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Comment by tomnipotent | Hacker News Reader

> discount for committing to a year

It's worse than that. They don't even offer a monthly subscription contract - it's purely annual, but they advertise and promote monthly with fine print.

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Yes they do, but they hide it. On the plans page,[0] if you click "see all plans", a true monthly subscription option appears. But the prices are unreasonably large to force you into the "annual, billed monthly" trick. For example, the full creative suite (Creative Cloud Pro) is $35 "a month" with the annual contract, or... $105 on a monthly contract!

[0]: https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html

Looks like this may be a recent change after they were ordered to pay $150M for deceptive practices.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/894555/adobe-75-million-doj-se...

They have always had a monthly subscription.

They always had it, I'm checking my email receipts from 2011~2013

They've always billed monthly, but the thing they got in trouble for was that it was attached to a 1-year commit where customers were getting hit with early termination fees pro-rated to the rest of the contract. If they did offer this it was hidden deep in the sign-up flow enough that they lost a lawsuit over it.

I'm looking at adobe.com in the wayback machine for 2015 and while the CSS is missing, the <select> dropdown right on the /plans page include:

* Annual plan, paid monthly

* Annual plan, prepaid

* Monthly plan

And this is how I remember it back when, I signed up for a short gig where I only needed it for 3 months and went for the monthly plan, and then when the gig became a contract I switched to the annual paid monthly.

I think what changed is now the plans page says upfront "early termination fees apply" right next to the price.

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