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Comment by gervwyk | Hacker News Reader

A while back I needed to do a project on an adobe product, I signed up and installed. After completing the project I uninstalled the software, some how I miss read that what I signed up for was an annual subscription of $11 per month. And when I stopped my subscription they charged me for the full year’s remaining fees.

I was shocked, it left a very bitter taste of bad practice on their part in my opinion. I have since switched to only work with Affinity products, and I cannot be more happy with the quality of the Affinity suite of products.

As a developer who has to deal with odd here and there graphic problems, Affinity products with a great once-off price model makes so much more sense.

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This is my experience. We had a freelancer for a few months who needed Photoshop, didn't realise we were signing up for a year.

They advertise it as a monthly subscription, but it's actually a monthly payment plan for a yearly subscription.

When I told them this was unacceptable, not what was advertised, and demanded a refund, they tried to bribe me by saying if I stopped pursuing a refund for the company they would give me a free year on my personal Adobe account. Explaining to them that I have no need for Adobe products myself, and that this bribery was really dodgy and making me think even less of of Adobe, was a tough process. They couldn't understand.

And here I was thinking how did I miss this on the signup process. Incredibly concerning that their marketing seems to deliberately apply this practise.

On the Photoshop marketing page it's advertised as a monthly fee (no *, no †, no footnote). Not even a "from $X", it just says the price.

Clicking "Buy now" takes you to the product selection page. On this page each plan has the exact price. It's the same as the price on the previous page. No footnotes, asterisks, or anything else. There is an asterisk next to the free month of stock photo access, which implies that they do use footnotes where necessary. Again the price is not "from $X", it's just $X.

Click "Buy Now" and you're in the checkout flow. The call-to-action is entering your email address. The summary shows the total as being the exact price. No footnotes, no asterisks, no fine print. However, the price is only now listed as not a per-month price (as it has been on the previous 2 pages), but as an annual price paid monthly. You can change this to monthly price, but it's 50% more expensive, proving that the "$X per month" advertisement is incorrect.

In the UK I think this would probably be classed as false advertising, and I think any refund complaint would be upheld in court or by the trading standards authority, which is probably why they gave me a refund when I pushed them.

Affinity's stuff looks nice. Oh how I wish they'd release a Lightroom replacement.

Is that not what their Photo app is? I guess it seems a bit more photoshop-flavored, but it looks like it has various lightroom-like features.

There's darktable, and it's getting very good (albeit quite complicated).

Luckily when I needed to install Acrobat Pro for a month I suspected Adobe was running such a scam so I used a Privacy credit card. After I finished with their product I paused the card and sent customer support an email asking to cancel (since the online cancel form wasn’t working for some reason.) I watched as Adobe attempted to charge my card several times over the next few days. Luckily Privacy declined all those charges since the card was paused.

The only other company I’ve had such an experience with has been Stamps.com.

Chargeback time.

This. Since I started using my credit card more for purchases, I’ve used the power of chargeback on a few occasions and it’s wonderful. It puts the burden on the vendor to fight it, and 90% of the time they either don’t or the CC sides with you.

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