Think twice before signing subscription to Adobe products | Hacker News Reader

Think twice before signing subscription to Adobe products

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134 pointsEugeneOZ107 comments

Notice how Adobe support staff are quick to address each individual complaining customer's short term one-off problem of unsubscribing, yet they never acknowledge that there is a general overarching problem with unsubscribing being impossible because of their broken looping web site, or promise to fix the actual cause of such a frequent and long standing problem.

Why, after the many years the problem has been repeatedly reported, doesn't Adobe fix their apparently terribly designed and maintained web site, which sends many of their customers who are trying to unsubscribe into a frustrating infinite loop, instead of manually unsubscribing the few persistent squeaky wheels who one by one eventually find their way to the forum to complain and demand a refund?

Could the reason be that Adobe's staff is unable to fix the looping bug in their own web server that their users keep reporting? Do they not employ anyone who has the appropriate skill set to fix that problem? Do they not have a bug reporting and tracking system in place? Does Adobe, of all companies, not consider the web to be important enough to devote sufficient resources to competently maintaining their own web presence? Or perhaps there is another reason?

The reason is because it's a dark pattern they've purposefully implemented and maintained in its broken yet lucrative state, because it makes them a hell of a lot more money that way by systematically fucking their customers on a large scale, while also saving them money paying their staff to fix their "broken" web site that's actually working as designed, by making them more and more money each time it "malfunctions".

I think what it boils down to is that it's just a low priority for them to fix, versus working on their products. They probably have a fix in the works as part of some new redesign and have judged the current annoyance to not cost enough money to fix immediately. I'd chalk it up to incompetence versus malfeasance.

This has gone on for too many years, and makes them too much money, to be a mistake. They completely ignored and refused to acknowledge the original subject of the thread, which states explicitly: "how to cancel monthly subscription to photoshop? Website leads you in a loop".

I don't think Adobe's incompetent when it comes to maintaining their own web site. It's the business they're in, and what the tools they make do.

So to be charitable, I'd chalk it up to competent malfeasance.

But on the other hand, maybe they're suffering from eating their own dog food! Perhaps ColdFusion web sites are so buggy and hard to maintain that they can't even fix their own infinite looping problem after all these years. Perhaps it's so hard to hire competent ColdFusion programmers and interaction designers, that even Adobe doesn't have any on staff.

Maybe like Valve / Steam they do it because they can... until someone with a lawyer drags them through court and they're held accountable for building theft and fraud into their business model.

http://www.pcmag.com/news/350574/valve-fined-3m-in-australia...

Before it even went to trial they globally overhauled their refund system, presumably after realizing EU, USA, CA etc also have consumer protection laws designed to protect consumers from companies that are committing fraud.

I think it is more along the line to make more money: replace engineers with sales

Alternatively - it might be typical big company bureaucracy. These staff members might simply not have an effective way to communicate with anyone that could fix the underlying problem - without going seriously out of their way and maybe missing a few targets as a result.

The excuse of "our sales people have no way to contact the web developer who's on vacation, and we don't have a bug tracking system in place" might work for a dentist's office, but not a company that prides itself in developing online software and tools for maintaining web sites, and brands its products with the buzz-word "Cloud".

When one works for companies of such size, discovers there is a huge difference between how things should be and how they actually are.

Such theories can easily be tested with a simple thought experiment: suppose there were a similar bug at the other end of the pipeline, in the subscribe feature. How long would it take for the bug to be fixed?

I agree, the sales / support staff is probably a different department. They probably don't even know who to contact. I'd imagine it would work something like this. I need to contact my manager, who then has to contact their boss. The boss will have to find the head of the support department in charge of this. Crap, it went to the wrong department. You have to email this person instead. Then it has to trickle down again. It's basically a game of telephone.

WTF. Every product should have an internal bug tracker, and support should especially be able to file bugs against products. Those bugs have just cost the company money by using support resources. I don't understand how this can be hard to understand.

> systematically fucking their customers on a large scale

The linked thread seems to be 20-ish people scattered over three years. Does the issue described really happen every time anyone tries to cancel?

I ran into a similar issue with Spotify. Reported a bug in their unsubscribe process and they would only respond with "don't worry about that, I'll do it manually" as if that was the norm.

> Why, after the many years the problem has been repeatedly reported, doesn't Adobe fix their apparently terribly designed and maintained web site, which sends many of their customers who are trying to unsubscribe into a frustrating infinite loop, instead of manually unsubscribing the few persistent squeaky wheels who one by one eventually find their way to the forum to complain and demand a refund?

Our culture loves the safety of recurring revenue more and more every year. It's not a technical problem, it's a business one. How can eliminate market uncertainties in our cash flows? Easy! Auto billing! People are busy and miss line items on their credit card records.

I sort of hope card companies start to look into people's frustrations regarding recurring revenue and implement policies based on it. Or the FTC. Policies such as 3 click cancellation, or maybe even higher merchant fees for recurring transactions.

I'm not afraid to report recurring transactions to credit card company. They just block your number with the charging company if you explain to them that their site didn't allow you to. Eventually they're bound to set a nice letter to Adobe if we all start doing this.

> Our culture loves the safety of recurring revenue more and more every year. It's not a technical problem, it's a business one.

Both statements absolutely true. But the problem here is shady unsubscribe, not recurring revenue per-se, right?

What Adobe is doing is pretty low and shitty, and I'm as averse to signing up for subscriptions as anyone, but software businesses do have recurring costs. The recurring part is actually simpler and more straightforward these days than the buy version 4.0 for $199 model of yesteryear, so I can see why it's popular from the business perspective. Updates and releases are continuous now, they didn't used to be. Forums, online help, support, upgrades, patches, servers, cloud storage & backup, etc. all things that cost and all things that consumers have much higher expectations for than we used to a decade or two ago. Saas businesses all run on AWS or whatever other cloud provider, and AWS charges monthly for their services.

For a business to make the buy it once for a fixed price model work these days, they have to do the equivalent of an actuarial table, and use statistics to guess how much a customer will cost on average, in order to set the purchase price. Customers that cost the company a lot in terms of support and upgrades are actually being subsidized by customers that cost the company less. It starts to sound a lot like insurance.

Looked at this way, a subscription might appear more fair, because the customer is charged for what they use, as opposed to the average of what everyone uses.

I fail to see how subscription vs one time purchase costs are any way related to how much a customer costs to support, both situations have edge cases of demanding customers eating up support staff time endlessly.

If anything per-customer support costs go way up in a SaaS situation because of the (mostly artifical) introduction of having to run the software on your own servers.

Maybe sign up with a stored value card, instead of a credit card.

If you really want to make Adode dance and fix this issue right away, file a complaint with your state attorneys general office and that of state Adobe is incorporated in (appears to be California). They'll immediately address your issue and potentially feel the legal pressure from the state government(s) to actually fix the larger over arching issue or face being sued by an entity with "unlimited" resources (rather than just a little peon consumer like you or me).

Some years ago, I bought a perpetual license for FlashBuilder 4.7. Recently, it failed to build an Air package because the product, which hasn't been updated for years, connects to an obsolete time server. To fix the problem, I followed the directions in Adobe's support site. Right after doing this, it asked me to re-enter my license key. It rejected it, saying it was no longer valid. A license that was sold as perpetual, no longer valid!

Their support was completely worthless: after being redirected to five different support teams that had no clue how to solve my issue, I realized I was never going to get a solution, and gave up.

My personal lesson learned: never buy or use anything from Adobe ever again.

Email them, ask your money back.

Doubt that is going to be any easier to get them to do.

No, but potentially significantly more valuable, depending on how much the product cost.

>connects to an obsolete time server

Obsolete in what sense?

A hosts file entry might be your friend in this scenario, if you're referring to a no-longer-reachable time server.

Anyway, sorry to hear that code rot screwed you out of a perpetual license.

I recently tried to subscribe with Adobe. I really only wanted access to two apps: Illustrator and Photoshop. I have absolutely no use for any of their other apps, and I hate all their cloud stuff. Unfortunately, that forces you to buy a $50/mo plan. Regardless, I thought it'd still be worth it, so I was willing to pay the price. After subscribing I download their Creative Cloud installer, only to find out it doesn't on case-sensitive file systems on macOS!

Unsubscribing wasn't that bad, though. They have a bullshit popup where they force you to give a reason. But afterwards, it seems to have gone fine. We'll see if any charges show up next month.

Honestly, this is a huge problem with all subscription services. I should be able to easily unsubscribe from anything without having to jump through a bunch of hoops. I don't want to have to speak with anyone on the phone, nor should I be forced to tell you why I'm unsubscribing. This is an area where I believe we might need a bit more legislation. I've read stories of people trying to unsubscribe from Comcast and getting immediately passed along to their retention department.

All you have to do is make sure that your credit card has no limit. They try to charge it a couple of times in a week (I think it is called the grace period) and when they can't charge it, they automatically drop your subscription, and without any penalties. This happened to me once, I was on a discount plan and tried to reinstate my subscription but their system is so complicated that although the rep tried to help, he could do nothing. I don't know if they would have a legal leverage on me to charge the penalties by other means if I lived in the US, but you'd better try, as you have nothing to lose.

But then wouldn't you just have to deal with debt collectors calling?

Your comment about a case-sensitive filesystem on macOS made me curious. Are you using APFS or anything else? What's your motivation to using a custom filesystem?

Case-sensitive HFS+ is an option when formatting a disk.

I'm using case-sensitive HFS+. When I last reinstalled macOS on my laptop it was one of the options available. I thought about it and thought a case-sensitive file system was more sensible.

Any problems with case-sensitive file systems must be solved if we want a smooth migration to APFS, which is case-sensitive. I've already reported or helped fix a handful of minor bugs related to case-sensitivity.

I can't see the advantage to having two files open and Open in the same directory. Why would you want that?

I have had zip files fail to extract because of a file and a directory with the same name but different casing... Perhaps the question is: why wouldn't you want it?

A better example would be where changing the case actually affects the semantics of the filenames involved: for example, you might have files named "formE" and "ForMe" which you're unpacking from a UNIX repository where the original authors never had to worry about this causing some sort of naming conflict. It's really unfortunate when simply unpacking such a repository to your disk ends up having one of those files overwrite the other.

(My preference is to leave the root partition case-insensitive, since some apps require that, but to keep all my data and source code on a case-sensitive partition.)

I encountered a bug once with an open source package where it contained both a file called Makefile and makefile. Is this a good practice? No. Would it be easy to miss, because make will by default open makefile first and only fall back to Makefile if makefile doesn't exist? Yes.

Edit: Makefile existed in the tarball after makefile, so it would overwrite the real makefile with whatever junk was in Makefile, and it would fail to build.

What's the advantage in not being able to have a file called 'Open' in the same directory as one called 'open'?

...being able to ignore case in filenames?

Does every language have a meaningful equivalent of "case insensitive" or does that mean we end up either creating lots of special cases or preventing certain languages from being used? I'm ready to be convinced otherwise, but it seems the simplest thing to do is not try to introduce the concept of "case insensitivity".

The issue is that programs will behave unexpectedly unless they know and respect the filesystem's rules for case insensitivity (which might be tricky when you go beyond ASCII):

    $ touch Open
    $ ls open*
    ls: open*: No such file or directory
    $ ls open
    open

I ran into so possible reason recently. Because Linux is case sensitive. So if you're making server software locally you can easily run into a bug where you reference "SomeFile" in your build/package/website locally but on disk it's named "Somefile". Everything works. Then you push to your server and things break.

I'm not going to switch my laptop to be case sensitive but I did just run into that issue.

The APFS developer preview in Sierra is indeed case sensitive, but we don’t know if that’ll continue to be the case […] in the upcoming general release.

I’d like say that it’d never ever happen on the Mac, but since iOS also uses a case-sensitive filesystem, I wouldn't be that surprised. Sad, but not surprised.

> I should be able to easily unsubscribe from anything without having to jump through a bunch of hoops. I don't want to have to speak with anyone on the phone, nor should I be forced to tell you why I'm unsubscribing.

As a consumer, I usually want the exact same thing, and it annoys me when I get prodded for reasons. Feels like talking to pushy car salesmen sometimes, and makes me tense & clam up.

More recently as a business owner, I'm surprised when people pay me money, and then later cancel and refuse to talk about what they were looking for before they gave me money. I can (and do) help save people money when they ask for things I don't have, and I can recommend other services that do what they're looking for. Sometimes people who cancel reach out to me to vent their anger for paying for something they didn't want, and still won't discuss what they wanted.

It's an absolute mantra of the startup business world to iterate your product based on customer feedback, so you can imagine one has to get creative to gather enough feedback to have statistical meaningfulness in the era where response rates & attention spans are dropping off a cliff and internet noise is through the roof. The majority of meaningful feedback I can get is limited to 'paid and hasn't canceled yet', 'paid and canceled' and 'visited but didn't pay'. I want to fix the problems when people cancel, I want to give them what they're looking for, but it's pretty hard to find that out. (Always has been, btw, and I believe the consumer has 0 responsibility to say anything, just noting my sympathy with both sides.)

I don't want to force anyone to say why, but I do want to offer the chance to give feedback. I do want to have a conversation about what you need, and it really does sometimes happen that people cancel because they think a feature isn't there that actually is there.

Anyway, I don't mean to defend Adobe in any way, their actions here are unreasonable IMO, but for smaller less monopolistic less bullying companies, where there's a reasonable chance the employees will hear & respond to your feedback, maybe even make changes for you, it might actually be to your benefit to use the annoying popups to ask questions before subscribing & after unsubscribing. I wouldn't expect Adobe to do this, but I usually give out coupons & extend trials anytime people ask, I frequently respond to feature requests with new features, and ever since my new perspective on feedback UI has been altered by my own business, and I've started being more willing to ask questions & share feedback, I've found a lot more business with people like me that will respond in ways that help me get what I want.

This is a wide-ranging problem, actually. Apple strongly recommends you NOT create a case sensitive file system, particularly on your system drive.

It gets even worse if you need to do subscriptions for your team. The management console is an utter joke. Adobe owns some of the killer apps of the creative industry but there are alternatives:

Photo editing (Photoshop):

- Windows: Gimp, Xara Photo, Affinity Photo, Corel Photo. Paint.net

- macOS: Pixelmator, Affinity Photo, Gimp

Vector editing for digital (Adobe had Fireworks but abandoned it, Illustrator is rather print and clumsy):

- Windows: Affinity Designer, Inkscape

- macOS: Sketch, Inskape, Affinity Designer

Vector editing for print (Adobe Illustrator):

- Windows: Inkscape

- macOS: Inkscape

Desktop Publishing (Adobe InDesign):

- Windows/macOS: QuarkXPress which is even more expensive

This is a good list. The alternatives have seriously improved in the last few years (Seemingly after Creative Cloud became a thing.) I've been using Pixelmator over photoshop and Sketch over illustrator for the past few months and it has been great for the most part. I'm not a pro user of either (I'm more on the dev side) but they have served my uses well.

Linux gets no love?

Because Adobe CC products don't run on Linux? Think before commenting!

You don't need Adobe Cc on Linux if you're going with one of the alternatives. And both Gimp and Inkscape are Linux applications, GIMP is even part of the GNU suite!

> You don't need Adobe Cc on Linux

What? Even if you wanted to, you can't use Adobe CC on Linux. Doesn't run. So these aren't alternatives, they are your only options. It's not that "Linux gets no love", it's that Linux simply doesn't apply in this case, because nobody who's currently using Adobe CC is on Linux.

I happen to use Linux as my only boot OS and I actually own a copy of Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat that I use semi-regularly. Everytime I want to use either, I have to spin up a Virtualbox Windows VM just to edit a few pictures. The alternative is to run it on WINE, which technically even qualifies as "runs on Linux" but isn't perfect.

So I would actually love to replace the Adobe products wih native Linux alternatives, because then I can get rid of the Windows VM or the WINE trouble.

Desktop Publishing: Scribus (Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, ...)

What can Scribus or any DTP system can do that LaTeX/TeX can't?

I haven't heard of DTP, QuarkXPress in 20 years. I'm surprised they're still relevant today.

Good enough results for graphic heavy layouts without high labor costs.

I'm a typographer and sometime book designer (as well as a programmer). I've also used InDesign since 1.0, so I'm very familiar with what it does. Having said that, I'd love to find an alternative -- InDesign has gotten bloated and awful over the years, not to mention the dreadful subscription policy. (It's one of the few CC apps for which I cannot buy a standalone/perpetual license.)

However, Scribus comes nowhere close to InDesign. Here are several basic things I require from a page-layout application if it's going to be any kind of competitor to InDesign:

1. Work in picas and ems, not inches. (Inches are fine for specifying page sizes, but beyond that, picas are the standard in typography.)

2. Be able to zoom arbitrarily. Scribus doesn't seem to support zoom levels more than 400%, so I can't work with even medium-sized text at all accurately.

3. Be able to easily set kerning and tracking on arbitrary text. The Scribus manual caims this is possible, but mucking around with the latest dev version (1.5.3), I couldn't figure out how to do it. (I did really well at totally fucking up my layout just by scrolling, through. Scribus is a bit too response in some ways.)

4. Be able to use OpenType features. Apparently Scribus 1.5.4 will include some of that. But to a typographer in this century, OpenType is essential, not optional.

Apologies to the Scribus developers, but being told that it's a capable publishing app is a bit like a C programmer being told that BASIC should be just fine for them -- hey, they're both programming languages, right?

And yes, I've attempted to use TeX (and LaTeX, and ConTeXT, and XeLaTeX, and...) to do high-quality typographical work. It's possible, but the amount of effort to undo Knuth's poor aesthetic choices (not to mention interface with archaic architecture) is significant, and frankly, not worth my time.

Grumpy typographer is grumpy.

I find the same types of gaps across the OSS photo/graphics/layout stack. For my avocational use, OSS is great (and money efficient). If I had to make a living, I'd buy Adobe CS, because I would a) need transferrable skills for in-house employment, and b) need the refined GUIs and workflows to compete with everyone else using Adobe CS.

Affinity is excellent! Thanks... I use Photoshop once every few months and have been wanting to lose the recurring cost for a while.

Photo RAW/workflow management:

- Lightroom

- Aperture (now discontinued)

- Darktable (open source, does RAW conversion but not great on library management)

- CaptureOne

- ???

Indeed. Quit Adobe like a drug and never looked back. I am fortunate enough to have a personal license of CS6 Master Collection but rarely use it. The people that are really stuck are graphic (non app/web) designers because InDesign is the standard and there are no viable replacement...yet. Adobe and Autodesk are both examples of "too big to fail" and it is only a matter of time before some company(ies) come along and take their market for good.

>only a matter of time before some company(ies) come along and take their market for good.

But folks have been saying that for years and also pointing to the open-source alternatives as done here and it has just gotten worse with CC.

For individual people, that have to retrain and use things as they wish, open source stuff works. If I proposed that sort of move at my company, I would get laughed out of the room. It's too entrenched as an "industry standard", even though every user I comes across curses various products at least a few times a day. As a desktop/application support person, I have to spend an inordinate amount of time daily helping figure people (on $3-5k workstations that can handle advanced 3D modeling) what new thing f'd up. CC being installed alongside our previous CS6 license has made this worse.

I don't think any investor would risk the money it would take to take on Photoshop/Illustrator replacements and whatever would be created would not only need to allow users to work flawlessly with those file formats but meet the baseline of tools, UI, and stability (though the latter might not be as hard). I'm not well-versed in all the possibilities out there but, like Autodesk, I think this is an extremely difficult monopoly to break.

I really hate Adobes subscription model. I completely understand why they are doing (increase revenue, decrease piracy) but rather than support it I simply stopped using their products. I had a bit of a work around to get a monthly AI subscription cancelled, but it wasn't as bad as some of these examples.

That's not an option for many people though.

I don't mind the subscription that much personally, but what I do mind is their scam of making it seem like a monthly subscription when it is actually yearly. To cancel they make you pay half of whatever your "leftover" subscription rate is, so if you are on the $50/mo plan you have to pay $25/month * however many months are left till your actual yearly renewal date. This is hidden in their terms and not actually stated anywhere that I saw on the main sub pages.

This model is fine for companies and large businesses, but for small time contractors that might only need software for a month or two it is a complete scam. I missed my renewal date this past year but in the mean time I've started gathering alternatives for all the software I use from Adobe.

Their pricing page clearly says "annual plan, paid monthly" [1] which isn't deceptive. So it's not a scam, it's just expensive.

[1] https://creative.adobe.com/plans?sdid=PGRQQLYP&mv=search&s_k...

The have a pay by month option, it just costs more.

See my comment below, they do have a pay by month option. It's just harder to find and costs more per month than an annual paid monthly.

I used it for a few months in 2016 - cost something like $50 CAD/mo

I am so sick if this perpetual dark pattern being used by online services. The following has saved me tons of time: I have setup separate debit cards for my online subscriptions. When I want to cancel one, I go through their cancel process once, and then I cancel the debit card used for that subscription, get a new one from my credit union (same day service with a credit union) and update my other online subscriptions if that debit card was used with them. My credit union (First Entertainment, southern California) will issue me as many debit cards as I want, so I have bad-acting online services all on the same card, for easy canceling.

You do realize that charges to dead cards attached to live accounts can and do go through, right?

Update: Adobe made this thread of forum hidden (only visible for registered users). Bad move, Adobe. Here is public copy: https://cdn.rawgit.com/e-oz/79954d0d7fff37b5f3c8d322202721be...

Thread shows up normally for me, no login or anything.

It's also three years old...

And still actual.

Unfortunately, Adobe is a terrible company these days. I had been using their products for over a decade, so unsubscribing and vowing never to work with their software again was not an easy decision for me. It sucks, because I think their software is great, but the company has completely lost my business.

I'm a custom software developer, mostly e-commerce, and over the years I have been asked numerous times to implement similar schemes.

The most popular is a recurring payments, such as for health supplements, that you cannot cancel on the web site. Not a broken system, but just no way to do it. You have to contact them via email. And many of them have a unspoken policy of not cancelling on the 1st, or maybe even the 2nd, request.

My suggestion is contact your credit card and declare the charge fraud and stopped.

It's important to contact the CC and declare fraud, because there often is a $15 chargeback in addition to reimbursement. If enough people could do that...

Please don't do this...

The fraud chargeback code is supposed to be reserved for transactions where the card holder did not participate and are used for training a variety of systems. Everything from product like FICO Falcon that is used by card issuers to detect fraudulent transactions to databases that are used to detect compromised systems. Adding a lot of bad data decreases the performance of these systems and makes it easier for fraudster to operate.

Correctly disputing the transaction will get the same result and also makes it easier for supervising banks to identify the problem and either get the merchant to resolve the issue or take the merchant down. When they are incorrectly coded as fraud the supervising bank will often go after the merchant to tighten their fraud systems rather than addressing their behavior (bad business practices).

Sometimes you just have to cancel your credit card and get a new one.

I had to do this with d××× the rip off merchants in Australia who refused to acknowledge or fix issues with their non functioning wifi broadband service years ago.

Only THEN did they contact me saying give us money, so I sent a complaint to the ombudsman and they suddenly said you don't owe us anything and cancelled the $300 they said I owed.

I feel I'll do the same, I'm not going to let them just take as much money as they want from my wallet.

Canceling your credit card may not always work; there are methods in play which let companies who provide subscriptions to get your updated card information and continue to charge you.

In its most innocent form, this is useful when your card naturally expires (or is reissued), since you don't have to go back and re-setup your CC with dozens of companies. In its most nefarious, there is no way to stop charges short of completely shutting down a CC account.

As an addition: today Adobe sent me email that they are going to increase price (2x) and there is no way to cancel subscription.

No way to cancel? Can you stop payment?

No, user can't remove/change card data or cancel subscription. And when I contact their support, they don't do nothing. They promise "we will cancel soon" but nothing happens.

I meant contact the credit card company to prevent paying further charges from Adobe.

Will try.. Sounds unusual to me. But maybe it's usual practice.

I don't know how common it is. But if Adobe is raising prices outside of your agreement and not allowing you to cancel, I think it's worth a try.

I'm also in the same position. I got an email few days ago that they're going to increase the price (25% in my case) but since my 1 year subscription end this month, I proceed to contact support to cancel. (Because apparently in some country, it's not possible to cancel via the web interface for some unknown reason.)

Support promise the subscription will be cancelled and I will receive confirmation email within 2-3 hours. Now, a day has passed and still not even a single email from Adobe. I choose to have support transcript sent to my email though, just in case it wasn't cancelled.

I have very visible options to cancel the plans and to change the payment options. In fact I changed them when my old card was cancelled

I have a subscription in Spain, I have not received that email and our laws say that if there is a unilateral change of conditions, they should be told with a month in advnace and the consumer can cancel if he doesn't agree

Price rise is declared for limited set of countries. Also, "Cancel" button is not hidden not for all users.

One of several reasons I left my first job out of college is that the boss made me remove the ability to cancel a subscription from our web application. I thought it was pure jackassery to make people call and then try to wheel and deal to keep them on, but it did make a surprisingly real difference to the bottom line.

No doubt something similar is at play with Adobe. Personally, I'm not sure I'd be opposed to a law or regulation of some kind that any subscription you can sign up for from a website you can also cancel from the website.

The whole "let's make it hard to cancel" play is so slimy.

I can see both sides to the issue.

As a consumer, I loathe any company that makes it difficult to cancel.

As the owner of a business management platform, we've found that more than half of our cancellations are due to lack of knowledge.

The product is fairly complex and has hundreds (possibly 1,000) settings that cover just about any customization a business in our niche could want. People don't want to learn or read documentation, so we offer one on one video calls with our team to support configuration.

The cancellations come when they forget about the (free) one on one time and get frustrated with all the configuration.

The way we handle cancellations is to follow the "don't be a dick" policy. When a customer requests cancellation (a single email to their acct manager) we remind them about all the resources they still have available and offer to chat with them to see if there's a workable solution for them. If we don't hear back within 1 day, we process the cancellation and refund.

You're still kind of being a dick to anyone that really does want to cancel. The flip side to the "half" of the customers that you can retain with this policy is the other half of the customers that just want to end their subscription and would be better served by a webpage and not having to get past a customer support script to do it.

In 2008 I was doing some contract work for a print shop that was still using CS2. For most work, it was fine.

As a graphic designer, I'm shackled to Adobe's line. However, I've avoided moving to CC. I did a trial and found that most of the new 'features' didn't benefit my workflow. Illustrator was significantly slower, Photoshop was alright, and InDesign is always the same.

The deeper issue is that the suite itself is sloppy. It's never been great -- but we've grown to love it (Stockholm syndrome...)

Inconsistent hotkeys across applications, odd behaviors (e.g. OSX users cmd+tabbing from photoshop to Chrome.) It feels like Adobe never really improves their products, but merely adds a few tweaks, a handful of moderately useful features, then slaps a new version number on it.

For me, its not worth moving from a paid-for product to a subscription model. I'm not alone in this either. The $50/m isn't a bad price, but I personally feel that Adobe needs to take a step back and focus on how their applications interact with each other and also how the user interacts between each application.

This doesn't even account for the somewhat sketchy 'difficult / impossible to unsubscribe' issues, user info leaks, etc.

It is convenient to have a service where you can generate "virtual credit cards" and set monthly or all-time spending limits to each of them separately and close the cards when you need.

In Finland we have Aktia Wallet[1], but probably similar services exist in other markets as well.

[1] https://aktiawallet.fi/web/

A bit late to the game, but the consumer side risks of the subscription model got me a-thinking.

My main credit card offers a one time temporary credit card number for use when I want to buy something from a dodgy website. I log into the credit card company website, hit a couple of buttons, and generate a random CC number with an expiration date one month out.

This works great for a one time purchase, but rather badly for a subscription purchase. I guess what I would do is, when wanting to cancel the subscription is to change my billing credit card from my "real" credit card to one time credit card number with a short expiry date. The one time card number will be dead within 1 month after such a change.

This is why you should never sign up for automatic billing. I had an issue with Verizon some years ago, and was glad I had taken the time to explicitly pay my bill every month. I told a customer service person to cancel my account at the end of my contract. When this didn't happen, and I kept receiving bills, I spent some time trying to navigate customer retention (i.e. "customer disservice") without much luck. Fortunately, I had made sure to never enable auto-billing, so I simply stopped paying, and they eventually took a hint and cancelled my service.

I'm glad I have a pre-"Cloud" version of Lightroom, so I don't have to deal with this nonsense.

Make sure they don't put it on your credit report.

Can confirm. Happened to me.

Recently made it to the cancellation page. They offered two options: pay a penalty for canceling early, or get two months free.

Took the two months free and signed some agreements. Wish me luck!

When I had 4 month remaining, I have called in and basically gave me same deal. Basically they didn't charge me four two months. After two more charges, when I hit my anniversary month, I have canceled my subscription. I don't think they made me sign agreements though.

Mods, can someone please change the thread title? I am pretty sure this violates site guidelines on titles.

Taking a more bird's eye view, this is what happens when to buy something you have to give over the information that lets anyone take money from you.

Things like this would probably be better served in many ways, such as putting money on a temporary credit card.

I had a poor experience was cancelling Adobe Premiere Pro. Let this be a wake up call to Adobe. Make it easy for your customers to come and go.

Treat your customers with contempt and well, the bitter taste in my mouth will take years to clear.

Contact your credit card company, and stop payment. If you tried unsubscribing multiple times in good faith, then that should be enough. Softbank of Japan tried pulling this fiasco years back, and the above tactic was used by subscribers.

Maybe the answer is being able to control is via the payment processor like this subscription supports Apple payment subscribe /opt out or whoever and that middle man can kill off the account.

There needs to be some sane solution in between Sketch and Photoshop/Illustrator. The former is a little too simple, the later becoming byzantine and crazy expensive.

Affinity Designer and Photo are excellent products, I would argue that affinity designer is much easier to work with than Illustrator.

What happens if you buy a years' worth of pre-paid subscription to CC? Will they also slap a charge on you if you decide not to renew it after a year?

I refuse to ever pay for their products again because of this. I shouldn't have to call the phone number to unsubscribe from a web product.

Nice way of punishing paying users ;)

This is the reason to support Pixelmator and Sketch.

Pro Tip: use PayPal account for any Adobe subscriptions. If you suddenly want to cancel Adobe subscription cancel it in PayPal. Very easy

Can't you just... call your bank and tell them to reject any payment requests from Adobe? It puzzles me to see so many people in that thread saying they've been charged for months and can't stop it... if that happens to you, your problem might be something else...

I tried to do this for my gym. After many back and forth calls with the bank and them telling me they just have to dispute the charge and do something else. Went in person to the bank (WF) and she said there was nothing they could (probably means will) do and I have to get a new credit card).

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