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.
I’m not as clued up on consumer laws as I once was but I’m pretty sure in Europe their sign up page is actually illegal. Not just immoral but literally classed as false advertising or something similar. And even if that’s not the case, we do have protections against being tricked into signing an unclear contract and this would easily fall into that category.
Unfortunately I think Adobe is beyond the point where few months of bad publicity would harm their core business. Amateurs would vote with their feet but professionals have really nowhere to go. There just are no alternatives to some of their programs.
The only one I can think of is After Effects, which appears to do a broader set of things than any other single package (but I could be wrong).
The rest, well I am not convinced, though there are some edge features in each package that undeniably would sell them to a few people, and that is, I guess, in the right way of things.
I don't think this stuff is illegal at all. What they effectively did here is put the email address and personal information form in front of the product details instead of below them, change the buttons that normally say "next" to "start your free trial, but the information was all in plain view. Complain to your browser vendor about the lack of scroll bars if that's what's gotten you.
The big scam here is the fact this program requires a monthly fee at all. All subscription services I know either have a minimum duration with similar cancellation fees (or you'd be on the hook for the full remainder of the fees instead of half) or they're advertised explicitly as being cancellable at any time.
I don't think anyone was getting tricked, but I do believe people were entering a subscription without looking at the details.
> But what does "Annual plan, paid monthly" actually mean?
I don't understand how "Annual plan, paid monthly" could be taken as something confusing or requires some additional context to make any sense out of it. How are other people reading "Annual plan, paid monthly" any other way than that it is an annual plan broken out into monthly installments?
I was actually considering trying out the Adobe line for my own work, but I'm going to be sticking with Affinity and Procreate now. Bad enough that they went to a subscription model, worse still that they run it like mobsters. I have too many kids, too little sleep, and not enough amphetamine salts to remember to cancel the membership in 7-14 days.
Also I wouldn’t be so sure that a class action suit of this nature wouldn’t be successful. Large companies have lost flimsier cases.
> or a monthly plan which is cancellable at any time.
At any time, sure. But it’s the $300 dollar cancellation fee thats the issue.
> Complain to your browser vendor about the lack of scroll bars if that's what's gotten you.
This whole “dont hate the players blame the game” meme is pretty tedious. If an organisation is abusing a feature for their own gain then they should be responsible for abusing a feature for their own gain.
> I don't think anyone was getting tricked, but I do believe people were entering a subscription without looking at the details.
“Tricked” is a loaded term. I think the real question is whether Adobe intentionally made it easy for people to misunderstand the details.
Given what I’d seen I’d argue that was the case. This might not be an issue in the US but it is in the EU, where larger organisations have had to pay out because of less.
...I'm sorry; I know this is a typo/autocucumber, but now I can't help picturing these nefarious Adobe otters coming up with ways to scam us. Adorable yet evil!
I get emails from them making offers to get me back on creative cloud. Nothing about the unpaid cancelled account.
Collections officers can't try to collect disputed debts, so they immediately left me alone.
Then, I spent over 24 hours on the phone with AT&T, and eventually paid them a bit under a hundred dollars that I didn't owe them. There was no credit report ding or harassment from the collections agency, at least.
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.
They keep insisting that it’s just “postponed” to 2021, and now 2022 …
It’s ridiculous, I’m never going to ever go to an Ultra show again in my life.
If they had just refunded me immediately I would probably have already bought tickets to & attended other Ultra shows (in the country I now live in).
If your credit card company is charging you, leave them.