Adobe charges subscription cancellation fee
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I didn't want it at all! Anyway, I sucked it up, got on with the remainder of the year, because they wouldn't let me put the cancellation in early, had to do it X months before the end. Then life happened and I missed the deadline to cancel and got suckered for a second year!
Fuck Adobe and this practice is all I have to say, I stick strictly to Open Source options now. It may have been my fault for not reading the first time, but robbing me a second time by counting on me missing the cancellation because they wouldn't let me do it there and then is just scummy.
For a long time the local telephone company in British Columbia (Telus) was giving away "free" xboxes or 46 inch flat screen TVs if you locked yourself into a triple play service contract. Of course the buy-out price to end the contract early far exceeded the value of the product given out.
So for example a phone on a plan is fine as there's a capital good but a gym isn't.
1. adobe waives the cancellation fee for australian customers
2. adobe eliminates the discounted annual plan for australian customers
I really like the moves T-Mobile has done to change this. They very transparent that you are financing the phone on your monthly bill and then receiving monthly credit to off set the monthly payment.
If you sign a 2-3 year contract and want to break it before it ends, there will always be some kind of penalty.
The extra insult was they called it a "discount package" (50% off!), but it was already baked into all the advertised prices. In other words you pay double the listed price if you don't take the lock-in.
RAW Photo import and editing is currently limited in Krita, and you cannot export RAW formats. But even professionals tend not to use destructive layer based editors like gimp/krita/photoshop/painter/paintshop pro etc and are instead using dedicated software like lightroom, rawtherapee and darkroom.
But if your output format is not RAW, then you have more than enough to edit "photos".
You have layers, masking, vectors and spatial bitmap editors. That's all any of these editors workflows have been since the 90's. Anything else is extra.
Put me in front of Photoshop on modern mac or IFX Amazon Paint on Irix and my workflow and (sloppy) output would be the same.
For example, there is no printing support. Units everywhere (other than document creation) are in pixels and cannot be changed to millimeters, etc. Tools (like drawing a rectangle) operate on the current layer instead of creating a new one like Photoshop, which makes drawing annoying. Guides aren’t that fantastic to use. There’s a lot of areas that require polish in Krita.
Having to do this is a terrible felling and I feel like a bad person, but I at least put the cancellation fee I would have paid to good use by buying Affinity Designer.
Adobe hasn’t even sent an email saying yet charge failed and I have to update my payment method out anything else. It’s as if they are aware of how shady the cancellation fee is and won’t chase you down for it.
My wife was/is happy with the anniversary present.
Adobe is in the same ring of trust as a random shady website and one ring above a Nigerian prince.
It depends on the company and sales contract, but as you signed up to an agreement for the subscription on these terms it's possible that Adobe would be able to sell the unpaid fees off to collection agencies.
You can make up any persona on the account and they wont know who to pursue.
The account name and address can really be anything... and this is also true for the CC on file.
The consumer now has to worry not only about choosing a decent product, but also about ways the company could extract value from them without being transparent about that, or by hiding a clause in their TOS.
Could you imagine how much slower and inefficient the economic system would be if we were expected to read every TOS of every software we install and every single service we sign up for?
No, this is not fine. Do not accept bullshit terms meant to extract value from your pocket at no marginal cost for the business or no benefit to you as a consumer.
Everything they did was legal until this. If they won’t process it, send them a letter with your state attorney general’s consumer affairs (or, if you’re a business, commercial division) Cc’d. Address it to their general counsel. State you cancel your contract with them effective such and such date. Contract termination is quite strictly defined in law, for obvious reasons.
Not sure what one can really do about it.
I think also the whole "you'll need an army of lawyers" idea is probably born from confirmation bias (settled cases get NDAs). I wonder if we shouldn't require registering a settled case, if there was any court action (arranging a date, say) then settlement details would be published? I guess it might encourage frivolous suits.
Important takeaway: only buy month to month plans when testing out services.
EDIT: I’m not a huge fan of subscription models in general. Software doesn’t need to change at the rate it is these days, but it does work wonders for the bottom lines of all these companies.
EDIT2: Monthly payments to open source software is a better investment because they actually need funding, and they aren’t paying shareholders profits.
Adobe deserves all the badwill they are getting in this thread, it’s 100% on them.
It does list the "Best Value" plan, but when you go to "Buy", it presents a shopping cart with the following text (no fine print, no other tricks), and even uses the word "commitment":
"Commitment:
Annual plan, paid monthly: US$52.99/mo."
Even at that point, the above is in a drop-down, and you can change it to "Annual plan, pre-paid", or "Monthly plan".
Pay for movies, DRM breaks it Pay for software, it's discontinued
At any rate, what's even worse for me is that you can't cancel in the last 3 months of the contract with ISPs which nobody tells you so it's even easier to get stuck with it for an extra year.
https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html
If you signed up for a yearly plan paid monthly, the cancellation fee is finishing your contract.
If you didn't want to agree to pay by the year maybe you shouldn't have signed up for a year of service?
When you click "See plans and pricing details" it gives you the Annual monthly and ACTUAL monthly prices. Pic: https://imgur.com/gxokkST
If you click Buy Now the ACTUAL monthly price is hidden from view in a drop-down. Pic: https://imgur.com/l05UZra
I don't know a claims court in the OECD that would rule in favour of Adobe here. Misrepresenting the monthly price up-front is false advertising.
This is a dark pattern, Adobe should be shamed.
What? ISP and similar contracts in Germany almody work exactly like this but with 2 years minimum not 1 and no cancelation in the last 3 months of the period.
1. No contract, pay monthly
2. Annual contract, pay monthly (cheaper than 1)
3. Annual contract, pay in one go (cheaper than 1 & 2)
You pick one of the three options and check out. Where exactly is the confusion?
They are also advertising their Lightroom cloud storage as a backup, but it does not meet the Macquarie Dictionary (Australian English) definition for backup.
Reminds me of car advertising. They don't show the full price of the lease. They show the monthly payments
Yes it's a bait and switch, and adobe deserve to be called out on the bait and switch but thats not what this thread is about, it's about someone signing up to (clear at time of purchase) annual billing and wanting to cancel early.
This is not 75th page on the user agreement, it's the first word in the product name he is trying to buy.
You click see more details, it lists all 3 options, you hit next and it keeps the 3 options in a condensed list, but respects your selection.
Their own site literally calls it a cancellation fee in the linked screenshot. People in the comments here are giving them the benefit of the doubt on everything else, so give their UX designers some credit that they labeled their own fee correctly.
----
But this is kind of a pedantic argument though. One of the big practical issues I see here (aside from whether or not people know they're signing up for a yearly commitment) is that Adobe wants to have its cake and eat it too on what an early cancellation means.
Typically if you buy a year's worth of service for something, you will get access to the service until your payment period runs out. At least in my experience. If you buy a year's worth of Amazon Prime and cancel early, you'll still have access until that year ends.
With Adobe, that's not the case. You pay an early cancellation fee (50% of each remaining month), and you still immediately lose access as soon as you cancel.
Which is pretty crappy deceptive customer service. It's pretty clear that what they want is for customers to not cancel out of sunk cost fallacy because the user is scared to "waste" the extra fee. And then they're hoping that by the end of the year the user will forget to cancel again.
Compare that with a company like Amazon, which (despite its many faults aggressively pushing Prime) will even refund you your Amazon Prime subscription if you cancel before you use any of its benefits or order anything from the site. And I don't think that's exceptional, a lot of companies have much better cancellation policies than what Adobe offers. You don't have to go to bat for them, the CC subscription terms are unusually bad for a tech service subscription.
Although that shouldn't be held up as a positive either. Where I am, it's literally illegal for utility companies to offer discounts or any other type of benefit to customers who wish to cancel or move to another provider. They aren't even allowed to contact you unsolicited after you have requested to cancel the service, as it could be interpreted as attempting to offer enticement to continue. Ending a subscription to a service should not be a difficult thing.
But you're right, it's a mark of how bad Adobe's policies are that the things I'm thinking about Amazon are that at least I didn't have to get onto an online chat and argue with a representative for 30 minutes. Amazon didn't act betrayed and snap me with a punitive fee to punish me for my disloyalty.
I'm not necessarily saying that the average tech subscription process is handled well just that Adobe is noticeably worse.
If it were merely making you pay what they were contractually owed for the remaining months of your current year, you should retain access to the apps for those remaining months too.
Right before hitting 'place order' there's a link to a pop-up modal with the cancellation terms.
> "Should you cancel after 14 days, you’ll be charged a lump sum amount of 50% of your remaining contract obligation and your service will continue until the end of that month’s billing period."
At no point is the total amount (aka, your contract obligation) displayed, just the monthly amount. I think it's deceptive, at best.
I believe most product/services should not have late fees, or cancellation fees.
Every business I have ever worked at used them as steady income. In college I managed a mini storage. The owner told me he wanted me to go to a seminar. The whole seminar was about increasing late fees. Yes--literally tricks to getting tenants to forget the payment date. (If ever have to use a mini storage, prorate a month worth of rent so payment lands on the end of the month. When it lands, say on the 14th it's easy to forget.)
No, it’s the opposite of very clear? It’s very misleading. They are purposefully avoiding printing the full sum they expect you to pay, just listing monthly prices without mentioning the terms, and a big “buy now” button.
I understand that you should never take anything related to pricing at face value, and I would certainly double check what I get myself into before I sign up, but calling it “very clear” just doesn’t add up.
I don't give any business to companies that simply lie to me. Trust is important. Adobe clearly doesn't care about creating any trust with its users.
There exists very little actual effort to let users know inside this payment funnel that they are not just paying 10 euros, but 120 euros.
Surprising to see a company like Adobe operate on such terms, although it also applies to companies like Audi on their EV charge subscriptions for access to Ionity
https://www.adobe.com/no/creativecloud/plans.html
Looks the same to me. Is it possible the law isn't what you think it is?
Pay monthly for monthly plans, and pay annually once for annual plans.
The way they show the prices is problematic. If 12 payments are expected, it should be reflected anywhere that price is shown. But I think it's fine if they are willing to offer a discount for agreeing to make 12 payments vs 1 payment.
This is what you do when you rent a house, 1 year contract monthly payments.
Not sure if you’ve been with Adobe for any period of time and then left, it hasn’t been pretty on multiple products for me.
If you have an annual subscription and cancel it early, they will charge you the elapsed months accordingly to the monthly fee, not the yearly one and I had to pay 150 Euros for early contract termination.
https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/times_fares/ticket_types/4657...
After I was done, I cancelled the plan and Adobe mailed me something like „sad to see you go here‘s a free month“.
What I didn‘t know and did not see ond the sign-up page was that I actually signed up for a YEARLY plan and I had to pay a huge cancellation fee. There was no indiciation or mentioning of a yearly contract (ok, maybe sonewhere deep down and so small nobody can read it).
IMHO, I was tricked into this yearly plan and had to pay much money to get out. It was the day I swore never to pay for Adobe products again.
Yearly commitment. Longer term commitments give you benefits in a lot of places and have checks in place to prevent people from gaming the system. Not very hard to understand.
There are some exceptions where a fee is ok like when it's actually putting the business out financially, like Garmin & Iridium satellite service agreements, Garmin has little choice...but clearly not the case for Adobe
They should think and act as building services to help the users, rather than extracting money. Even though part of a business is extracting money.
It's past time that consumers in the US realized their utter lack of power as individuals against corporations, and their collective might. The 'dark patterns' in online commerce, car loans, mobile payments etc are really 19th century business practices that shouldn't be accepted anymore.
This whole thing sounds a lot like a loan. If Adobe wants to provide a loan then they should be regulated like a bank.
Otherwise a monthly fee isn't a loan, and a monthly fee shouldn't have a cancellation fee.
You have to pay back the discount if you end up not using it for a year, as it should be.
Edit: I had to call them, because the website indeed only showed me these options where I had to pay the rest of the year. Email didn't help, they offered me some discount for the rest of the year. Very strange as a Dutch person, it has become so normal to not worry about this (I really like this law, a nice example of citizens before companies.)
I'm surprised they haven't started suing people over range check functions yet.
Cadbury is a brand like this, as soon as they started smoothing corners on their chocolate bars to save a few percent volume and making the chocolate waxy they died. I expect under Kraft/Mondelez the brand is making more money than ever though.
I suspect there's a transition from R&D/development spending to marketing spending that marks the change.
The mix of less piracy, no used software, no discounts except for the education discount (which is also halved) is bound to lead to more revenue in the short term. But it also causes a lot of people to consider their alternatives.
Yes there are alternatives, Affinity, Pixelmator, etc, but all that's being taught in educational institutions is Adobe, and it's what the industry uses.
Private/small business users are a very small part of their business, but one that requires as many (if not more) support resources as large customers, so if anything they're probably happy to see them go elsewhere.
And no, i haven't used Adobe since they introduced subscriptions. I'll subscribe to media and cloud storage just fine, but not pay annual fees for micro software increments that 99% of the time doesn't add anything i need.
If they had something like Jetbrains where your subscription also gives a perpetual usage license for that specific version, then i could subscribe and upgrade when they actually added something i needed, and i'd likely reconsider.
DEC, Commodore, Novell, SGI, Cray, Lotus, and Acorn would like you to explain how a computing companies last forever.
1) There is an iPad version of Photoshop, and it's fine.
2) They are adding new features (at least to Photoshop), including some interesting and useful machine learning features like "select subject" and "enhance."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-27/forget-ph...
Me 1: Adobe 0
Curious, what did you choose as a replacement for raster graphics? GIMP is a no-go, as its slow and buggy as well.
You sign up for an annual subscription, paying monthly installments.
They give you the option to pay half of it out if you want to cancel, it's no different than a 12 month phone plan in places like Australia.
God I hate Twitter. People on their are so used to only reading 150 characters, that it's started affecting them in their daily life, that they're not reading the paid agreements they're signing up to.
Edit: This isn't defending Adobe. I was stuck in this agreement for a whole extra year than I wanted to be, because I didn't get a notification about it renewing (but that was again, my mistake). Fuck Adobe, they have shitty practices.
The actual shitty thing that people should be complaining about, is that the subscription auto-renews (unless I missed the checkbox) and I couldn't find a way to cancel it pre-emptively, outside of blocking it at the bank level, otherwise it signed me up for another 12 months.
This is not how subscriptions usually work, but with Adobe it is.
With every other subscription I have ever had if I have it for say 14 months or 16 months and then want to cancel I have been free to do so.
But with Adobe when I wanted to cancel after 13 months I learned that I had automatically been committed to another 12 months and would need to pay a hefty cancellation fee.
I like the software that Adobe makes but I hate hate hate the subscription.
When I leave Adobe after my subscription ends this time, I hope to never have to sign up for their subscription again.
If you choose the annual contract, that will run for a full year with you paying monthly installments. If you want to cancel early, you will have to reimburse them. That is exactly the same as phone plans, gym plans (with the exception that gyms often don't allow early cancellation at all), etc. Now if you don't cancel what do you think will happen with an annual contract? Of course it will prolong for another period of time that you chose, in this case a full year again. This is literally hoe contracts work.
If you get a monthly subscription of Netflix, you don't need to manually prolong it every month, do you?
It's not that terrible, but it certainly is something immigrants like me don't expect. Now I assume it's the case.
If there was a separate box or better, a popup modal/page, that explains this, I'd give Adobe the benefit of the doubt.
The problem is patterning - _a lot_ other companies monthly subscriptions don't have 50% annual cancellation fee or any cancellation fee. So this method of 'lowering the price' is uncommon/against-the-grain.
When faced with an uncommon situation you really need people to understand what they're getting into, otherwise lots of people are surprised when they get hit with this.
- Annual plan, paid monthly: $50 / month
- Monthly plan: $75 / month
Then of course there is going to be a catch to the first one. I cannot imagine anyone being so naive they’d just assume both plans are the same aside from the price...
Tons of people will be so naive as to either not read closely, or just not know that the cheaper one comes with a catch.
Because it’s common sense and practice.
Why would anyone commit to a yearly contract otherwise?
Terms should be easy to read and understand, that is one part of accessibility.
No major phone carrier in Australia charges cancellation fees on a 12 month contract. None of them even offer a 12 month SIM only contract.
If you have a phone payment attached, you just pay the remainder of the phone which you keep. With Adobe's contract you pay half the remaining amount and immediately cannot use the software anymore.
But that's unworkable in modern life. We often have to agree to multiple terms documents per day, jumping through hoops for urgent things like receiving security updates. 99% of people clicking "I agree" do so without reading the terms.
It's just like everyone suddenly being shocked and surprised that social media companies have the right to ban their accounts and moderate their content for any reason. That was in the contract you agreed to when you made an account.
This is not to excuse Adobe, their tactics here are vile, but pretending contracts don't really exist just because you don't read them even when you sign them is a childish way of thinking.
Companies get away with things like this because consumers have normalized never reading terms of service as acceptable behavior. If they did read the terms, they might see how bad they are, and not use the product. It would be easier for competitors to compete on their quality of service rather than the superficial things consumers do notice like name recognition and aesthetics. There would be some market pressure to prefer honest contracts over dishonest ones. As it is, there is no such pressure from consumers, only regulation.
And even with regulation against dark patterns like the ones Adobe is engaging in, the consumer is still responsible for their own actions. Signing a contract without reading the terms is never going to get you off the hook, at least not in the US. The answer is to educate and empower people to be proactive, not to excuse and normalize their apathy.
"Annual plan, paid monthly" vs "Monthly plan"
It's not like they hide the fact on page 488 of some multi-document contract. It's on the sign up page.
I've paid half the RRP on full CC for the past 3 years this way telling them it's too expensive every time renewal comes up. I've also heard of people being able to waive the early termination fee.
Hate Adobe more than most, being an ex-Fireworks user but I was kinda surprised how much outrage Twitter managed over this.
What IS frustrating is that some of their products don't offer a monthly plan. I want to use Lightroom about once a year, after going on a big vacation, but there's no cheap plan that just includes Lightroom.
There's a $10/month annual Photography Plan that includes Photoshop and Lightroom (exactly what I want), but no monthly option. I would pay $15 for one month of this, but the only way to get Lightroom for a single month is with the All Apps package, which is $80 for a single month.
Best part is it goes through Apple’s payment system so no shady business.
As a point of reference, World of Warcraft offers about a 10% discount for their 6 month subscription plan compared to the month to month plan. Additionally, they have pretty consistently offered one free item from the store (which they choose) for players on the 6 month plan. The last such item was a mount which must otherwise be purchased for $25 (obviously the true value to 6 month subscribers is lower than $25 due to bundling and since subscribers don't get to choose which item they receive).
What should they do instead? Not have the annual payment option and screw over all the people who do want to pay for the entire year and are happy with the discount?
After Effects has 3 tiers
1. Annual Plan paid monthly ($20.99 * 12 = $251.88)
2. Annual plan prepaid $239.88
3. Monthly Plan $31.49
https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html?filter=video-...
For Photoshop they only offer 2 plans
1. Annual Plan paid monthly ($9.99 * 12 = $119.88)
2. Annual plan prepaid $119.88
So no discount. The wording might have been poor before because I remember when I first signed up i didn't know they only had yearly plans but at least now it's pretty clear
https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html?filter=photo&...
It think it's deceptive, at best.
The word "annual" doesn't even appear on the first screen anywhere. It's even very easy to miss the word "annual" on the little dropdown on the checkout screen (2nd screenshot). If you are in a rush, it's VERY easy to see numerous line items for "$___/mo" and miss the single instance of the word "annual" in this entire checkout flow.
Where is the link to an agreement that the user has to read to even complete this purchase? Is it just on another step elsewhere in the process?
Apparently the early cancellation fee is 50% of your remaining subscription fees. In other words it's an improvement to the actual terms I signed up for when I agreed to be committed for 1 year. I dont see why Adobe needs to explicitely "warn" customers about an option that is actually beneficial to them (the users, not Adobe).
if you click the drop down, it shows you not only your other options but also the prices.
In the interim I misplaced my credit card and had to cancel it - my adobe account subscription was automatically suspended when the payments didn't go through and I never heard another word from them (I deleted my adobe account just to be safe...).
For an unexpectedly joyous role-model, Microsoft Office subscription plans are delightfully drop-in/drop-out - I've done several one-month office subscriptions to do stuff in excel.
Serves the 80% use case. Is in some areas (Live Filter, real time zoom, startup time, one fileformat for Photo, Vector and DTP) even better.
And best of all: no subscription!
Hitting this experience after paying them $500 over the years turned me from an infrequent user of their products into a scorned customer who swore to never to do business with them again.
Fuck the MBAs who came up with this bullshit. I hope Adobe dies in a fire.
This is the kind of behavior you see with ossified or dying companies that no longer innovate.
- Informercial "Jelly of the month"-type memberships
- Gyms
- Comcast
Adobe is toast. I'm going to look into more metrics and consider shorting it.
Haven't looked back.
And first of all, as the OP noted in the twitter thread, they believed they were doing a monthly subscription as advertised; the "yearly plan" interpretation is Adobe getting creative in the terms of service.
https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html
... from my perspective, it is clearly written "annual plan". You can choose to pay on a monthly basis, or in a lump sum. There is no "monthly subscription" or similar.
Now it's possible that this page has changed since the OP subscribed, but I don't think it's changed that much - I remember this clearly from when I signed up which was many years ago.
The OP might be unhappy that their expectations were violated but I really don't think Adobe is trying to hide the nature of the product and its annual commitment cycle.
If they believed that they were signing up for a monthly, they did not read, what they were signing up for, its clearly stated on the sign up screen.
There is a final: 'By placing my secure order, I agree to Adobe's subscription and cancellation terms and Terms of Use' but you don't have to check a box. I think it's a bit deceptive.
Also, something being common doesn't necessarily mean it's good.
Cancelling the subscription over the phone was an absolute shit-show.
I truly resent Adobe as a company, but they have a monopoly on certain applications.
I never did do a lot of graphic work and most of what I need to do now can be done in Pixelmator. I think I paid $30 for that over 5 years ago.
I emailed Stripe (my payment processor) to find out how my subscription had migrated to the new card and they said that the feature had been added some time back. So even if you get a new card number, don't be surprised if your subscriptions follow you around.
You could assemble the finest legal minds in the world and they'd never convince me that this shouldn't be 100% illegal.
Did you report your old card lost or did they issue a new one because it expired/etc?
I have another good example. I bought an Adobe license few years ago, and as a business in EU, I had to bought in excluding VAT, and pay VAX tax here locally. I provided my valid EU-VAT, price dropped to net price in interface (let's say 100 EUR), in confirmation, and even in invoice I get. However, to my surprise, my credit card was charged with full gross price (123EUR), meaning I lost 23% of purchase - as I was obligated to pay VAT anyway second time, as there was 0 VAT tax on the invoice.
Well, such things happen, you may think. This should be childishly easy to fix with support, as clearly amount from the invoice and amount charged simply didn't match. However, after dozen attempts with support, dealing with various support level people from Adobe support from India, not knowing even what the VAT tax is, and without any interest on helping me out, I had to give up. I decided to use PayPal protection for buyers, as transaction was made through the PayPal. Tu my surprise, despite clear evidence, they rejected claim after consultation with Adobe, without providing any reason. So I decided to not deal with those thieves any more and called my bank to fill chargeback request. It was so clear, that they recognised the request the next day and returned the money.
Takeaways are: - Adobe is a shady corporation focused on robbing their customers, with other examples you can find online I cannot call that otherwise (among others, deceptive offers, blocking perpetual licenses, and as in my case simply stealing money from customers credit cards) - PayPal protections are completely useless, even with so clear cases - It's good to make transactions with shady companies with credit cards.
I'm not affiliated with them, but I'm a fan of their product.
[0] - https://imgur.com/qyAWTXw
(mirror, source, dead link)
I contacted customer support and asked to upgrade to a more expensive SMB plan for a different but related product (Adobe Sign). I also demanded the first 14 days free, as that product advertizes a 14 day trial.
As I suspected, they could not make this complex change with their internal tools, so they offered to cancel Acrobat DC for me so I could sign up directly for the trial of the more expensive product.
As it happens, I changed my mind after the cancellation was completed. ;-)
If they had been able to do what I asked, I might have requested a change in billing country into or out of the EU or US - this is often complex for tax reasons. If their tools are capable of everything I could think of, I might still change my mind around the final confirmation stage.
Here is the pricing page: - https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/acrobat/pricing.html?promoid...
It does mention "Requires annual commitment.", but in a vastly less noticeable style than "Best value".
(Legal theorizing, IANAL and all that)
Contract law requires a "meeting of the minds". Ordinarily, a written contract is evidence of where exactly the minds met - but there are exceptions. For instance, website ToS are not really enforceable. ("By using this website, you agree to sell me your house for $1?".)
I would argue that for most people buying Adobe products with an easily missed cancellation fee, there is no meeting of the minds and the contract should not be valid.
A good test for this might be to ask 100 randomly selected customers about the terms of the contract. If a majority aren't aware, it is reasonable to conclude that this information isn't conveyed adequately and that part of the contract should not be enforceable. I've never heard of anything like this happening in practice, though.
I also just went half way through the cancellation process and got the next two months for free to take away some of the sting.
"Monthly Plan - £75.85/mo"
"Annual plan, paid monthly - £49.94/mo"
"Annual plan, prepaid - £596.33"
Also I just upgraded from Premiere Pro to the Creative Cloud and was given the full upgrade T&Cs, including that there'd be a cancellation fee to pay if I signed up for the yearly option and cancelled mid-way through.
Again, a genuine question: am I missing something?
https://responsivedesign.is/articles/cancel-adobe-without-pa...
Happened to my daughter she needed InDesign in order to do a once off college project. She missed the small print and signed up to an annual sub (€300 total). She managed to get out of it using the method described above.
This was unacceptable to me, so I simply got on the live chat and (politely) bothered their sales reps until they stopped it for me. As a last "screw you", they cancelled my entire sub, rather than just the renewal. But, hey, good enough.
Adobe: Never again.
I guess their model is bit different than the a lot of other software subscription offerings, as the most I encounter out there are prepaid for certain duration of time with no commitment. (You pay monthly, or yearly -- with some services offering something between, like 3 months or 6 months.) If you choose to not renew (or cancel the contract) your contract continue to the end of the term. (Though, time to time, particularly some Japanese services, I do encounter model where your service terminates at the moment you choose to not renew -- even if you had 364 days out of 365 days remaining on your contract.)
It definitely is pretty much same as if you are paying for something up front. If you stop using the product in the middle of the term, you generally don't get refund for the remainder of the term, but it definitely feel bit different.
The Affinity suite is great and affordable for me as a hobbyist. Many of the open source packages are also excellent.
Few years down the line they will turn legit (guessing most are poor students who will graduate and get jobs) and will have to pay or pass the cost to their employer.
"Free for educational use" is the legitimized version of the same scummy tactic. I wish universities would not fall for it.
As a few folks noted below: This feels like a pretty intuitive presentation of pricing, with three clearly laid-out options: 1. No contract, pay monthly 2. Annual contract, pay monthly (cheaper than 1) 3. Annual contract, pay in one go (cheaper than 1 & 2)
The soundbite of "oh they made me pay to cancel" is so easy to virally hate on, but the fact is that purchasers chose an annual contract. That being said, would be nice to see a confirmation message along the lines of "Early cancellation of a massively discounted annual plan results in an early termination fee." Always room for improvement.
The guy took an annual license which is cheaper than a monthly one, and paid with monthly payments.
As such, he engaged himself by paying the whole year, not only few months.
Cancelling out means he has to complete the annual payment, which is of course due, according the what he signed for.
Capture One Express is a free and highly functional alternative to Lightroom if you have a Nikon, Sony, or Fujifilm camera.
So i had an account which looks like they renewed my account in November 2021 without asking me.
Logging into my account there is NO refernce to the start and end date of the contract i agreed to, i never agreed to renew. I tried to cancel and says £178 to cancel.
Adobe you are now the worse company for this crap.
I signed up to YC to tell you this:
After half an hour or so on their chat, I managed to make them waive the fee.
I'm pretty sure their practice would be deemed illegally misleading by Danish consumer laws. What worked in the end was threatening to file a complaint with the "Consumer Ombudsman".
But here is the problem, much like Microsoft Office, the competitors for Adobe's CC suite really are meager by comparison.
I know a lot of people are going to stomp and yell and say they are not, but everyone knows the reality.
But that doesn't give Adobe the right to be assholes about it.
Anytime I start a trial, or pay for a service provider with a high likelihood of screwing me over—Privacy.com virtual card.
Any sort of trial though, 100% of the time.
Privacy.com is amazing.
Account is cancelled, so there’s nothing to log into.
No choice but to chargeback or attempt to engage via Twitter. Seems like a well established occurrence.
I recently discovered the Affinity suite of tools to replace much of the use/need I have for creative suite.
Perhaps there's an opportunity for arbitrage of the unused period of subscription by pooling the remaining time and then allowing others to be connected to the individuals who have time remaining and use their accounts.
Basically buying up the unused time and reselling by treating it as a marketplace.
Just checked and it seems I can only cancel my subscription during a fixed period around the renewal date - if I miss it, I get to pay the remaining term as a cancellation fee!
e.g. if monthly is $10 and yearly/m is $8, and I decide to cancel after only 7 months, Adobe should just charge me $14 ($2*7).
It's basically your standard mobile phone contract.
You can cancel the trial and bingo, you've exited the plan with no costs :)
When offered a discount or to switch to another plan, choose the cheapest new plan (for me it was photography)
Once your membership is updated, start the cancellation process again immediately
The cancellation fee is now $0.
Or in 2021 is Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo just the best single-purchase option right now?
You can also choose to subscribe by the month, and can cancel at any time.
I understand why companies like to do this. I get it. However, if we went along with every single one of these transitions to monthly subscription models we would bleed money every month unnecessarily.
What happened since then? The CS6 suite works just fine. Tools such as GIMP have become better and better. There are a number of good video editors, file converters and other tools out there.
We used to also update our Corel tools every year. Now they want subscription. We are done with Core.
The next victim will be Altium Designer. We have probably put somewhere in the order of $30K per license into this tool over the years. Annual maintenance is in the order of $1,500 to $1,800 (can't remember). No more. I have decided we are going to switch to KiCAD by the end of the year and donate half of our Altium maintenance fee towards KiCAD development (as well as contribute with software development if we have the time).
It isn't that I have a problem with subscriptions. We subscribe to Jetbrains tools and will continue to do so. It's more of a question of what you get incrementally for your money. And, in addition to this, getting cutoff if you stop paying.
As everyone on the planet knows by now, shit can happen that can put a serious kink into your finances. The old model meant that we could keep using our software until things got better and update when it made sense. As an example, we've done this kind of thing with Solidworks. Went a couple of years without updates and then updated all seats to the latest version when it made sense.
The Jetbrains subscription model is great. If you stop your subscription you revert back to the version from one year ago (I may not have put that exactly right, but it's close). That's fair. I can work with that. If I need to save money for any reason at all I can put it on ice, keep working and get updated back to the current version when it makes sense.
Adobe and others seem to be very different, brutally so. If you stop paying you lose your ability to work. To repeat myself, that is brutally painful. Others have things like cutting your off from bug fixes to even your last licensed version and cutting you off from accessing their peer-to-peer support forum.
I can't claim to know the internals of their business equation. All I know is that, as a customer, I dislike monthly subscriptions that cut you off like and make the very tools you need to do your job evaporate instantly. That, I think, is wrong.
These are tools. I need to own my tools. That's why I buy equipment instead of leasing it.
Did Adobe change? Do you get to keep and use any version of the software at all if you stop paying?
I believe Microsoft Office 360 is the same.
I know this kind of software can be a tough business due to piracy.
Frankly, I feel the same way about stuff like Gmail for business. We have always hosted our own email (which isn't that difficult) and have archives going back a couple of decades. Full access with a number of email clients, including Outlook, which is what I tend to use.
This scummy behavior is not OK.
1) Adobe stops offering the annual paid monthly plan. This sucks because the consumer gets fewer options.
2) Adobe advertises the price of the true monthly plan. This sucks because Adobe is unable to advertise what, for many, is their best deal. If I intend to use this software for more than a year, which is a very common use case, then I want to know the best price on a long term basis.
3) Adobe keeps the advertised price as-is, but must add some kind of disclaimer or note which indicates the terms. I think this is pretty reasonable, and maybe should be implemented. Still, this sucks a little bit, not just because it’s more legal red tape, but also because it is visual noise in the same vein as the © and ® symbols.