these days - I hardly have to worry about tracking or the rest of that nonsense.

[1] Advanced for an IT techie - I don't know what a graphic designer or artist would say, though they are the target audience.

Was Krita always available on macOS? I'm shocked -- I swear I checked before and I'm happy to see it is! It looks like Kdenlive is also available on macOS, for video editing! [0]

Edit: Kdenlive is really only for Intel Macs. Unfortunately, it crashes under Rosetta :(

[0]: https://kdenlive.org/en/download/

I fell for this. When I called adobe to complain the service rep said, in a manner not much polite than this, that "I don't believe you that you didn't know you were signing up for a year".

Looking back, I now see where I agreed, but the manner in which they attempt to deceive you is criminal.

Fucking scumbags.

CC chargeback.

Depending on your card it could be a pain and cost you some money. Mine requires a new card if I want to do a charge back.

You need a new credit card company.

I would definitely switch, it isn't hard and I've done it in the past just to get better terms or rewards several times.

But wouldn’t it affect your credit score?

Momentary dip. It recovers after a few months as long as you aren't doing anything else to mess up your score like not paying bills. I guess some people love those perfect credit scores but honestly anything over 750 is fine for most things even getting a mortgage.

"My hospital staffs fake doctors." Okay! That is not normal, and in no way does it change the general recommendation.

A chargeback should be (I would imagine is required to be, but haven't checked) free. If the company wants to roll the number too then fine, but that should be just inconvenient not a cost.

If your credit card company is charging you, leave them.

Never heard that, I’ve only done it twice but would be surprised if I was asked to pay for it.

For future reference, just tell the vendor "I did not authorize this charge. Please refund me". Don't engage them further.

When that call fails (or, if they don't pick up the phone in a reasonable amount of time), call your credit card company and say "I want to issue a charge back". They'll ask if you tried to work with the vendor. Answer "yes", full stop.

There should be a phone number associated with the charge on your credit card bill. Start (and end your interaction with the vendor) by calling that number.

Edit: You can also say "this service wasn't rendered", or "I never received the product I ordered", as applicable. Those are specifically listed as valid reasons to issue a chargeback. The person at the credit card company has to enter a numeric reason code for the charge back, and by using those phrases (or similar), you're making their lives easier.

And what if they then send you to collections? Now you’ve got bill collectors after you and your credit affected.

I can’t see Adobe going to those lengths because they’d know there is a good change they would lose any class action lawsuit that would come about. Which would not just cost them in damages but also in bad publicity plus likely get them ordered to remove the dark patterns too (thus removing any future revenue this dark otters generates).

I’m not as clued up on consumer laws as I once was but I’m pretty sure in Europe their sign up page is actually illegal. Not just immoral but literally classed as false advertising or something similar. And even if that’s not the case, we do have protections against being tricked into signing an unclear contract and this would easily fall into that category.

> Which would not just cost them in damages but also in bad publicity

Unfortunately I think Adobe is beyond the point where few months of bad publicity would harm their core business. Amateurs would vote with their feet but professionals have really nowhere to go. There just are no alternatives to some of their programs.

Which products do you feel truly have no alternatives, and which features define that for you?

The only one I can think of is After Effects, which appears to do a broader set of things than any other single package (but I could be wrong).

The rest, well I am not convinced, though there are some edge features in each package that undeniably would sell them to a few people, and that is, I guess, in the right way of things.

GIMP has no CMYK support; that isn't an edge feature, it's a core need for working with print.

Indeed -- a problem. I think Bloom did but they seem to have disappeared?

I don't know, I opened their page and the drop down was clearly labeled as an annual subscription to me. It also told me the exact date by which I should cancel not to infer any costs. The drop down offered me to pay the full year upfront, or a monthly plan which is cancellable at any time.

I don't think this stuff is illegal at all. What they effectively did here is put the email address and personal information form in front of the product details instead of below them, change the buttons that normally say "next" to "start your free trial, but the information was all in plain view. Complain to your browser vendor about the lack of scroll bars if that's what's gotten you.

The big scam here is the fact this program requires a monthly fee at all. All subscription services I know either have a minimum duration with similar cancellation fees (or you'd be on the hook for the full remainder of the fees instead of half) or they're advertised explicitly as being cancellable at any time.

I don't think anyone was getting tricked, but I do believe people were entering a subscription without looking at the details.

The author of this tweet thread even acknowledges it states the terms in the workflow.

> But what does "Annual plan, paid monthly" actually mean?

I don't understand how "Annual plan, paid monthly" could be taken as something confusing or requires some additional context to make any sense out of it. How are other people reading "Annual plan, paid monthly" any other way than that it is an annual plan broken out into monthly installments?

For me it is more that the overall presentation is not clear. That wording on it's own is clear, but at every other stage in the process the implication is that it's a month to month commitment and not a full year you're signing up for. The fact that if you cancel they take half the year of payments and then only provide you with service for the remainder of the month is another nice little "fuck you" too.

Every single button said "Start Free Trial", not "Start Annual Plan" and the cancellation terms were hidden and hostile.

I was actually considering trying out the Adobe line for my own work, but I'm going to be sticking with Affinity and Procreate now. Bad enough that they went to a subscription model, worse still that they run it like mobsters. I have too many kids, too little sleep, and not enough amphetamine salts to remember to cancel the membership in 7-14 days.

The thing is, that kind of fine line between deception while still presenting just enough detail to claim the customer should have looked at the details might wash in an American court, but it wouldn’t in the EU. In the EU the rules state that the responsibility is on the company to ensure the individual is aware of what they’re signing. And you cannot reasonably say that is what is happening here.

Also I wouldn’t be so sure that a class action suit of this nature wouldn’t be successful. Large companies have lost flimsier cases.

> or a monthly plan which is cancellable at any time.

At any time, sure. But it’s the $300 dollar cancellation fee thats the issue.

> Complain to your browser vendor about the lack of scroll bars if that's what's gotten you.

This whole “dont hate the players blame the game” meme is pretty tedious. If an organisation is abusing a feature for their own gain then they should be responsible for abusing a feature for their own gain.

> I don't think anyone was getting tricked, but I do believe people were entering a subscription without looking at the details.

“Tricked” is a loaded term. I think the real question is whether Adobe intentionally made it easy for people to misunderstand the details.

Given what I’d seen I’d argue that was the case. This might not be an issue in the US but it is in the EU, where larger organisations have had to pay out because of less.

> any future revenue this dark otters generates

...I'm sorry; I know this is a typo/autocucumber, but now I can't help picturing these nefarious Adobe otters coming up with ways to scam us. Adorable yet evil!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-59592355

I don’t think their agreement with the CC network lets them come after users for chargebacks the bank has approved. In a chargeback situation, the bank has to agree that the charge was unreasonable.

I used a virtual card (and froze it) for adobe. They haven't gone to collections.

I get emails from them making offers to get me back on creative cloud. Nothing about the unpaid cancelled account.

Virtual cards are a must with all these nasty subscriptions

AT&T sent me to collections once because of an error on their part. I immediately disputed the charges with AT&T, then explained the situation to the collections officer.

Collections officers can't try to collect disputed debts, so they immediately left me alone.

Then, I spent over 24 hours on the phone with AT&T, and eventually paid them a bit under a hundred dollars that I didn't owe them. There was no credit report ding or harassment from the collections agency, at least.

> You can also say "this service wasn't rendered", or "I never received the product I ordered", as applicable. Those are specifically listed as valid reasons to issue a chargeback. The person at the credit card company has to enter a numeric reason code for the charge back, and by using those phrases (or similar), you're making their lives easier.

This is, unfortunately, not a panacea. I paid for tickets pre-covid for a concert that was indefinitely postponed - Ticketmaster refused to refund, and PayPal and my bank also both refused to issue chargebacks. My view was that I paid for tickets for a concert on a specific date, and a postponement to an indefinite future date was a failure to render the service I paid for, but none of the payment processors I went through agreed.

I did eventually get the refund from Ticketmaster, and the concert still hasn’t happened. I didn’t like Ticketmaster before, and I like them even less now.

Ticketmaster is definitely a great example of one company essentially owning the market, but they have a legal out against being a monopoly in that most places will also sell a few tickets through other channels like grocery stores or a hard to get to box office somewhere or “at the door”

I’m still out $506.70 for a ticket to Ultra Music Festival in Miami on 2020-03-20/21/22.

They keep insisting that it’s just “postponed” to 2021, and now 2022 …

It’s ridiculous, I’m never going to ever go to an Ultra show again in my life.

If they had just refunded me immediately I would probably have already bought tickets to & attended other Ultra shows (in the country I now live in).

I also fell for it, I just needed to sign a document. It's ridiculous.

This happened to my wife and I. We both have advanced degrees and write software for a living. The fact that it had these cancellation terms was not at all obvious to either of us, and only realized it when she went to cancel. It’s one of the few trials that I absolutely remember and I’m so glad it was just the photography bundle and not the whole creative suite. It’s absolutely designed to trick you and it works. Fuck them for doing this. At least it wasn’t a lot of money to us, but what about struggling artists/photographers who sign up for creative suite trial but plan to only buy one or two apps, and are now on the hook for a year of everything? It’s pretty dang close to a scam if you ask me.

Did you try a chargeback? Or make a report with the bureau of consumer protection?

Screw those guys.

At least for amateur/hobby work, I've used the following for years and love them. I also try to regularly donate to them.

Instead of Illustrator for drawing, use Inkscape https://inkscape.org/ and/or Krita https://krita.org/en/.

Instead of Lightroom for developing digital photos, use Darktable https://www.darktable.org/

Instead of Photoshop for touchups, use GIMP https://www.gimp.org/.

Instead of Acrobat Reader, use MuPDF (mobile) or Atril https://wiki.mate-desktop.org/mate-desktop/applications/atri... (Linux)

Krita is closer to a Photoshop competitor than Illustrator. Inkscape is like Illustrator but honestly it is not very good, mostly due to seriously poor performance.

I don't know if Atril is a good Acrobat Reader replacement either. Does it support PDF forms and annotation? That's what most PDF readers are missing.

Apple's preview is pretty great from that point of view. I've also used Xournal++ for that in the past.

If you want something more professional you can look to the Affinity products which have a very reasonable one time fee:

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/

I personally like Affinity Designer and have designed quite a few things with it. They are behind illustrator on features, I can't deny that, but I've been able to find answers to everything I needed.

Also they have solid developers working on the app. Check out this technical explanation of performance improvements to their rendering pipleline:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnfxzknVK_0

For a photoshop replacement, however, I would say Krita hands down. Again, its not as polished as photoshop, but I prefer it over Photoshop at this point even with all its rough edges. I really need to make a video or something about how to set it up and use it correctly but I think its got a lot more going for it.

I've been using Inkscape since it was SodiPodi. It's gotten better, but the interface is still too jumbled. Affinity is much nicer to work with.

I will say that if I really need the end result to be an SVG that I can modify in a text editor later, Inkscape is better for that.

Yep -- Inkscape might have some advantages in exporting SVG to FreeCAD, too -- I've seen some differences with Affinity Designer that I don't quite understand.

Or more likely I just don't understand FreeCAD.

For pdf reader and annotator, https://docmadeeasy.com is a good alternative.

Lately I've just been using Microsoft Edge for viewing and filling out PDFs. It has the handy ability to draw on and sign documents. That's about all I used Edge for.

<3 Krita

Graphic designer here: I got hired at an agency recently, signed up using my company's account so I could save $50/m doing away with my subscription and ran into this issue. Very fun.

Anyways, the future isn't going to be kind to Adobe. Figma has replaced a lot of my Adobe workflow, it's just infinitely a more pleasant experience. Canva has replaced things that require 3 different Adobe products to do. For serious video editing I'm using DaVinci Resolve. InDesign kind of remains a necessity but I can see Figma filling that gap too. That really just leaves Lightroom and Photoshop that get a lot of use, and the things they're necessary for are decreasing by the day.

Affinity products are really great. Not yet on par with Adobe's but almost there for most tasks, and more than enough for casual users.

I actually prefer Affinity over Adobe in many regards. The UI is nicer with colored icons and everything i've ever needed is there and very polished.

Frequent updates for a single charge of 50 usd is just amazing.

It is an interesting mix of things, actually.

Some things are missing -- a JavaScript or AppleScript interface for example. And small stuff like you can't reseed the perlin noise generator in Photo.

But some things are surprisingly better.

Affinity Photo has live filter layers that work much better than smart objects, it has a frequency separation tool that is genuinely easier to use, it has proper blend curves that are enormously powerful (sharpening just the highlights? noise reduction just in the shadows?), and you can do things like use Lab curves on an RGB image.

Affinity Designer I know less well, but the symbol and artboard support is astounding (bordering on what Sketch can do), and small things like the rounded corners support is amazing. Its one omission -- it doesn't have an autotrace.

I am sure there are several things InDesign does that Publisher can't, but Publisher's integration with Photo and Designer is absolutely remarkable.

This mix of missing features and improvements is exactly what you should hope for in a competing app; they don't have quite the same objectives in mind and they have started afresh rather than chasing a feature set.

> it doesn't have an autotrace

Yes, that's a problem. For that I still use CorelDraw.

I lack familiarity with Adobe, though sometimes I'll follow a guide for Illustrator and translate it to Designer.

Designer doesn't have:

- Autotracing

- Blob brush

- The color theme picker switcher thing.

Which I could see as being potentially important features for someone in a rush. Other than that, what's really missing? Is it just "you can do it but it takes more setup" kinds of things?

I've been working at detangling myself from the Adobe lineup of products. I really like (or liked) Adobe AfterEffects, it's been very helpful for me in compositing trailers for my computer game business, but it's totally been replaced by the free version of Davinci Resolve. Which I've also found is an excellent replacement for Adobe Audition, which I was using for editing the Voice Over and raw Sound Effects for, again, my video games.

But I can't see myself escaping from Photoshop anytime in the next couple of years. I have a lot of special export scripts in 'Adobescript' (yuck) that carve up my high res art assets, slice them this way and that, crop, hide/display different groups and export in particular ways. Nothing unusual, it's just a lot of grunt work, but I have it set up so that clicking a button in Photoshop will just Do It All and have it work. It'll take some time to set that all up again in a Photoshop alternative.

The nasty payments stuff detailed in the twitter thread is just the usual Adobe nastiness, some product manager somewhere is trying to juice the numbers.

My own billing experience with Adobe recently was needing to change my account's country from UK to Canada, as I've moved, and the VAT number and sales tax stuff is of course all different. The poor support person I spoke to couldn't fix it for me, they had to have a backend engineer manually change alter a field in a database somewhere - it all sounds like a terrible mess.

That's the problem. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and After Effects have almost no competition and they know it.

Even if there were, companies can't just jump to different tools because they would lose ability to open all their past work files. The migration will be slow.

AutoDesk (CAD/BIM/etc) is also getting like this. Maybe not totally Adobe yet, but they too also basically have a lock on their industry. Just like with Adobe, some alternatives exist and a few might be good enough, but AutoDesk bought so many competitors and/or companies that most of the time they are the only game in town.

Bentley (not cars) is another company I loathe, but I've already gotten off topic.

The professional software industry is a cesspool across all industries.

Yes, AutoDesk is a very good comparison.

The problem is these companies aren't evil but they are under considerably less pressure to be good. Perhaps the saddest thing about Adobe is that the subscription model has almost completely eliminated their support staff's ability to allow things like discretionary late free upgrades (which I've benefited from in the past, before I made the jump to Affinity Photo in 2015, after a year of Photoshop CC).

I agree there's no pressure on these companies as a whole. Ideally, they should be heavily investing in R&D while the moat is still wide.

I manage a product design team. We've long moved away from from using Adobe products. It's not that we detest subscription model or Adobe as a company; their products were no longer meeting our needs.

Only After Effects doesn't have an all-in-one competitor, really.

Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign, as a linked suite, has a very, very able competitor in Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher. Given the complexity of these products, expecting more than one fully-integrated competing suite might be too much.

You might find this video useful, to see the extent to which it is a competitor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVqJIaMlB6E

Not a 100% drop-in replacement, mind you, but almost nothing ever is. Very close, though, and capable of some remarkable things.

(I still don't have Publisher but I love Photo and Designer.)

Last I looked for a replacement for Lightroom I didn't really find anything that worked well for me. Maybe the open source tools have matured in the interim? I've been sticking with my old copy of Lightroom 5 and until I buy a new camera that it doesn't support processing raw files for.

I don't really like Darktable for that job to be honest -- nothing against what it is capable of, because it is clearly capable, it just rubs me up the wrong way GUI-wise. Haven't tried RawTherapee in a long time but maybe?

Because I don't really like working in "sessions" and prefer folders, what I do is use DxO PhotoLab (which now comes in an "Essentials" version when you get it with their Nik tools, which might appeal to you). It's fast enough to cull in, though for really fast culls I use Fileloupe on the Mac.

I am not quite sure why people don't grasp that it's an annual plan for really expensive software.

"Annual plan, billed monthly" is about as easy as it's going to be in four words on a button or by a button.

If you could rent it for just a month now and then, wouldn't you only rent it in the months you need it?

They make it so you can't.

There's a solution: DON'T USE IT.

Ask yourself seriously: what is it you want to do that the Affinity Suite (which costs about, what, £150 and then £20 each for the two iPad apps) cannot do for you. It's not toy software; it's enormously capable (and improves on Adobe's approach in several places). It has surprisingly complete PSD and Illustrator import, it runs Photoshop plugins, it's cross-platform and it runs well on old hardware (at least on the Mac).

Failing that, you have Krita, Inkscape, Scribus, Darktable, Rawtherapee, GIMP if you must, and they are all pretty surprisingly good. Plus there are video options that are cost-effective or free (Resolve, for example, runs on Linux). There are all sorts of viable competitor apps on other platforms.

Adobe aren't really evil -- they are a giant, slow-witted, largely benevolent monopoly, weighed down by a lot of cruft. (They are also fairly reasonable on the phone and support portals). But you don't need to use their stuff; you can create a sane workflow that routes around them with decent tools.

Complaining about a "dark" pattern that up front tells you that you're getting into an annual commitment for something incredibly expensive strikes me as missing the point; the point is subscriptions are tricky and you shouldn't expect to be able to game them.

Vote with your feet.

You're just defending the right of a giant corporation to communicate poorly in a way that enriches them at the expense of customers, who are often struggling artists.

> "Annual plan, billed monthly" is about as easy as it's going to be in four words on a button or by a button.

It's absolutely insane that you think Adobe has fulfilled their obligations to communicate to the customer what they're getting into by putting "annual plan paid monthly" in a drop-down next to a button.

Adobe should warn the user of the early cancellation fees in big red letters. We all know why they don't: because they benefit from some users taking a deal that they don't realize is very bad for them.

That's what you're defending.

> You're just defending the right of a giant corporation to communicate poorly in a way that enriches them.

Thanks for the downvote (I guess) but no, I'm doing no such thing. I'm explaining that the giant monopoly is going to do what the giant monopoly does.

Really almost all subscriptions are like this -- they depend on you forgetting to cancel. And this one is a bit more up-front than most.

> It's absolutely insane that you think Adobe has fulfilled their obligations to communicate to the customer what they're getting into by putting "annual plan paid monthly" in a drop-down next to a button.

Sorry, this is a straw man. I didn't at all say that I thought those four words fulfilled their obligations.

What I said is, they have a maximally clear four word way of summarising the plan right at the beginning of the payment flow.

I'm quite sure they need to do a bit more to explain what the early cancellation options are at some point in the payment flow. But right before you even try to buy, they do explain you're buying an annual plan, don't they?

FWIW, if you do not grasp that "annual plan" means an annual plan and then think about what your early cancellation options might be, perhaps you shouldn't be using the company credit card.

Complaining loudly that you can't use something clearly marked as an annual plan for just one month is a bit of a stretch.

What a staggering battery of distortions. Company credit card? You're just assuming that everyone doing this is spending someone else's money?

Everything you've written functions to blame the victim and leave Adobe harmless here.

> You're just assuming that everyone doing this is spending someone else's money?

To be fair, you're also assuming that starving artists are paying for Photoshop. A quick "Adobe" search on your BitTorrent tracker of choice may change your mind.

Plenty of low-income people do their best to follow the law out of conscientiousness. I know some of them personally.

I object passionately to the idea that, when people misunderstand communication that's designed to be maximally misleading, subject only to the constraint of legal defensibility, they are entirely to blame for falling into the trap.

Adobe should be very clear and upfront about their early cancellation fees.

"Annual plan, billed monthly" is demonstrably not maximally misleading.

If it said "monthly subscription" without clearly identifying the annual commitment, that would be maximally misleading.

I will grant you that it could say "Yearly plan", not "Annual plan", and be less misleading; they do appear to use this alternative phrasing in A/B tests.

If anyone from Adobe is reading this thread: make that change.

(And sort out your Photography plan: make a slimmer version of Photoshop that really does have just the features photographers need, and offer a plan for that.)

Monthly subscription would simply be a legally indefensible lie.

Yes, but also we're talking about the whole Creative Cloud suite, not Photoshop here. There's a Photoshop-only plan that costs about £11 per month and there are Black Friday deals which are well understood by the budget photographer world to provide better value for money than this.

(Even then it is poor value for money, IMO; other packages cover 95% of the functionality of Photoshop and cost less than a year of this, and I really think the market understands that now)

> What a staggering battery of distortions.

I don't know who you're really angry at but it doesn't seem to be down to me. Maybe dial it back a bit.

> Company credit card? You're just assuming that everyone doing this is spending someone else's money?

The tweet talks about the the full Creative Cloud suite (something close to £750/yr), and yes, the majority of these people are either spending the company's money or that of their own freelance business. It's an eye-wateringly expensive commitment otherwise.

This kind of commitment encourages due diligence.

> Thanks for the downvote (I guess) but no, I'm doing no such thing. I'm explaining that the giant monopoly is going to do what the giant monopoly does.

Isn't it our job as consumers to raise awareness and try to change this behavior though?

There's something about this sort of argument that seems off to me. Someone complains about someone doing X, then someone else comes along and says it's always been like that.

Why does that matter?

"Annual plan, paid monthly" seems pretty clear to me too, so help me approach this with a new perspective.

Is there a SaaS provider using the "annual plan, paid monthly" who does this "right"? Are you against this pricing model in general?

I reject the idea that everyone should know from these words that they will be subject to an enormous early cancellation fee if they forget to cancel before the 7 day trial period is over.

Adobe has a moral obligation to explain that up-front, so that consumers who cannot easily pay the fee are adequately warned of the danger they are getting themselves into.

> I reject the idea that everyone should know from these words that they will be subject to an enormous early cancellation fee if they forget to cancel before the 7 day trial period is over.

I hear you, and I want to dig in on that a bit if you'll be kind enough to indulge me.

I'm currently helping a SaaS vendor define their pricing plan, so I'd like to know what you would like to see in order to feel comfortable with an annual, paid monthly plan. If you have any thoughts on the two questions I asked, I'd really appreciate the feedback!

Haven't I been clear enough? If you're going to charge a giant early cancellation fee, that information should not be hidden behind a link and fine print. It should be explained on the payment page, briefly and in plain language.

I don't really get why the cancellation fee should be the issue here. When I purchase a subscription for a year, I assume that I will have to pay for the entire year. That's why it is cheaper per month than a monthly subscription.

The cancellation fee might be quite high, but it is absolutely expected that there is one. And if I'm not sure if I'll keep the subscription running for an entire year, then I'll look into the cancellation term beforehand or simply pick the monthly plan.

Because some people might not have the background to think exactly the way you do.

People are reporting that they were surprised by the cancellation fee. Is it reasonable to assume that these people were fully aware of what would happen? And chose this path anyway, in order to... what, exactly? It makes no sense. It's more reasonable to take what they say at face value, that they were in fact surprised and didn't understand in good faith what they signed up for.

Given that, what is so unreasonable about expecting companies to be upfront about the fee and explain it in the payment page? Why is this trivial disclosure and transparency to the consumer something to balk about?

I think the reason is pretty obvious. Companies have always loved it when confused customers have to pay money they didn't expect to pay. So the companies design their payment flows to encourage this, to the maximum extent the law allows.

It's sociopathic, and just because it's common and accepted doesn't mean I have to think it's okay.

I think maybe the words:

"Yearly plan, billed in monthly instalments"

makes the point more clear that you're in for a year. You can then put accompanying print that says "early termination fees apply".

But really, apart from people perhaps not understanding that "Annual" is doing the work of saying "yearly, not rolling", I don't get the logic here.

As another interested in this aspect, how about an 'info' tip alongside that states the minimum cost with an asterix?

"Yearly plan, paid monthly, £678" --> [ minimum cost £456 [[ a href="terms-cancel.html" ]] if cancelled early ]

In the interests of reaching a point of agreement, I concur that they could put, in or next to that initial wording, something like "early cancellation fees may apply".

But an annual plan really is that. They are telling you pretty clearly* what you're buying; the fact that there's a way to bail out half way for less is an advance on that position.

* though as I said in the other reply, "yearly" would be better

These four words are clear enough to be legally defensible, but they are the absolute minimum and they are designed to be the absolute minimum. They want to maximize conversion even if it traps people who didn't understand in good faith what they were buying.

It isn't hard to provide a complete explanation of what happens if you go past the trial period and want to cancel. All they have to say is, "if you don't cancel after the trial period, you are obligated to pay X over the next 12 months. Early cancellation is possible for a fee of half the remaining balance. For example, if you cancel immediately after the trial period your early cancellation fee will be X/2."

There's plenty of space to feature this explanation prominently. We all know why they don't. It's to trap people.

Many subscription plans work this way but it's no excuse. It's scumbag behavior. The fact that it's so common is just one of the many reasons why I believe the world is run by sociopaths.

> ... why I believe the world is run by sociopaths.

Finally a point on which we agree. On average I suspect it is.

> I concur that they could put, in or next to that initial wording, something like "early cancellation fees may apply".

Again, this wording seems unnecessarily soft to me - the inclusion of 'may' adds ambiguity to make the user think that there might not be exit fees - it should really be "early cancellation fees will apply".

Better yet, you could give the cost:

"Early cancellation fees of 50% of the remainder of the year will apply".

Fair point, though at that stage, early cancellation only may apply, because you can back out of the trial on/before seven days.

Early cancellation fees will apply after the trial, is the wording that is the clearest, I guess.

This is a really interesting exploration of word choice though. I must say, I had not considered that the word "annual" could be perceived to be unwieldy in this situation, for example.

What does 'annual plan' mean to you?

How can you misinterpret those words?

I would probably understand it, but I don't think those two words would necessarily make it clear to every person of every background, and it's very easy for Adobe to briefly explain the early termination fee on the payment page where everyone can easily see it.

They don't explain it because they want everyone to convert, even people who did not understand what they signed up for and would not have signed up if they had understood.

Subscription fee companies have always behaved like this.

> They don't explain it because they want everyone to convert

Being charitable, I would guess that they don't explain it because it seems like plain language and should be understandable.

That's only "charitable" to the giant company. It's not so charitable to the people who say they were confused in good faith and signed up for something they wouldn't have signed up for if they had understood it.

These people exist and have made themselves known in the OP Twitter thread and other HN comments on this post.

I can't help but wonder if all this "how can people not understand" is just thinly-veiled contempt for people who don't have the same background or way of thinking or interpreting words as you do.

Who gives a shit about those people, am I right? Who cares if they're on the hook for hundreds they didn't expect to have to pay. Good on Adobe for imposing that stupidity tax on lesser minds than yours!

If people can't understand 'annual plan' then I'm not sure what it's reasonable to do? How can you conduct business with a person who can't understand language like that?

I already explained how Adobe could be more clear, by briefly explaining their early cancellation policy on the payment page. Amazingly, it's quite easy to be more clear by using more than two words to explain something.

You're just playing dumb and it's uninteresting and in bad faith, so, bye. Enjoy being baffled about how a giant rich company could possibly be less shitty to their customers.

> You're just playing dumb

I'm playing dumb by understanding the sales copy?

And the people who pretend to be dumbfounded by 'annual plan' are the ones who aren't playing dumb?

Come on - people are putting on this outrage. Nobody was seriously confused at what 'annual plan' means. It's the plainest language possible.

It could easily mean "we will bill you monthly 12 times, for one year, and then stop billing you". It's not immediately clear that it means "we will bill you monthly forever, if you cancel within a year you owe us big money".

Annual typically implies recurring. Annual in APR (Annual Percentage Rate) etc. An annual plant flowers once a year, not just once, etc.

If it said "one year", that would match the meaning you have.

For plants it's exactly the opposite, actually. An annual completes its life cycle fully in a year - germination to death. Perennials come back year after year.

> I reject the idea that everyone should know from these words that they will be subject to an enormous early cancellation fee if they forget to cancel before the 7 day trial period is over.

Reading the twitter thread it seems to me that you can cancel within 14 days of subscribing without a cancelation fee. See also: https://twitter.com/darkpatterns/status/1489901691151519746

For most users it isn't a bad deal at all. It's a 33% price savings over straight monthly, and I suspect many/most users have subscriptions much longer than a year.

This all seems a bit overwrought. Like the root post, I cannot fathom who would go through a purchase process that included the phrase "Annual plan, billed monthly" and not clue in. Or that that drop down includes a separate straight monthly plan at a significant price premium (50% higher). To give even more of a hint, a separate "you have until this date to cancel without a penalty" disclaimer gives another clue.

On the scale of dark patterns, this one is pretty eh. It clearly could be clearer for people who seem to just click straight through stuff, but I suspect a lot of the people chose the cheaper per month annual plan thinking they were hacking the system, and then discovered that it wasn't all upside.

> This all seems a bit overwrought. Like the root post, I cannot fathom who would go through a purchase process that included the phrase "Annual plan, billed monthly" and not clue in.

FWIW (mine is the root post and) I am definitely coming around to the idea that it should at least say "Yearly", and maybe say "in monthly installments", because that language may be more familiar to buyers. But the rest of your point about the other plan you can choose is right.

I don't yet believe Adobe is evil, either. Banal, corporate, plodding, slow-witted, yeah. It is definitely an 800 pound gorilla.

> There are all sorts of viable competitor apps

> monopoly

You lost me there. Are you using a different definition of monopoly than the usual one?

I am using a different definition of monopoly than the USA one.

They are a monopoly according to the EU definition (which used to be the UK definition; may still be). They control clearly more than 50% of the market; that is enough to attract regulatory scrutiny as a monopoly.

The reality is that a monopoly need not have 100% control of the market. It is more that they have control over some barrier of entry to the market. That, combined with half the market share, is a powerful tool.

In the case of Adobe, as well as market share, they also have de facto control over a set of file formats that the market depends on (the so-called 'industry standard'). And they have a level of product integration/tying in the Creative Suite that could be monopolistic. That limits the competing apps; they cannot together offer a truly competing suite.

Affinity is I think close to rolling back some of Adobe's monopoly power, because the Affinity Suite is so capable, and it might well be in Adobe's interest to allow them to do that; it certainly must help them when they talk to EU regulators.

The real question is whether they are an "abusive" monopoly. And I don't believe they are quite there yet.

There are some hints that they may risk becoming technically abusive but this "dark pattern" ain't one. One such hint is that you can't buy just the two arbitrary apps you want in the suite -- it's either one app, the photography plan, or the lot.

It is certainly the case that any further acquisitions by Adobe could attract monopoly regulation in the EU.

I disagree with your implication that people are basically dim for falling for intentionally malicious design. You could put a push sign on the door of the physics department in a Uni, but if the handle was designed to be pulled, most people would be doing so.

I agree with the rest of your sentiment for the most part. Vote with your feet. Affinity is great, and there are other good alternatives. Most people who are stuck on Photoshop used it when it wasn't as good, you can do the same again

I am not saying people are dim for "falling for intentionally malicious design", because I do not see what is intentionally malicious -- that word has a meaning. It is not malicious. It might be unclear; I'm not convinced it is even misleading.

I am saying I do not understand why people don't grasp that "annual plan, billed monthly" means something priced yearly but paid for in monthly pieces.

Not that I think they are dim, but I do want to understand what the comprehension gap is here.

After reading many replies I think that if people are saying that "annual plan" is too ambiguous for anyone with a credit card, then "yearly, billed in monthly instalments after free trial" should do the job. But then I expect we will still see people expecting this means they can cancel after a month. Because the thing is if they say "one year commitment, billed in monthly instalments" that is actually untrue; you can in fact get out before a year is out, it just costs you an early closing penalty.

(I _am_ saying they are dim if they are expecting to game it by cancelling after a month.)

> Ask yourself seriously: what is it you want to do that the Affinity Suite (which costs about, what, £150 and then £20 each for the two iPad apps) cannot do for you.

I tried to open a raw image and it didn't seem to process the XMP sidecar file I had alongside it properly. The photo looks quite different from what it looks like in Photoshop. This is despite the fact that I can confirm via Process Monitor that it actually does actually read the XMP file. It just seems to ignore the contents for some reason.

I think there are some elements of the XMP it is trying to make sense of, and perhaps failing. Or possibly the XMP-reading code is in production but none of the decoding is yet. Or maybe it will get keywords from XMP but nothing else? Not sure.

The thing is, XMP is not any kind of independent standard; it's largely a set of instructions specific to Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop. I do think we should expect them ultimately to be able to interpret most of it, and I half expect them to support XMP in their eventual DAM product as one sidecar type, (which is why I think there is probably code in Photo that is ready to read it) but they don't commit to it yet.

I must say that if I process a raw file in one package then open it up in a competitor's raw processing package, I expect the second to ignore the work of the first

The main thing that the suite really can't do is a Bridge-type function, though.

Sure, it says annual plan. But if we are going to be marking words, the very same screenshot also say: "You can cancel your subscription anytime", without any conditions declared up front, except a tiny "Learn more" link. Given this you'd likely win a consumer case or chargeback if you tried. If only this text had a more clear disclaimer i would give Adobe a pass, even though whole process contains a full load of other dark patterns.

This is fraud, not a dark pattern. You are intentionally making designs with the intent to deceive, knowing that if people understood the terms they would not agree. Free trial? Actually it's a minimum $150 obligation. I don't understand how companies that do this aren't being fined or having people put in jail.

No, it's a free trial, because you can cancel it. And if you look in the screenshots in the very tweets this item is about, you can see that they tell you this up front, on the third screenshot, including the date by which you can cancel to get a full refund.

It's not "fraud". Could it benefit from clearer language -- there are some small tweaks they could do.

Would you say the goal of the setup is to deceive the user into paying for a much longer term than they would agree to if they knew?

To me, two things stand out. 1) The fact that they have a "monthly price billed anually" could only be used for deception. Either you bill monthly or annually. Telling me how much per month is not helpful, it's deceptive. That's the billing scheme in my head. I am thinking of monthly billing. 2) The fact that they will charge you 50% of the full term no matter how soon after you cancel. The subscription is automatic and has near 0 marginal cost to Adobe. Clearly, the goal is to suck money from the pockets of people who either didn't find the software useful after all or didn't even intend to buy a full year.

Together, I see a clear intent to deceive with the goal of financial gain. Fraud. The fact that you can know what you are signing up for is immaterial. They could and would make it clearer if the goal wasn't to deceive, and they wouldn't charge you 50% on cancellation if the goal wasn't to profit off of people who mistakenly paid for more than they need.

No, not at all. They may not be communicating well enough with the word "annual", which people clearly don't seem to grasp, and perhaps they should use "Yearly".

The one thing I found frustrating when I cancelled after a year is the relatively short window of time you have to actually cancel; well, that and the slightly tiresome retention process I was dropped into -- would you like a free month instead? two months? (I half expected to be offered a kitten).

But generally Adobe think you want this software for the longer term, not for a month, and economically they would be hosed if people could just use, say, InDesign for a couple of months, since a lot of InDesign tasks are annual tasks (brochures, reports, catalogues).

It's an annual price, billed monthly.

Quite a lot of things are like this -- for example, the TV licence in the UK is a product that you buy for a year but pay monthly. Our council tax is, too.

I don't believe the subscription has near marginal cost -- Adobe have a huge number of employees making hugely complex products, and this is how they choose to amortise it, instead of relying on people upgrading every three versions.

It's not fraud; that's just not the right word to use.

Is subscription pricing consumer-hostile? I don't know. But I do know that per-seat licensing of the prior Creative Suite was a non-trivial expense for a lot of design firms.

My main objection to Creative Cloud is that it's a one-or-everything pricing model; that's the only thing I think risks being anti-competitive given their market share.

Under Australian consumer law most of what's discussed in this Twitter thread is actually illegal. Just because it's part of a company's business process doesn't mean it's legal. I ran into the same problem when trying to cancel my service, and found myself presented with some utterly onerous cancellation fee. I told them I'd make a complaint with Australia's consumer affairs regulator, the ACCC[0]. They waived the fee pretty much the moment I mentioned their name. I'd advise anyone in the same position to check your country's consumer laws, and contact your local regulatory bodies.

https://www.accc.gov.au/

Same for Europe. You should receive what you could reasonably expect to receive, even without reading the fine print.

What staggers me is that everyone knows (in Australia) that the ACCC can be quite the toothless tiger in many aspects, yet the mere mention of those 4 letters can make Adobe fold over instantly.

It's so telling that Adobe reacts in this way, when they present their terms of conditions in such a dark-pattern manner. It's like they know what they're doing is super dodgy, but want to toss whatever reputation they have left out of the window, for the sum of just a few bucks a month. It's revolting.

I wouldn't call an organization that makes companies 'fold over instantly' toothless. Companies fold if they are in the wrong or even if things are in doubt, because losing at arbitration is an indelible black mark.

I know those 4 letters got me a full refund the next day when brought to the attention of the parent company after failing to deal with a local franchise owner. Before hand having followed the ACCC guidelines trying to get the order back on track (and creating the paper trail to ensure there was no doubt I was in the right).

ACCC may be a toothless tiger, but suing the business in your local Tribunal is absolutely effective. The filing costs are $80 or so, and generally, if you make a good faith effort to resolve the issue before hand with the business and they don't resolve it, the magistrate will give you costs.

I've only had to do this once and it was a fairly simple process. Lawyers are not allowed. Just point to the specific consumer guarantee being breached, provide documentary evidence, and show up.

On the topic of Adobe and things to look out for:

I paid for the full subscription for years as I got a lot of use out of it for many projects.

What made me quit Adobe was their iPad Pro apps.

I found myself using the iPad Pro for visual art projects more often, and I eagerly awaited Adobes eventual iPad Pro offerings.

The only file storage option in the iPad versions of Photoshop and Illustrator is Adobe cloud online with offline cache allowed on a per file basis.

Every project has mandatory upload to Adobe cloud. No way to disable.

I am comfortable having client work stored on iCloud, and sometimes will use Dropbox, both have decent enough reputation for secure storage of IP.

But Adobe? I’m sorry but any company forcing professionals to store client IP on their cloud offering by definition cannot be considered secure, who knows what data mining they do if they are willing to pull stunts like this.

On principle I found alternative apps and ditched Adobe.

> But Adobe? I’m sorry but any company forcing professionals to store client IP on their cloud offering by definition cannot be considered secure.

Not to mention that they stored and leaked the unhashed passwords of their entire userbase.

https://www.adobe.com/downloads.html

Click the Start Free Trial and experience the flow for yourself.

You're presented with 3 options, but it defaults to the 2nd option.

Instead of using more straightforward "Annual Subscription - Billed monthly", it uses rather unusual "Yearly - Billed Monthly" phrasing.

The default selection makes it less likely that you're going to read the fine print.

You also don't get the Total Cost comparison between the 3 options.

7 day free trial, but 14 day to cancel creates another unnecessary disconnect intended to confuse.

It's clear they 'optimized' the funnel towards maximum conversion at the user's cost.

Really scammy. They are riding on the coattail of their former glory products that are slowly becoming irrelevant.

I think the language is pretty clear. The fact that there is a much more expensive monthly option makes it even more obvious that the "yearly" option is a year long commitment. Not sure why you'd need to read the fine print. It also says "Fee applies if you cancel after Feb 26" -- as long as that implies that you can cancel without paying a fee until then, I think that's pretty clear? Though seeing how many people feel tricked by it, I may be missing something.

I think it's partly because you're looking at this through HN posting and you are aware of the dark pattern issue. Even if it poses no problem for 95% if people, if it does for 5%, it's a big number.

the problem is, they're deviating from the norm by doing things:

> Offering annual pricing, but with monthly pay option. > Imposing rather stiff penalty.

Stuff like this... is not that common in ordinary e-commerce. You either pay 1 full year price and enjoy substantial savings or go monthly.

They could've made this info much more clear so that the comprehension wouldn't be a problem for 99% of the people. But they didn't.

OT rant:

> Ooh, I can scroll. That was not obvious at all.

It is if you use a proper browser+OS combo. Why some designers thought it was a good idea to hide the scroll bar in their OS (which some browsers adopt to) is beyond me.

It's also an annoyance as a user with a browser that display scrollbars. The amount of random scrollbars appearing because the devs never tested anything but Mac+Chrome is staggering.

> the devs never tested anything but Mac+Chrome

Which Android browsers show scrollbars?

Firefox does, briefly when you load a scrollable page. And then shows it again while scrolling, naturally.

I suspect parent commenter is looking for more major browsers like Opera (4X market share [0]), Vivaldi, Brave, Chrome (leader), Safari, Samsung default, Android default, etc.

Firefox isn't widely used anymore for mobile, especially with their recent user-hostile approaches of deprecating extension access, removing about:config, devs alledgedly flipping off users on twitter, and so forth.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile-table...

> devs alledgedly flipping off users on twitter

What’s this a reference to?

> Firefox isn't widely used anymore for mobile, especially with their recent user-hostile approaches of deprecating extension access, removing about:config, devs alledgedly flipping off users on twitter, and so forth.

I don't get this sentiment. I understand that people are upset at Mozilla, so am I. But why would you then decide to switch to a browser that makes the exact same mistakes without any extensions whatsoever?

That said, websites like Statcounter will always show a larger user base on Firefox because of anti tracking measures present and enabled by default in Firefox. It's definitely not what it used to be, but these statistics can't be relied upon ever since ad blocking first appeared on the internet.

> why would you then decide to switch to a browser that makes the exact same mistakes without any extensions whatsoever

Adblocking among the browsers that are more user-focused. I personally use Vivaldi, which is from the same devs that created Opera before the company was sold off.

Difference is a mobile view is often designed with that in mind, so it works across the board.

On desktop, I've had random horizontal scrollbars even on big sites like GitHub. Non-functional as the content had enough space, but still there, because no one bothered to test.

I do think hiding it on mobile devices is bad as well, though. Leads to exactly the issue in the twitter thread, with more content not being noticed.

Found an old discussion on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24293421

Working link: http://web.archive.org/web/20210226184710/https://svenkadak....

> Which Android browsers show scrollbars?

How many people develop web sites on Android?

Meanwhile, there are a lot of web developers who use Mac as their dev machine; and the majority of them would never check how the website looks on Windows or Linux.

There's a setting on MacOS: System preferences > General > Show scroll bars > Always; but neither developers nor end users seem to enable it.

Plus — and this is a pet peeve of mine — there's a growing number of developers who would use the Tailwind CSS library and apply its "w-screen" class to their elements. The w-screen class sets element width to 100vw, which does not take into account the width of the vertical scrollbar. So the moment the page content gets taller than viewport height and a vertical scrollbar appears, the 100vw width of an element exceeds the available width of the page, and causes a horizontal scrollbar to appear as well. Argh!

At my last company, we enabled this by default for new company macOS laptops. Helped a lot.

Found a demonstration of 100vw with vertical scrollbar. Suggested solution is to use width:100%.

https://sbx.webflow.io/100vw-scrollbars

> Suggested solution is to use width:100%.

Which, for a block element inside a block container, is the default anyway.

This isn't a solution and doesn't excuse Adobe's shitty behavior, but I use privacy.com which gives you single-purpose cards. That way, I can just pause the card and subsequent charges will fail. Then let them try to get their money.

Pull-based payments are such a bad idea, implemented even worse. Privacy.com at least gives you per-merchant controls and limits, even though this really should have been a Visa default.

You're right here, they won't be able to charge you automatically via the credit card, but you're still legally obligated to pay for the subscription since you have agreed to the terms of service during sign up. Depending on the action that they would take, you could easily end up paying a higher amount than the original subscription price if they put additional charges on you...

> you're still legally obligated to pay for the subscription since you have agreed to the terms of service during sign up

Except they didn't agree to them, because they didn't know about them, and they might not be legally obligated to pay, depending on the jurisdiction.

It's pretty clear that there wasn't a "meeting of the minds" in most of these situations.

I don't use Adobe but if I got bit by this I'd definitely take them to small claims.

> because they didn't know about them

I want to agree with this, but can't in strict terms. "Annual plan, paid monthly" item description next to the price is hard to defend as something unreadable. Maybe it's just me, but anytime I see "annual plan", I know I'm signing up for a year, and that commitment pretty much always comes with advantages (less total price) and disadvantages (cancellation fees) compared to shorter commitments.

It's hard to deny the pileup of dark patterns in this and many other subscription services is disgusting and I wish the legal precedent was clear that customer clarity and control always trumps service clauses. Over a decade ago I established as a rule for myself that anything "free" that requires me to enter my credit card is in fact not free. Anytime I consider sidestepping the rule, I know I have to be REALLY sure and read everything. Yep, "limited trial with pre-accepted subscription but hey you can cancel anytime!" which is common in mobile, is always a no no from me.

I think this is a question of fact, but isn't consistent with OP. Either Adobe tricked them and they genuinely didn't know and it's a dark pattern.... or it isn't a trick/dark pattern and they did know.

But if the part of the agreement that talks about canceling is above the fold and the part that says there are liquidated damages of half the remaining annual payments is hidden behind invisible scroll bars, I know which way I would be likely to rule if I were the judge.

The problem is only that they can throw lawyers at you. Normally a contract is invalid if one side can show to have been deceived.

They can sue joe fartnoggin all the want. I’m not sure they will get very far. Virtual cards only require a valid zip code nothing else has to match

How were they deceived? The workflow clearly states "Annual plan, billed monthly." This wasn't something hidden from the user.

Technically but enforcement’s another matter. Many subscription services are just going to cancel your plan and paywall you

Can they report you to a credit bureau and get your credit score lowered? I recently had my credit score lowered, I think because I canceled a Chase / Amazon credit card after only 1 month. Apparently that is a credit faux paus. No balance owed, but I did hit the measly $500 limit once - another thing bad for credit scores.

When my car + homeowner insurance renewed, it had a special section about how Lexus Nexus had lowered my insurance score, which is partially based on my credit score. Cost me several hundred dollars extra in insurance premiums.

No. The worst they can do is send you to collections, which they won’t do, or charge you for back charges if you sign up again.

Canceling a credit card as you did may hurt your score though.

In general, they can and do send this sort of stuff to collections since you did sign up for the terms and it's a non-trivial amount of money owed. Gyms do it for far less, so I don't see why Adobe wouldn't.

We had Time Warner send us to collections which then reported my wife to the bureaus, alleging that we had never returned our cable modem (this was just for $60, and it was 5+ years ago!!). First of all, I’m incredibly sure that we did. We had fiber after that, what would I want with an old DOCSIS modem anyway? And second of all, they were unable to offer any proof that we had not returned it. The company that was collecting tried to strongarm us, but after a few documented phone calls, it all went away. But why are companies allowed to report a fraudulent payment to collections, when they have no proof (if they had some proof surely they wouldn’t have dropped it) and there is literally no follow-up or accountability required of them? I’m glad we have the financial literacy and confidence to tell them to stuff it, but how many people get scammed by stuff like this?

We also spent a bunch of time on the phone with TWC directly, and they had no account in our name or any history of our account.

> We also spent a bunch of time on the phone with TWC directly, and they had no account in our name or any history of our account

Best part of this story

I had similar encounters with a shitty ISP where their salesperson signed me up on a yearly contract despite explaining very clearly that not only did I only want a 30-day rolling contract but that the reason I'm doing so is because of a temporary issue with the new ISP. Even if they somehow misheard the "30-day rolling" part, a yearly contract just wouldn't make sense given my planned use-case. I can only assume that the idiot simply wanted some commission and I guess they don't give any for monthly rolling contracts.

When it was time to cancel I learnt that I was actually on a yearly contract - this was a month later so past the cancellation period. The support advisor claimed that I not only received an email but actually opened it, at which point I knew they sent it to the wrong address or were outright lying as my email client never loads remote resources, making it impossible for them to see that I "opened" it. He also refused an IMO reasonable demand of reviewing the call recording (it was just a month ago so they should still have it) to determine who was in the right.

In the end, I simply blocked further payments. When collections reached out, I explained the story above and they went away immediately. Collections ended up having significantly better user experience than the original company.

Not your fault but the easiest way to prevent this is to return equipment at a corporate store, you'll get a receipt for the return.

They can send it to collections all they want, but ultimately if the debt isn't valid as per the law then you're all good. If the merchant is using bad-faith tactics to trick you into a contract (or outright lies as in my case) it is very unlikely to fly in court.

Until when you go apply for a mortgage and the underwriter makes you resolve all outstanding credit issues, which in many cases results in you paying the collection agency otherwise it could hold up your home purchase.

Theses systems were built by the creditors not the consumers.

I'm surprised gyms don't do it... It is my understanding that credit reference agencies pay money for this kind of information, and pay even more if they get to guarantee that the same debts won't be reflected on competing credit reporting mechanisms.

> privacy.com

Not for those of us who don't live in the US unfortunately.

Where are you located? Privacy.com were first to bring this feature to the mainstream as a product but it exists as an add-on in various places. For example, in the UK it’s offered by Monzo and offered by Revolut in the many countries they operate in. If you want to use virtual cards, it should be possible where you live.

Wise (formerly Transferwise) also offers virtual debit cards. I don't think you can limit the amount or merchant, but it still works if all you need is to be able to cancel a card on-demand.

While virtual cards are technically a thing in Canada (e.g. you get a virtual cards if you add a card to Apple Pay), I’m not aware of any services that let you generate more than one at a time in a useful way.

This is why last year India's policy for auto debit rules for credit debit card makes very good sense.

Under the new norms, banks will be required to inform customers in advance about recurring payment due and transaction would be carried following nod from the customer (will need additional factor authentication from 1 April). This rule is likely to impact your monthly subscription charges for different streaming platforms including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+...

https://www.livemint.com/industry/banking/debit-card-credit-...

Love that. I wonder how much money is flowing from consumers on forgotten subscriptions. My bank should have a separate highlighted section for any recurring charge.

Their "free" plan says you can

> Create up to 12 cards per month

Does that mean you can create 12 in January, 12 more in February, etc? Or is it capped at 12 total?

AFAIK it's 12 every month (I have hundreds by now) but I've never reached the limit. They're vendor-locked so you need one per vendor.

I am so sick of companies doing this.

Google bait and switches your unlimited-forever suite into limited workspaces, fails to support products, and generally makes it so you can't trust they will be there in two weeks unless you're an ad buyer.

Facebook tracks you everywhere, even VR glasses.

Adobe nickels and dimes, takes away permanent software with kludgy, awful SaaS billing and UX.

Why are we okay with these practices?

These are not the same things. I'm annoyed by the workspaces thing too but at least I got a decade of free service.

Adobe is using sleight of hand to get you locked into a long-term contract. That's closer to fraud.

Google was also using deceptive language (pay or lose access) to hold previous G Suite purchases hostage. Only after backlash did they add info to their FAQ and say that there would be some sort of purchase migration available.

I just went through most of the process of subscribing. The Twitter feed seems to be missing a screen that I was presented with. The screen includes 3 cards to select from. One is monthly at a price of $79.49/mo and has a clear note that you can cancel anytime with no fee. One is annual billed monthly at $52.99/mo with a note that fees will apply if I cancel after Feb. 26th. The 3rd is annual billed upfront at $599.88/yr and a note that there are no refunds if I cancel after Feb. 26th. It seems pretty clear to me and I wonder the motivation was in not including this screen from the sign up process.

I'm pretty sure they do all kinds of AB testing essentially scamming people in various ways - i always read very carefully and was trapped for very expensive year.

Then suddenly they will have a non-scummy front page. I'm from Europe though and it was in no way clear that you signed up for a year. I work in software, and know how to read legalese pretty well.

I don't understand this. It's a free 7-day trial. If I cancel during the 7-day trial, the following cancellation terms apply: If you cancel within 14 days of your initial order, you'll be fully refunded.

7 < 14.

Also, it's not even clear if the 7 days do even count towards the 14 days, since in that case they could just as well state "first 14 days are free". But they are not free, since they belong to the first subscription month. They'd be 14 consumed days of the first month if no cancellation is made.

This should mean that the 7 days are not a part of the initial order. The initial order would get placed automatically after 7 days, you are just expressing your intent to automatically order after the 7 days of trial.

If this is not true, then they are definitely scamming their users, but I doubt that they would risk going to court for this.

But what I definitely think is a big scam is the 50% cancellation fee of the initial order, with the condition that you only get to use the remaining days of the month.

For example, if you cancel in the third week, you still have to pay around USD 300 (the tweets indicated a USD 600 per year cost), but you only get one week for that, instead of being able to use the full 6 months (50% of a year) you are actually paying for.

---

If I go to that page, there is the following text (it's also in his Tweet):

Cancel before --> 26 Feb [today is 5 Feb] <-- to get a full refund and avoid a fee. You can cancel your subscription anytime via your Adobe Account page or by contacting Customer Support. Learn more.

This means that they are actually giving you a cancellation right of 7+14 days, just as mentioned in the "subscription and cancellation terms" plus the 7 days.

According to Wolfram Alpha "today + (14 + 7) days" = Feb 26, 2022

So no, you are not getting scammed with this free trial.

No, that's correct. If you cancel within 7 days you pay nothing. If you cancel after 14 days you have to pay for half the year. I'm not sure what happens between those two points— I'd guess it's a grace period but I'm not sure— but personally I'd be surprised to have any reduction in cost if I went beyond a clearly stated free trial I agreed to.

Folks have legitimate bones to pick with Adobe— including the cost alone— and I think that’s why folks want to pig-pile on them for something like this. That said, I don't think this is a dark pattern. I don't even really think it's critique— more like conspiracy theory.

Dark pattern: Buttons confirming difficult-to-undo actions not in a user's best interest hiding in buttons styled and positioned like cancel buttons.

Dark pattern: Ad modals with undersized X closing symbols in low-contrast colors with transparent backgrounds over complex graphics making it hard to find and harder to not click on the ad.

Dark pattern: Cookie consent boxes w/an “accept all” option but only line-item rejection of dozens of entries requiring 2 or 3 clicks each.

Dark pattern: Cookie consent boxes with “reject all” options which don’t reject cookies selected in other tabs/cards not visible unless you click on them.

Dark pattern: Inconspicuous opt-out adware in Windows installers that rarely require user interaction beyond clicking next.

Dark pattern: One-click sign-up requiring in-person, written, or phone cancellation via a ‘retention specialist.’

... this pattern: Bait link that doesn’t tell the whole story leads to a screen with a prominent order form. It has only one line item near the top that’s labelled commitment which says "annual plan, paid monthly £49.94/mo" with the monthly price. It clearly states the length of the free trial, twice, including the explicit date you need to cancel by to not get charged. The terms modal, which could be more clearly styled, explicitly states the penalties for not cancelling before twice the length of your free trial passes.

So if a user signs up for an annual subscription and doesn't cancel until more than double the time their free trial passes then they get charged a penalty. Ok.

Adobe has room to improve here, but sorry— this is just not a dark pattern by any good faith measure.

The first page is obviously a bait link, It should prominently state a 12 month commitment and save non-interested users the click. While it's overly salesy, it's a standard advertising tactic and incredibly mild compared to what you see at your average car dealership. Newer SAAS companies (e.g. Slack) do a much better job, here, and Adobe should follow suit. I would absolutely levy a dark pattern accusation if users only saw that before committing more than a click, but it's not.

I don't understand how anyone viewing an order form occupying ~ 1/3 of the screen with a prominent box labelled "commitment" saying "annual plan, paid monthly £49.94/mo" would not understand that you're making an annual commitment to pay £49.94/mo, and that the total cost will be £49.94/mo * 12. Never has any phone plan or car lease or gym membership or anything else I paid for monthly with some multi-month commitment prominently displayed the explicit total price. The free trial end dates are prominently mentioned twice.

The cancellation terms box styling should more clearly convey the document structure, but even someone quickly skimming the first 8 paragraphs would see the content didn't end with the headline “Cancellation Terms:”. Hanlon’s Razor shreds the assertion of deliberate malfeasance over a site-wide design system flubbing form follows function.

Normally love a pig pile on Adobe’s pricing practices, but this looks a lot more like histrionics intended to drive twitter traffic than a useful analysis of Adobe’s sign-up process.

I tend to agree on principle, but this whole concept of 'annual, monthly' is really scummy.

Even YC startups are doing it now, showing you a per-month price while de-emphasizing the fact that you're paying for a year up front. Adobe is the first one I'm familiar with that does normal monthly billing but forces you to stay a year.

>Hanlon’s Razor shreds the assertion of deliberate malfeasance over a site-wide design system flubbing form follows function.

Hanlon's Razor is a heuristic, not a law, and ceases to apply in the face of bad-faith actors. If Adobe wanted to be clear, they'd say "$X/month for 12 months", and not hide the commitment terms in WCAG-violating grey-on-white text. I offer instead the heuristic of "follow the money".

I got caught up in one recently but was able to talk the operator out of it. I thought I was signing up for a 1 month trial not for a year. Evidently they didn't push the people on the other side of the phone to refuse just make you have to at least call and talk to a human. I could find no way on the website to do it. Some people would just have let it go for a few months after not being frustrated enough to call customer service, as it wasn't a lot of money $8/month if I recall correctly.

> Adobe is the first one I'm familiar with that does normal monthly billing but forces you to stay a year.

Really? The Commitment Subscription payment model is super common and old as time.

Oracle. Microsoft for some services. Lots of random SaaS companies. Unity Pro. Gyms. Internet service. Webex since forever. POTS service. Mobile service until Verizon got greedy and they started letting phone subsidies do the same thing. Leases. Service contracts for everything from software support to pest control. Consulting contracts. Columbia's Record of the Month Club.

I am firmly against blaming people who've been ripped off because they didn't' prevent it, but this is not new. It is a standard business practice across many industries. It's not even new to software.

Beyond that, even with Adobe, you don't even have to use it— it's just the only one Adobe lets you sign up for a free trial with. If you go to Adobe's sub page: https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html

And click on the 52 whatever a month plan, the three options for subscriptions— Month-to-Month, Monthly with a 12 month commitment, and annual paid upfront, are listed clear-as-day on the right.

I think the Hanlon's Razor play on words is clear. When the two possibilities at large seem to be "Adobe, the world standard in creative software, maliciously styled their cancellation terms to trick the sliver of people suspicious enough to read the terms but not suspicious enough to realize the text was cut off" and "Adobe fell behind on user testing for infrequently viewed text-only fine print pages," Hanlon's razor is the heuristic people should use, and the results are self-evident.

I found a loophole to get out of their contracts for free online and was amazed it worked. Tell them that your employer now pays for your Adobe subscription so you don't need it anymore. They must have a policy around this because these magic words seem to get them to cancel for you no questions asked. Also, the easiest way to contact them (good luck finding a live chat on their website) is via twitter DMs. Sounds bad but using this method I got my account cancelled with no fee in around 10 minutes and with just two messages.

Tons of dark design patters in the "Adobe Sign" platform also, formerly free for gsuite users it is now pay only. When you try to send a document out for e-sign it gives you an option to upgrade for as low as $2.99/month. Seems reasonable.

After you upgrade (which is the YEARLY price... 2.99*12 = $36), you find that this plan doesn't have the e-signing... That one is $19.99/mo. But that's the yearly pricing... obviously.

Who in their right mind is paying $240/yr for this? I cancelled 20 minutes after buying the yearly, and they took 10 days to return the funds. In 2022, a refund transaction using the new auth-method is SAME DAY, just like a purchase.

Really terrible design patterns and 0 intention to fix.

Subscription models are great for professionals (and companies), but amateurs, a single year of the Adobe Photoshop + Lightroom bundle is over 2x what a perpetual Affinity Photo license costs. (I just wish Serif came out with a photo management product, but in the meantime, it's not too bad to use digiKam for some management and `aws s3 sync` to back photos up in an s3 bucket.)

What's sad is that it was not easy to even see that there's still a Photoshop Elements product these days with a one time price, though I have no idea what the support is, and what upgrades cost. I had to search around to find it. It costs $99, though there's sales and bundles yada yada yada. The Adobe "comparison" page (which I still don't know how to navigate to) just seems like they want to funnel everyone into the subscription offering: https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography/photoshop-vs... It seems like Elements would be the "hobbyist" license, the subscription model would be the pro version, but it's very, very not clear.

The product that gets subscriptions right is Autodesk Fusion 360. There's a Personal Use tier that's free, which provides pretty much all the features you need for most hobbyist style 3D design and CNC usage. You need the serious features, you pay the expensive license, but, you're probably making money at this point, so it's a necessary tool. Fusion 360 changed it's licensing in 2020 which confused a lot of people, but really, they used to have a "startup license" or "personal use" license that was really vague, and I think was being taken advantage of by actual businesses. It's just simpler now, and I think it's more obvious.

Previously - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26786563

I stopped using all Adobe products after they did this exact trick on me. When i actually tried cancelling normally their cancel page "didn't work" and i had to call and e-mail wasting hours and days.

Absolute thrash company. With Adobe, always pirate, never recommend them, pay for competitors.

I just hit something like this with Amazon Prime. I haven’t used Amazon in a while and forgot that they push it very hard during checkout. Well, they got me. I accidentally clicked on the wrong button. I immediately realized my mistake and hit the back button before the next page loaded. Too late. A second later an email arrived letting me know my Prime account had been activated.

I immediately went looking for the cancel link. It’s not as terrible as some. (You don’t have to call them or anything.) But it’s still pretty bad. I didn’t need to confirm even once that I wanted the Prime subscription, but had to confirm 3 or 4 times I want to cancel with a bunch of confusing options to only pause my subscription, etc. I did eventually cancel, but I don’t see how this can be legal. If you accidentally press the wrong thing, you’re suddenly obligated to pay for something you didn’t want, but if you try to cancel, it’s a bunch, “Are you sure? Are you really sure?” nonsense. I don’t think I was charged as it was still during the 30 day “free” trial.

Speaking of dark patterns, has anyone noticed the DoorDash app sets the tip for you automatically and places the “place order” button above the tip form, which you must scroll to to make visible? there is no way to adjust a tip without calling customer support.

This is such an obviously blatant deception. Off screen form fields _below_ a submit button? It’s insulting. I’m surprised I haven’t heard more complaining about this.

And the tips are their way of being able to limit the pay of their employees by offsetting their wages onto the end user.

I haven't experienced that on the website version -- they give you three suggestions or let you choose any amount -- but noticed my order yesterday was $4 more than it should have been after choosing a custom tip amount. I normally don't double check email receipts for that kind of thing, but maybe it's time to start.

I'm still able to reproduce it on the website today. Trying to add a custom amount magically adds $4 to the order in a way that's not just superficially in the UI. It actually gets added to the order.

It's such a shame Adobe acts like this; they used to be a reputable technology leader. These days most of their products seem like scammy upsells.

I will get "downvoted" into oblivion, but dear god does no one want to write a small blog/page anymore? I read so many "this is super interesting useful information" blurbs about contracts, laws, etc, but they are in the smallest possible digestions given to us by twitter.

Either "when did I get so bitter" or "when did the web go to hell" thoughts enter my mind.

You reach a much wider audience with twitter, it's sad but it is what it

Use a virtual card if you can, delete that card once you start the 'free trial' then cancel after the trial, or within 1 month to not get charged.

Thats some hoops to go through just to get a 'free trial' to see if the products actually work for you! At least back in the CD days you got 30 days to actually try it out, then either buy it, crack it, or stop using it!

That stops the money being automatically taken, but you'd still be legally responsible to pay the contract, no?

Reneging seems like a great way to get yourself sued for the balance, possibly the costs of recovery and even having your credit score ruined in the fight.

They are welcome to sue, but they'd have to justify their shenanigans to the court, which I'm sure would take a very dim view of intentionally tricking the user into signing up to something they didn't understand.

The business model relies on most people not escalating it there and making noise about it. If they start getting hit by chargebacks or start clogging the legal system with these cases it will end pretty badly for them.

Why would they need to sue? Can't they just send invoices to your email, followed by debt collectors?

The annual subscription is in plain sight. The cancellation terms are the result of bad web design for people using browsers whose browsers have made the idiotic choice to hide scroll bars by default (i.e. all mobile browsers and Safari) but that can be defended if the devs used Windows to make the website.

Actually, on mobile the terms and conditions get cut off halfway through a sentence so if you'd actually read them you'd see that they continue below the fold. Maybe that's not the case on iOS, though?

Their cancellation terms definitely suck but the terms and service and subscription term seem quite clear to me. "I didn't read what I was getting into" is hardly a defence. These details weren't hidden at all.

You can trivially ignore the debt collectors. If they still want their money after that, they can sue. At that point it's ultimately down to the court to determine who's in the wrong and who owes what.

Yes, totally, my wife wanted one month of InDesign and got a yearly subscription, spent hours on the support without success. I wonder if there was a way to fight the dark patterns like this. They managed to show her some small print in a screenshot. Disgusting. I am extremely careful these days touching anything with "Adobe" on it. Extremely frustrating.

Someone pointed out that you could switch accounts types and cancel immediately

I was a victim once. That was when I removed every trace of Adobe from my life and ended my relationship with Adobe that spanned decades. On my way out, and to serve my nostalgic need, I bought the software from Serif's Affinity[1] - Publisher, Photo, Designer.

I really wanted to build up a workflow with Lightroom but that was cut short. For now, I'm good with MacOS Photos and some plugins such as Skylum's[2] Photo Editing Software.

1. https://affinity.serif.com/

2. https://skylum.com

The Adobe you started your relationship with decades ago was a great company. I wonder when it started to go wrong…

I'm someone who tends to double check terms before I sign up for any recurring billing... and somehow Adobe still got me with this exact dark pattern. I thought I was paying for a monthly subscription, only to be told I need to pay 50% of the remaining annual charge AND lose access immediately if I cancel.

I was convinced I signed up for what was a monthly plan... and somehow Adobe hid the fact that this was an annual plan, paid monthly (WTF??)

This level of a dark pattern made me move away from all Adobe products. Congrats on the additional revenue per user: it's also a sure way to have churned users like me not return.

They got me with this a year ago, and I can't wait to cancel my subscription at the end of this month and hopefully never have to be a customer again :)

Can't people contact their credit card provider to inform it as fraudulent charge?

It would not qualify as a fraudulent charge.

Disputes are not just for fraud. If you got tricked into paying for something or didn't receive the promised goods/services it's also a valid reason for a dispute.

Given how low they are already stopping, they likely have a dedicated team for chargebacks that will fight tooth and nail to challenge it.

I am currently dealing with a chargeback team for another company, and the amount of time they’ve dedicated into challenging me likely exceeds the chargeback value itself.

> the amount of time they’ve dedicated into challenging me

They likely haven't used much time at all. Big companies get thousands of chargebacks, and can gather evidence all automatically in a matter of seconds. It'll all be templated documents anyway.

> I am currently dealing with a chargeback team for another company, and the amount of time they’ve dedicated into challenging me likely exceeds the chargeback value itself.

For the company the value is in keeping their chargeback rate down, not in the money itself. If your chargeback rate gets too high it becomes increasingly difficult and expensive to find a card processor who will work with you.

They'll point you to the T+Cs which is something my bank did recently. Even though the company had changed identity to avoid their customers, the bank still went to the new web site for the new company and pasted the T+Cs from there.

Wow, and I thought Ryanair was a masterclass in dark patterns.

“By clicking here you agree that you would like to opt out of receiving newsletters”.

“By clicking here you agree to our terms”.

I remember being extremely frustrated when I cancelled my long term subscription a few years ago. I knew to cancel right before the yearly billing date. But they had so many hoops to go through on the website! Multiple times they were showing me free offers to continuing using the software for a month or whatever. Of course they were trying to trick me into a new subscription! The buttons to actually complete the unsubscribe process were well hidden next to the bold offers. I was pissed that they almost got me. Never again Adobe.

I would be interested to hear an expert opinion about whether such arrangement falls under 'unfair contract terms' descibed by the Office of Fair Trading: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Not sure if such regulation exists in the US, if so it would be worth to probe into it.

I fell for this using Adobe stock photos. I did not see anywhere that I signed up for a monthly plan as I was only getting free credits to use. Well, a few months later and I noticed the charges on my credit card bill. It took me a few hours but I was able to get back all of my money. Not until after, though, the representative on the phone cursed at me and told me I was an idiot for not realizing what I signed up for. This was a few years back and I no longer use any Adobe product and never will again.

Adobe are full of dark patterns - if you install After Effects, they also drive-by install Cinema4D without warning. Nearly had a heart attack when I found it on my computer and it took a lot of digging to discover how it got there.

There’s been an outstanding issue on the Adobe forums about it for years and the attitude from Adobe staff there is shocking - just can’t comprehend people might not want random multi-gigabyte software installed on their computers without asking.

Adobe is for sure one of the worst dark pattern practioner. Was trapped by them once and had to talk to their support. And it turned out their terms were much malicious than it looked. So once you get past the 14 days trial period they will charge you till the end of the year. If you do not notice and do not cancel before the last day, then from the very first day of the following year, if you want to cancel, they will charge you for the rest of that year.

Adobe licensing practices are pure evil. I've been in IT for over 30 years. I was a fan of Adobe products for a very long time but no longer. Even the supposedly stand-alone products require a continuous connection to Adobe's cloud, which is not only a way to verify licensing but to track users.

There is a consistent pattern with companies that do advertising, they go pure evil in the name of profit. See Roku and others.

I now obsess over cancellation policies before subscribing. Yesterday I signed up for Peacock premium so we could watch the Winter Olympics and beforehand made sure I’d be able to cancel anytime. $10 per month and I can cancel easily whenever I like - but they still go out of their way to extract every cent of worth by selling all your personal information, and had to go through a rats nest to opt out.

The most important (not to mention blindingly obvious) rules of running a subscription based business are "make sure the customer knows exactly what they're signing up for and on what terms" and "make it memorably pleasant and easy to cancel", so it's pretty funny to see big names like Adobe and the NYT be too scared and insecure to live by these rules

The billing page does say "annual plan, paid monthly" but it is a bit non obvious at first glance. Oddly this seems to be only in the UK version, the US version has a much clearer pricing layout.

> But what does "Annual plan, paid monthly" actually mean? Let's fill in our email address and press continue. Maybe that's explained on the next page.

This Twitter thread appears to be a person who indeed noticed that and had to delve into the fine print to figure out what it actually implies for the contract.

Seems pretty obvious to me, it's an annual contract you pay for monthly, I have many such contracts

But thats a monthly plan? I would pay monthly... an annual plan I would pay once per year... or is that their cunning terms - 'contract' rather than 'plan' kind of thing

A monthly plan would be one that you can cancel with a month's notice

An annual plan would be one you can cancel with a year's notice

The payment terms might be all in one, or in daily, weekly, or monthly amounts

No, the term of the plan can be separate from the terms of payment.

Auto insurance is usually a 6-month plan you pay monthly. Some are easier to cancel/change mid-term than others.

Mortgage is an X-year plan you pay monthly.

Auto loan is an X-year plan you pay monthly.

This is fairly standard stuff.

Sure, me too. Annual plans are great. The issues here are:

1. All of the marketing language shown in the tweets present this as a monthly cost, rather than an annual commitment. This is deceptive. The other, truly monthly plans are default hidden on the plan selection page.

2. The enormous contract cancellation fee is buried inside the fine print.

Contrast this to the USA version: https://i.imgur.com/TDptfcI.png

Annual plan to me that you're agreeing to pay for the year. Disney did something similar, it was cheaper to sign up for a year. Typically you get 12 months for the price of 10.

The screenshot says you can have a full refund if you cancel before Feb 26th, assuming that holds, that's plenty of time to work out what's going on.

The US is clear, I've seen that setup several times. The UK one has several red flags

1) Free trial

2) "From" £x a month

3) It's Adobe

If a user will be on the hook for $300 when cancelling a contract, that should be made quite clear. The only hint that that lays buried in the fine print is small gray text intoning "avoid a fee" that gets shown after plan selection.

It's pretty clear Adobe has work to do on their sign up flow, here. That they've already done so on the US side makes it even more inexcusable, frankly.

Very first screenshot says "Starting At"

The point where you enter your email states "Annual Plan Paid Monthly", and "Cancel before 26th Feb for a full refund"

Maybe I'm just cynical, but I would expect if I were to sign up I would be on the hook for a full year unless I cancel before 26th Feb.

"I would expect" is not exactly a sterling commendation of how clear a sign up flow's terms are. The Creative Suite has a wide audience.

Maybe it's not entirely clear, but then you get several weeks to decide to cancel and pay nothing

Of all the dark patterns online, this is fairly low down the list.

> Oddly this seems to be only in the UK version

Considering this behavior is likely illegal in the UK (where consumer cooling-off periods are 14 days or 30 days), I'd find that peculiar.

Adobe, a company of the past, playing tricks because they never will understand - or be - SaaS.

I’d wager the opposite, that they have this scheme precisely because through all of their optimization they’ve discovered that this was the most profitable

Fell for that trick once. Avoiding Adobe products since. Found Capture One instead of Lightroom, the Affinity Suite instead of Photoshop/InDesign/Illustrator.

I am upgrading Capture One every year, so I probably pay the same as what I would pay for Lightroom.

But it just feels like a fair contract. And I love the product (probably because I know it well by now).

Seeing this thread, I just realized how easy the hidden scrollbars in macOS can screw you over. Would the terms and condition page by worded slightly different, the Cancellation Condition heading would not even be visible and you won't even notice that there is still content you are agreeing to.

This feels bad, like really bad!

Is it really a trick when it says right in the subscription term selection that it's an annual subscription?

I hate Adobe's insane subscription prices and the fact that they don't give any reminders that your subscription is going to renew is evil, but nothing seems wrong about the 1 year subscription.

If anything, it's a courtesy[1] that they're letting you cancel in the middle of the subscription term at all. Imagine if you paid a lump sum for an annual subscription. Do you really expect to get any portion of your money back if you cancel? The annual-paid-monthly option is still an annual term, you just opted to spread the payments out. It's similar to if you bought something from a store using the store credit card to get 0% interest on the purchase for 12 months.

[1] A courtesy while they're fucking you over, but a courtesy nonetheless.

>Do you really expect to get any portion of your money back if you cancel?

Yes I do. I stop using their app and service so I expect to stop paying for their app and service. I have cancelled several annual subscriptions from other vendors and they all refunded the prorated balance. Sometimes there was a small cancellation fee, but in all cases I received the vast majority of the balance.

Your analogy is flawed. In your example, I still have the thing so of course I have to fully pay for it. In the software case, the company can turn off the license and I no longer have it available to me. Refusing to turn it off is just bad customer relations policy. When you do rude crap like that you get (deservedly) written up on HN and other sites. Plus, you eliminate the possibility of a future customer relationship. It is just ugly and stupid on their part.

I'm really not seeing the difference between this and the early termination fee that phone companies charge.

Under commitment dropdown it says annual… where’s the surprise for being committed annually? What am I missing? I’m actually surprised that you don’t have to pay the 100% of a full year fee, since you’re committing for a year.

Maybe I’m used to too much long term commitment in contracts living in Germany.

I fell for this a few years ago when I was in college.

I intended to sign up for a month, and see if I liked graphic design. After a few weeks my school ended up offering any student a "free" (paid for by my tuition really) Adobe CC subscription if you fill out a Google Form and tell them what you want to do with it. So I tried to cancel and learned I would be hit with a massive early cancellation fee (I think it ammounted to something around $240).

I called Adobe support and in my experience their customer service politely cancelled my subscription and waived all fees. Thankfully they did not give me a hard time about it whatsoever.

But when I signed up I had absolutely no idea that it was a yearly plan paid monthly, since Adobe was the first and last time I have personally seen such a model for SaaS.

And this is why I avoid Adobe products like the plague and why I paid the small once off payment for Affinity Photo for my photo editing needs instead. Fuck Adobe.

But really, this is why I avoid subscription software as much as possible. I will pay for streaming media (because I'm paying for the media not the software). If I buy software, I expect a once off payment to be able to use it forever (I'm ok with having to pay for a new version sometime down the line as long as my old version continues to run). I do sometimes use SaaS web products, but I do try to avoid it when I can.

Since most things are subscription these days, I don't buy much software and tend to stick to open source stuff where I can.

How do these contracts hold up to charge backs through the credit card company?

Also, consumer protection laws. I smell a pile of fines and lawsuits in their immediate future.

As I understand the charge back process, vendors are generally assumed guilty until proven innocent, and it's not going to be worth Adobe's time to fight these. On the other hand, it costs credit card companies a boat load of money to acquire customers, and failing to issue legitimate chargebacks is a great way to lose customer. On top of that, the bank makes more money from a chargeback than a legitimate charge.

I've successfully issued charge backs against Experian, for example. You can't get much more in bed with the credit industry than they are. (Though the operator at the credit card company did say that Experian was responsible for about 50% of their caseload that year...)

So what’s the chargeback reason?

In the Adobe case, I'd go with "unauthorized charge". Experian was running a similar con, and it worked with that incident.

I was able to cancel a while ago by threatening with a chargeback so at least the threat of it seems to help.

They don't. The business model relies on most people not challenging it or not being aware that chargebacks are a thing.

Similarly, this may not fly in court either, but again the business model relies on most people not escalating all the way up (and in their case, they won't pursue it either, as they'd lose more in legal fees even if they ultimately win the case).

Nasty business models like this won't survive if people stood their ground and knew their rights better.

The worst part of this stuff is you can bet the PMs and others working on this feature have some BS terminology that helps them feel like this is not actively hostile toward their customers.

What am I missing here? It’s a 7-day free trial, but if you go 14 days into the trial, you have to pay 50% of the remaining contract.

I mean, that sucks that you can’t cancel without having to pay the remaining money, but the “7 day free trial” part still seems honest enough, right? As in, if I cancel before the 7-day period I don’t get charged anything?

I was expecting “tricks users into a 12 month contract” would imply the “free trial” part was a lie, but it isn’t. It’s what happens after the trial that is sketchy.

They’ve done this for close to ten years (or however long Creative Cloud has been around) and you have to be careful to cancel before they renew you into another yearly contract.

I swore I would never have a personal subscription again (and just use the one I have at work for personal projects, which is against TOS but prove it), but then they had a 50% off special and I caved. I also set a calendar entry to remind me to cancel before I get renewed for a second year.

While I am sure this is not really a "dark" pattern, Adobe's subscription terms definitely discouraged me from subscription software generally. As soon as Affinity Photo was stable in beta (March/April 2015 time) I cancelled my Photoshop Plan subscription at the first opportunity.

Similar thread last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26786563

I made a complaint to ACCC in Australia last year regarding the way they advertised monthly pricing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26786563#26787160

I recently dealt with this. Right before my free trial expired, I went to cancel. A support rep offered another 3 months free. The first red flag was not receiving a log of our conversation. Three months go buy and sure enough, when I went to cancel, they told me I had already committed to a year. Incredible. After some persistence and vague legal threats I managed to receive a full cancelation and refund.

I had a small task that Illustrator would have been the right tool to use. However, with all the [expletive deleted] around dark patterns on the free trial, I decided that I was better off doing it with Affinity Designer instead. I've bought multiple editions of the full Adobe suite (dating back to before it was called Adobe CS or whatever it is now) and they've since lost me as a customer.

I just tried this in USD and at least the initial screens were more clear about the options. To wit: after "start your free trial", there's a choice of "$79 monthly, no cancellation fee" or "$52 yearly billed monthly, fee if you cancel". It is pretty common to discount per month when a user agrees to an annual contract.

If Affinity Publisher had the needed tools for book publishing, I'd drop CC in a heartbeat. But I need footnotes and cross-references, and ideally, book collations of multiple Publisher documents with contiguous page numbering. InDesign is the only game in town for this, and it's frustrating. So I'm stuck feeding that beast.

This dark pattern smacks of an IBM esque legacy co that will be vanquished by better competitors in due time. But as a user that keeps his process monitor open, Adobe’s greatest sin is their multiple mandatory Creative Cloud processes that soak up memory and CPU whether an Adobe product is open or not. Rotten at the core.

If you are looking at Adobe for Lightroom, get Capture One instead. No trickery and it's a much superior product.

I switched to it in fact after getting burned with the Adobe cancellation thing. Never looked back.

I also tried darktable. But Capture One does magic. The photos turn out always much better than what I could do with any ohter product.

This isn't just Adobe. Unity3d does this too. While I like the Unity product, I was trialing others too (Unreal) and didn't realize I was being locked into an annual contract. They don't even have an early cancellation fee; you are on the hook for the entire year, no way around it. Be careful.

Adobe got a permaban from all of my devices the moment they slipped a bundled Norton Antivirus installer past me by hiding the checkbox to include it on the Acrobat Reader installer download page rather than in the installer itself. Adobe can fuck right off and die as far as I'm concerned.

My trick to avoid this has been to use single-use credit card numbers that I generate via privacy.com.

You can create credit card numbers and assign a spending limit to them. Some service can detect that and will refuse the card, but many don't.

Once you're done signing-up, simply delete your generated credit card.

If you're replacing Adobe with something else, whatever you do, stay away from Skylum software like Luminar. And the rest of their suite. I feel so burned after being a customer of their crap for a few years. Constant frustration with upgrades and broken promises.

As a serious hobby photographer (I do birthday parties, portraits, etc for friends and family), any alternative to Lightroom that works on windows and Mac?

I tried a few but either performance was poor or features were missing along with .CR3 support.

It's all well and good to pretend that Adobe transitioning to a subscription-based model was to give more people easier access to their products, something I never truly believed to begin with, but it gets really hard to take that claim even remotely seriously when Adobe turns around and completely dismantles it by trying to trap people in this way. You just cannot argue that they're making it accessible when they're trying to trap people into paying the amount they were trying to avoid (or couldn't afford) in the first place.

It's corporate rent-seeking and that's pretty much all it will ever be.

I still remember when they didn't even give me an option to cancel my subscription from the website (because of my location). Instead, I had to contact tech support and ask them to cancel my subscription. IIRC, the first time I tried, it was around 1AM, so no tech support, so I had to wait til the next day, but it was until a couple of days later that I actually did.

This is when I started to dislike Adobe. At least a very good competitor surfaced recently, Affinity, and they have a pretty good Photoshop and Illustrator alternative. I just wish that they would make a Lightroom alternative, which is not on their roadmap.

It's one of the reasons for why I intentionally avoid Adobe, despite often contemplating using their products. I wonder if these kind of tactics are really worth their while, leaving stung customers from ever coming back.

I had this problem many years ago and that was when I decided to never, ever use or recommend Adobe products to anyone for that very reason. A bunch of people at work wanted me to green light purchases of Adobe subscriptions for Premiere but we decided to go with Apple instead. Never in my life will I install another Adobe Cloud software on any of my machines again.

And that's in addition to the fact that once you decide to install their software they'll install about three hundred different things that are somehow needed and are pretty much impossible to easily remove. I really hate Adobe with a passion.

This information seems useful[0]:

"I fell into this trap also and my state's bureau of consumer affairs was able to help, resulting in a refund and no cost contract cancelation. I encourage everyone in the US with this issue to do the same. Find your office here[1]"

[0] https://twitter.com/trevorgoodyear/status/149000854626786509... [1] https://www.usa.gov/state-consumer

Negative Option billing practices, as this is referred to, has been a violation of Visa rules since at least 2010 and MasterCard rules since 2021 [0] and also an FTC illegal practice [1].

[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.chargebackgurus.com/blog/ne...

[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/part-425

"But what does 'annual plan, paid monthly' mean?" - is it just me or is this completely self-explanatory? I think it's a bit shitty of them to require a yearly contract but it's very clear.

They don’t even require a yearly contract, it’s just one of the 3 choices

pretty sure this is illegal in EU/Germany

gotta show the investors that revenue growth thou!

That is literally the first thing I've encountered as a new immigrant to Germany. This scheme is ubiquitous here that nobody even considers it especially dishonest, it's up to the customer to be careful.

we have a 14 day "Widerrufrecht" Adobe must comply with and return 100% of the funds

they can't just override the law with their own Terms and Conditions

but yes, the scheme is very popular among telcos

Gyms and online services too. Widerrufsrecht is useful, but if you are not aware of this scheme you're likely to miss this term.

They don’t override anything - did you read the T&Cs? It clearly states you can get a full refund within 14 days of purchase.

This is why I use privacy or eno burner cards for all subscriptions. Simply turn off the cards when you are done, they also accept fake names and addresses so they can’t attempt to send you to collections.

You can replace Adobe Photoshop with Affinity Photo or Gimp. You can replace Adobe Illustrator with Affinity Design or Inkscape. But what do you replace Adobe After Effects with?

Natron is a free and open source node-based conpositor for visual effects and motion graphics, similar in functionality to Adobe After Effects. It's available for Linux, macOS, Windows, and FreeBSD:

- Website: https://natrongithub.github.io

- Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/details/fr.natron.Natron

- Source: https://github.com/NatronGitHub/Natron

I manage adobe subs for my company. When you log into the adobe user management portal you can see all of your users and the products we pay for but you can’t pull up a “last used date”. This way I would know who to cancel if not used in a long time.

I have complied to adobe about this for years and they say it would violent the privacy of the users we are paying for - yet I have their email addresses.

I try all the time to get users to try others products when they ask for an adobe product subscription.

I cancelled an adobe subscription years ago. I still get constant emails about renewing. I hate subscriptions so much. The only one we have right now is Disney+ for the kids.

I want to watch _Get Back_, but the only way to see it is to sign up for Disney+. It's not worth the agony of navigating a subscription.

The US legal environment and lack of consumer protections makes it too difficult to spend money and get what you want in return. It's incredibly hard to avoid getting ripped off by technically-legal-but-predatory schemes.

> I want to watch _Get Back_, but the only way to see it is to sign up for Disney+. It's not worth the agony of navigating a subscription.

This is where the Apple ecosystem absolutely earns it's vig with a consumer-friendly, self-service, no-hassle experience. Subscribe for a month for 8 bucks and watch everything you can, then unsubscribe.

Returning to the original topic, would this technique also work for subscriptions to Adobe products purchased through the App Store?

I've considered getting Illustrator for my iPad Pro, but have held off because of reticence about subscription terms.

(For what it's worth I used to work in graphic design and prepress a while back and learned Illustrator, so it has a familiarity advantage for me over worthy competitors like Affinity Designer.)

I ran into this the first time I tried out the new Lightroom plan. The customer support rep waived the fee for me. I then used LR6 until I upgraded to an M1 Mac Mini where I was forced to upgrade. I don't think these subscription models provide good incentives for software companies. I don't see LRCC has much better than LR6. It has a few more features (that I've never used), more camera support (haven't upgraded), and a recompile to ARM64.

I encountered this when canceling my Lightroom CC subscription. Changed me from ”potential future customer” to ”never buying anything from Adobe again” pretty quickly.

Even better, if you've been bamboozled onto an annual Teams plan, you get a weird single 30-day window at your renewal period to change your license/seat count downward without penalty. Otherwise, you're just perpetually on the hook for the full number of licenses contracted.

And the Twitter thread that shows someone's chat experience with canceling is the exact sort of 25 minutes in support agent hell it appears to be.

It's complete madness.

It gets worse. So you fall for this trap you get to the end of your contract and you forget to cancel they just start it again with no warnings!!!! Total scam.

I experienced Adobe's toxic business practices years ago when I tried to reduce our DC license count by 1. It made me no longer want to work with them.

How do people at Adobe justify this to themselves? In addition to management who made the decision to fuck over their own customers, there are dozens of others who were involved in implementing this scam. This is near criminal, if not outright theft.

If you are an Adobe employee, you really should talk to your manager about your misgivings working for such an unethical company, and question whether you should still be working there.

I don't quite get it - Adobe has half of world population of users. They have position of monopoly close to Microsoft and yet they seem to go over themselves making elaborate schemes to sponge off more users? Did the company become so monstrociously bloated that it cannot sustain itself without increasing income? :D I always disliked their policies and attitude towards users, but this...

Now, see, I've been using Photoshop (and Premiere, and After Effects, and...) for all my life, and yet I've somehow never had this problem. Haven't had to pay a single cent, in fact.

With each new headline like this, I feel more and more satisfied in my decision. Why pay more money than you have to for the exact same service? Worse service, even - I don't have to bother with the DRM nonsense.

Adobe is the dirtiest company in the industry. And some bugs in their software remains unfixed for years. I refuse to touch anything they produce.

Right, and this is why I use Privacy one-time-use burner cards (or Blur burner credit cards) for almost everything online these days.

Skillshare just pulled the same trick on me. I decided to go with the free trial. Was enjoying one tutorial and decided to get, what I assumed, was the first month of subscription. Nope, got slammed with 130 pound charge on PayPal for 12 months. I decided to keep it, but cancelled the recurring charge and just decided I will never renew it on principle.

I could recreate this deceptive workload on the Adobe UK site but not the Australian or US sites. It looks like they're playing fast and loose in the UK. In Australia this would be prevented by Australian consumer laws which has broad protections for behavior likely to mislead consumers (fine print, unclear total contract price etc).

They did something like this to me, 3 persons on the phone (all English speaking) later some manager finally caved after me repeatedly stating they were breaking Dutch law with 1 year renewals (after one year it’s always monthly if there is no new approval, it was my 3rd year).

I reported this to the relevant instances here, heard nothing from it.

What’s worse is that you can’t say ‘end my subscription when the current billing period expires’ - you can only cancel when you’re in a magic 1 month window when your plan is about to renew.

I was 15 years + user of Illustrator and Photoshop - now I actively avoid embedding myself any further into their eco-system.

For me my student membership fee went up without me noticing it. From somewhere between C$20 to C$44 or so,

Apropos of nothing, GIMP is pretty darn good, no charge, no subscription. Ditto Darktable, Inkscape et. al.

Krita

> GIMP is pretty darn good

GIMP could be pretty darn good if they gave 20 UX designers another 10 years to redo their entire UX. As is, it's a usability nightmare. Whenever I'm forced to use it, it feels like I spend 70% of my time fighting with the horrible UI, 25% of the time Googling how to do trivial things because it's very much not obvious, and 5% doing what I actually want.

Most open source productivity apps are like this.

Free office apps are a great achievement but you seem to get what you pay for.

I find Inkscape pretty good, and remember even preferring it over Illustrator. Certainly depends on the use case though, I wasn't doing anything super complex.

I tried to use GIMP for a few months because I'm totally broke, but I have to agree with the comment here. I ended up getting the full Adobe cloud plan for $30 a month on Black Friday and it's not a bad deal considering I regularly use Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere.

That's exactly what made Krita so good. Every once in a while they'd shut a bunch of the developers in a room with a bunch of artists/users, have the users complain about everything that pisses them off, and get all those things fixed. The resulting application is obviously driven by what artists enjoy, and it feels that way. Strongly recommended.

The stupid pandemic has made that impossible for us for quite some time, but our current workflow of having artists discuss stuff on krita-artists.org with developers listening, then making a plan and then working on works quite well for us.

But I miss the sessions where each artist present would have two hours to demo making something with the express message: tell us what you hate, and we're not allowed to tell you "oh, but you could do this using that."

Affinity on Mac is also pretty solid, reasonably, and most importantly not a subscription.

Sorry it is not. On my computer it looks like a poorly made artefact from the 90-s. And it's slow.

I have loathed Adobe for this for years. Even worse, Adobe was supposed to make all of their products available under this single subscription, but now they want to charge users a separate additional subscription to access Substance Painter/Designer which they recently acquired.

This must be desperation due to losses of paying subscribers due to the diversity of Microsoft ways to do this, as well as many others that make pdf's. Time for Adobe to fade into another company. Are they also losing share in their other photo products = a broad decline?

Surely with the right data, we can quantify the exact effect of a dark pattern. Once quantified. We can we bring a class action suit against this kind of practice!? Once established as a precedent, the existence of this kind of lawsuit would universally improve web experience

The fact that this is legal is the real problem here.

Also, anyone whining about Apple's AppStore lockdown on subscriptions by in-app payment only (I know I have complained about this myself) there is no better argument for why letting a 3rd party manage subscriptions is a good thing.

I got hit by this at work while managing our subscriptions. Adobe customer service attempted to bribe me to not chase it further by offering me a free subscription on a personal account. I declined and pushed and they eventually agreed to let us out without payment.

I had exactly the same issue about a year ago - missed the fine text. Adobe refused to reduce or remove it on contact, however the moment I mentioned I was happy to take this to consumer affairs to review, they were very quickly fine to cancel it without fee.

This is why I sail the high seas.

I fell for this too. I wanted InDesign for 1 month to make a decent looking CV when switching jobs. I felt really stupid when I tried to cancel and realised I’d be charged the remaining balance. Adobe lost me as a returning customer.

hey, just seeing this I don't want to hold back on what we are working, it might help some. It's an Adobe Illustrator alternative for the web. Still not launched officially but many designers use it in a beta mode. Feel free to check it out here. Happy about any feedback. Point is - it is free. Paid plans will come later with more expert features. https://home.heritagedesigner.com/share/ckzbdfl8y017j1ktw9ge...

This is almost as bad as the dark patterns employed by Intuit’s TurboTax.

Give Affinity products a try. They cover a variety of very serious use cases and they offer some of the highest production quality tutorials on their website to quickly train someone.

Is it legal to be forced to pay a fee that was never on the screen?

Why don’t more people use burner one use cards and cancel them after entering them in trials? That way you don’t need to worry you forget to end the trial and enter the contract

Just out of curiosity: what happens when you cancel the paypal subscription or chargeback the credit card transaction? Will banks be sympathetic to fraud like this?

At some point they switched from "free 7 day trial" to "if you cancel after 14 days" so I don't know what's really going on there.

I assume this means days 1-7 are completely unpaid, days 8-14 you've begun paying but without annual commitment, and after that you're both paying and annually committed.

Seems like it shouldn't be surprising then having to pay something after the 7th day?

Is it legal in the EU?

I guess not, just tried that and there's an additional step at the beginning - where you have to explicitly choose if you want monthly billing ($79,49/mo), yearly but billed monthly ($52,99/mo), or yearly paid upfront ($599,88)

Yet they wonder why folks would rather pirate old versions.

i am told origin of this was customers who subscribe for 1+ yrs wanting a big discount (without needing to pay upfront). but clearly the experience must improve, and there are many good suggestions for UX and copy in thread below that I’ll share w/ that team. frustrating to see, especially because the team we have today building our future products and services are here for the right reason. we can do better.

This is something businesses should be fined millions for

So this is basically a complain that one can't use something marked as an annual plan for just one month.

They do say “ Annual plan, billed monthly” don’t they?

One way to cancel is to chat with them and say that you now have an enterprise subscription via your company. They cancel without fee in that case.

Never sign up for anything Adobe … except for CC of course, totally worth it. The photo stock, they keep renewing it yearly, even after you cancel

I got caught in this a while ago and got out because I got mad at the service rep and said it was unfair. This was like 2 year ago now though.

I got caught out by Grammerly in a similar way into signing up for 12 months. Any good will I had towards the product is now in the gutter.

I wonder what the dark patters programmers/coders' of hn-community think about this? I really like to get their point of view.

“Just doing their job”

I was just thinking of switching to non-faang where the work life and salary tradeoff were just right.

With this business model Adobe may not last long

Adobe is now blocked from the networks I control. A page pops up with links to Inkscape, Gimp and other open source alternatives.

Meh. It’s not great, could definitely be clearer, but it’s also bordering on intentionally obtuse to claim you have no idea what ‘annual contract paid monthly’ means.

I mean, all of the words are right there. Any time I sign up for an annual contract I assume I’m in it for, well, about a year.

If I didn’t want an annual contract, or wanted to see if there were options, I’d simply hit that little drop down box there and voila - it’s even clearer.

as a subscriber to CC, i was thinking of canceling after reading this... but it seems it isn't a dark pattern at all? they advertise two rates: one if you pay month-by-month, and one if you pay for a 12-month term, billed monthly. An early termination fee is common if a contract is ended early, no?

Change your payment method to a virtual card (like privacy.com) then freeze it. Problem solved.

They tricked me. Now I will bend over backwards to never buy anything from them again.

Change your card to a prepaid debit card with a few bucks on it. Don't update.

£49.84/mo is way too expensive already, even without the contract lock-in...

Me over here just happily running my super old but still viable copy of CS6... :|

By far the easiest way to quit : Close you credit card, and order a new...

I switched to Gimp and Inkscape a few years ago for exactly this reason.

Adobe ... they have good products, but i will never give Adobe money.

What would happen if people performed chargebacks?

Adobe is one of the worst companies.

i enjoy watching big companies like Adobe being under the radar of the internet community

Expensify does something similar.

Shutterstock do the same thing.

cancel the credit card, dispute billing, many options

Cool!

Disgusting. What you should do is call your bank and reverse the charges for fraud. Unless you bank at Mercury in which case customer service will just laugh at you because they’re a shit bank (that I’m ditching today)

I think customers are a bit to blame for such shady companies. So many good alternatives to Adobe ecosystem exists but customers are mostly unwilling to switch to them and as result Adobe doesn’t have to worry about keeping customers satisfied.

Eh, this one's a little tough. Both my wife and I extensively use Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign on a frequent basis, and we're not even designers, we just like to make stuff. I've tried alternatives like Gimp and Inkscape, but they really don't even come close. I've never found an alternative to InDesign at all. There are some applications (especially photo editing apps on Mac) that are nice, but still don't really give you everything the CS suite gives.

Do I hate that I used to pay a (large) one time fee for a version and now I've given them thousands of dollars more than I'd have preferred? Yes. Do I think this 12-month contract dark pattern is scummy? Yes. But I also can't find suitable alternatives either, so in a sense they've earned their money in that regard.

Have you tried the Affinity suite? They even have an Indesign alternative (Publisher) and at reasonable prices. Sometimes they even go sale. Free updates too. Of course if you need EVERY feature of CS nothing else will do but there's some good stuff out there that's significantly more affordable.

> They even have an Indesign alternative (Publisher) and at reasonable prices.

Scribus also looks like an interesting open-source solution. (Anybody here have an "InDesign vs. Scribus" perspective?)

The most fully featured free and open source alternative to Adobe InDesign is Scribus. It's available for Linux, macOS, and Windows:

- Website: https://www.scribus.net

- Download ("Development Candidates" recommended): https://www.scribus.net/downloads/unstable-branch/

- Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/details/net.scribus.Scribus

- Source: https://www.scribus.net/websvn/listing.php?repname=Scribus

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