Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract
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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.
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.
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.
There is a legitimate reason to do that: to keep people from making a bunch of accounts and getting free trials with them forever.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
You should name and shame, so that others don't fall into the same trap.
I also torrent their shows, so...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(No affiliation, just a pleased user)
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!
Looking back, I now see where I agreed, but the manner in which they attempt to deceive you is criminal.
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.
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.
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)
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 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.
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.
Or more likely I just don't understand FreeCAD.
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.
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.
Frequent updates for a single charge of 50 usd is just amazing.
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?
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.
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.
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.)
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.
"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.
> "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.
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.
"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?
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.
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 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.)
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.
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.
> monopoly
You lost me there. Are you using a different definition of monopoly than the usual 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.
It's not "fraud". Could it benefit from clearer language -- there are some small tweaks they could do.
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 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).
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.
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.
Not to mention that they stored and leaked the unhashed passwords of their entire userbase.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
Which Android browsers show scrollbars?
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....
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.
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.
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-...
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.
Not for those of us who don't live in the US unfortunately.
> 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?
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?
Adobe is using sleight of hand to get you locked into a long-term contract. That's closer to fraud.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Absolute thrash company. With Adobe, always pirate, never recommend them, pay for competitors.
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.
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.
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.
Either "when did I get so bitter" or "when did the web go to hell" thoughts enter my mind.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“By clicking here you agree that you would like to opt out of receiving newsletters”.
“By clicking here you agree to our terms”.
Not sure if such regulation exists in the US, if so it would be worth to probe into it.
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.
There is a consistent pattern with companies that do advertising, they go pure evil in the name of profit. See Roku and others.
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.
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.
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).
This feels bad, like really bad!
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.
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.
Maybe I’m used to too much long term commitment in contracts living in Germany.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I tried a few but either performance was poor or features were missing along with .CR3 support.
It's corporate rent-seeking and that's pretty much all it will ever be.
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.
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.
"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
[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.chargebackgurus.com/blog/ne...
gotta show the investors that revenue growth thou!
they can't just override the law with their own Terms and Conditions
but yes, the scheme is very popular among telcos
- Website: https://natrongithub.github.io
- Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/details/fr.natron.Natron
- Source: https://github.com/NatronGitHub/Natron
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I reported this to the relevant instances here, heard nothing from it.
I was 15 years + user of Illustrator and Photoshop - now I actively avoid embedding myself any further into their eco-system.
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.
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.
They do say “ Annual plan, billed monthly” don’t they?
With this business model Adobe may not last long
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.
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.