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FTC sues Adobe for hiding fees and inhibiting cancellations

altacc
73 replies
2h2m

About 25 years ago, working at one of those dot com bubble internet consultancy firms, I was told by an Adobe rep that they knew everyone at home had a pirated copy of their software but the company view was that they thought that was a good thing. It meant people learnt their software at home and then insisted on using it at work, where it would be a paid for license.

It seems their attitudes changed soon after, perhaps due to their almost total market dominance, and they became aggressive towards their users in the pursuit of profits. The last Adobe software I really used was Lightroom as that was one of the last pay-once software titles. Now the only Adobe product most of us at work have is except Acrobat Reader. We were quite glad when the Figma purchase failed.

gorkish
14 replies
1h11m

When creative cloud was very first released, it was excellent value. I was actually quite supportive of Adobe's initial SaaS strategy. It was well and truly a "why would anyone ever pirate photoshop ever again?" type of product.

Fast forward a decade and that $19.99/mo product has become $89.99/mo and the value prop has plummeted on top of it. The big difference today is that instead of people returning to the high seas and continuing to use adobe software, they are just moving to different ecosystems -- procreate, davinci, foxit, etc.

Eji1700
3 replies
55m

When creative cloud was very first released, it was excellent value. I was actually quite supportive of Adobe's initial SaaS strategy. It was well and truly a "why would anyone ever pirate photoshop ever again?" type of product.

This is the entire issue with these kinds of things. They always launch at a good value because they know they can capture the market. Yes if they were benevolent or whatever it'd be fine, but these things almost ALWAYS turn into cluster fucks.

They couldn't launch at worse value than the current product line because they need full adoption before they can put the screws to you.

mistrial9
1 replies
42m

agree but I would reverse the cause and effect.. launch great experience on the web+cloud to gain traction.. then Because it is so Easy to Do It, change the terms of service, the benefits, the longevity, the billing practices, the prices.. etc

IMO pathetic to see a well-loved brand degenerate in the public.. especially while Apple counts that cash (and ways they ran rough over their former "friend" )

swores
0 replies
7m

Maybe I'm misreading somehow but you seem to be saying the exact same thing as the person you replied to, without reversing anything?

duped
0 replies
20m

Or you do what everyone else does, which is force everyone to adopt the SaaS model by revoking their licenses or otherwise bricking the software.

That's why it's important to own your own data in a way that can be reused and adapted when they try and screw you later. You see this all the time with video games nowadays. Everyone wants their own launcher and subscription services.

jonathankoren
1 replies
11m

It's not. The quality stayed the same, even improved. It's run of the mill monopoly pricing.

crote
0 replies
3m

It is 100% enshittification. The definition is even in the linked article:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, (..)

The core point here is "abuse the user", not "make features worse". Price gauging would be included in that definition.

londons_explore
2 replies
34m

They should release a home-user version with some restrictions unpalatable for commercial use - eg. "Can only edit 5 files per month" or "All edited images get non-commercial use licenses attached".

Or even "May only be used during evenings and weekends".

alt227
1 replies
14m

I like this idea,

Or even better it could run on credits. 100 credits per month, and then various things in the software cost a credit each. Load a file = 1 credit. Save a file = 1 credit, etc.

You could even turn this into an ecosystem by itself, so instead of buying or 'renting' the software users are buying credits to actuallyt operate the software.

Newer features like AI could cost more credits up front. There could be sales on credits etc.

Somebody please show me a downside to this model?

swores
0 replies
2m

I think there's multiple downsides, but the biggest one is that it makes it a massive pain in the ass for any price-conscious users to decide whether it's worth paying for.

Right now if I want to install some software to edit images on my PC, I can look at how much Photoshop costs, how much rival 1 costs, and look at Free Alternative 2, and decide what I'm willing to pay.

But under your scenario, I have no clue how much more (or less) expensive Photoshop will be than the paid or free alternatives, unless I can first forecast all the individual steps that will be needed to do the editing I have in mind, and then spend time adding up each action's costs to get an idea of the total price. Not only would it be extremely hard to accurately list every action that would be needed before actually doing them, but even if I thought that were possible then the amount of hassle would be a big enough deal breaker that I just wouldn't be willing to bother with it.

Trollmann
1 replies
21m

Not for students. CS6 single product was up to $250, CS6 DS $350, CS6 MC $800 compared to CC 1st year $240 increasing to $360. If you only needed a single product you were off worse after one year. Even doing a bachelors which required all products would have been less expensive with the one time fee if you had the money.

duped
0 replies
14m

Back in the day (a decade ago) you would go to the lab which had Autodesk/Solidworks/Matlab/Adobe/$expensive-software installed instead of buying it for your personal (and probably underpowered) device. It was one of the few things that your tuition actually paid for.

And you'd have to learn time management to make sure you could get your project done on time instead of crunching at the last minute, because the lab would be filled with people who didn't.

</grumble>

richbell
0 replies
46m

When creative cloud was very first released, it was excellent value.

Your wording reminds me of this infamous video where Adobe's CEO refuses to answer a question about them overcharging customers in Australia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnrMhbWG0Pc

behringer
0 replies
45m

I only pay 32/mo for creative cloud.

Sign up for the free trial, then "cancel" you'll get a screen that says "offers" and you can choose a realistic price plan.

Remember to "cancel" before your year is up or else you'll be automatically charged the full price the following month.

tombert
10 replies
1h0m

I haven't used any Adobe products since they started doing the subscription-only model. I want to use it, they typically make good enough software, but I have a line in the sand that I will not pay for a subscription. I want to buy my software and own it and use it for as long as I want.

Basically my options if I don't want top pay a license fee for forever is to find alternatives, or pirate the software. I've opted for the former, but either leads to Adobe getting $0 from me, where they could have gotten >$0 if they had had a "pay outright" program.

I have generally found good enough alternatives with their competitors (Toonboom is generally good enough for basic animation, Krita is good enough for artsy stuff, Final Cut Pro is good enough for video editing).

johndhi
5 replies
53m

You'd pay $1500 or whatever for a perpetual Photoshop license? I wouldn't

jimmaswell
1 replies
11m

I wouldn't pay $1 for Photoshop when GIMP is free and open source. It's been my daily driver in a personal and professional capacity for ages, and Photoshop offers nothing special for me.

bongodongobob
0 replies
7m

If GIMP is a replacement for you, you're not Adobe's target customer.

bobim
1 replies
35m

That's dirt cheap for a software you can make a living off. For FEA or CFD one would need to shell off in the order of 50-100k plus 20k per year. 1500? I would.

SomeCallMeTim
0 replies
8m

But not all of us make a living off of Photoshop.

I'm a programmer. I periodically need to make a tiny tweak in a file that's been created by a real artist, or I want to edit a photo I took, or whatever.

It's insane to spend $1500, or even $500 (the CorelDraw buy-it-outright price) for hobby and occasional-use software like that.

And yeah, I use other things like Affinity Photo, which is Good Enough for many of my purposes, but it's just annoying to not be able to use the same software as my artists--unless they flatten the image before giving it to me, it's a crap-shoot whether I can import it in anything but the exact version of PhotoShop they were using.

It feels like extortion: I have to pay the artist to make the tiniest changes because I can't edit the original file, or I have to pay Adobe an outrageous sum to do it myself. Lose-lose.

tombert
0 replies
48m

I mean, sure, there's probably an upper bound of a number I'd pay, and I don't do enough photo editing to justify paying really any amount of money for Photoshop.

For software I'd actually use though? Upper bound is probably $600 judging by what I paid for Toonboom Harmony. Honestly if I had known about Moho at the time I probably would have gotten that since it's considerably cheaper and on Humble Bundle fairly often.

I'm not in a creative industry so it's tough for me to know "fair" numbers, just "what can I justify as a toy" numbers. I like to occasionally whip out an animation tool and draw stuff with stick figures, and I like having that readily available, and I don't want my tool to change from under me so I don't want transparent updates. I just want to buy my software once.

jimmaswell
1 replies
14m

Adobe software isn't quite "good" in my experience. The company is an Oracle: all-in on giving the right bullet points to pointy-haired managers but with a palpable paucity of technical merit.

I have to work with Adobe Experience Manager and it's a weird, painful, slow/inefficient kludge, not to even get into the licensing terms and what devs are "allowed" to do on their own servers.

Acrobat Reader stands out in my memory only as that extremely slow, bloated thing you launched by accident, then closed 5 minutes later once it loaded to use Sumatara instead.

They killed Flash by neglect after buying it from Macromedia - we might still have it around if they invested in it properly and made it up to par for the iPod. Thankfully we finally have good emulators that work in the browser to see the vast amount of old Flash content.

Creative Suite is fine and mostly functional from what I hear, but they didn't make that codebase either, and I've never felt limited by free or cheaper alternatives like GIMP or Sony Vegas. (I find it baffling how people rag on GIMP - I use it in a professional and personal capacity and I love it, and I'm familiar enough with Photoshop to compare it.)

tombert
0 replies
2m

I don't think Vegas has been Sony for quite awhile has it?

Vegas is great, but as far as I'm aware there's not really a way to get it running on Mac, and I don't own a Windows computer anymore (I still will VM it if I really need it). For my video stuff I've been using Final Cut Pro and Apple Motion for the last couple years since it's a one-time purchase and I think pretty good. I'd like to use Premiere and After Effects but, as stated, I don't want to pay for subscriptions.

I don't know enough about photo editing to say if GIMP sucks, I've used it before and it seems fine.

dangerboysteve
1 replies
49m

"ToonBoom, is generally good enough for basic animation".

What? This is the premier 2D animation package used by most of the top studios.

tombert
0 replies
46m

Oh no question, bad phrasing on my end, I sort of meant it inverted.

Toonboom is excellent if you're a professional. I'm very much not a professional, I barely know what I'm doing. I think Flash/Animate appealed to someone like me, because I found it easier to draw some goofy thing really quick and animate it.

I feel Toonboom has a much higher learning curve and isn't really for people like me. It's not insurmountably difficult or anything, just that I'm not really the target audience and as such I don't know that it's a good fit for "basic" stuff, if that makes any sense.

Topgamer7
10 replies
1h11m

I don't want to pay for a subscription for software I use thrice a year. I was looking forward to having Affinity's suite be the replacement, where I could buy it, and use it.

However I don't want to support another company that is inevitably going to go subscription. Since they've been bought by canva, it's just a matter of time.

I even went so far as to get Affinity Photo being able to start on Wine. But lost interest since their acquisition.

(I'm sure people will question why I don't just use inkscape, krita, or gimp. And its because all of them have a subpar vector experience IMO)

carlosjobim
3 replies
47m

Completely agree! I also refuse to put gas in my car because I know that prices will go up later...

Or on a more serious note: I use Affinity professionally (previously PhotoShop). Why would I care the slightest about what they might or might not do with their pricing model in the future? I need software that delivers right now.

anonymousab
1 replies
13m

For the same reason that you would care with Photoshop or Premier or Lightroom; you're investing money in learning and building your workflow around a tool that is guaranteed to go down the subscription and enshittification path.

carlosjobim
0 replies
3m

Your computer will not explode if or when Affinity changes to a subscription model. You'll still have the software and can use it until the next ice age if you please.

earthling8118
0 replies
28m

I don't want to pay for the car nor the gas. Let's not let the same hostage situation extend to other aspects of our lives it we can avoid it.

tombert
2 replies
57m

Corel's (or whatever they call themselves now) stuff is generally pretty ok, and most of their stuff still lets you buy it outright.

I don't know much about Affinity Photo but Paint Shop Pro and Aftershot have been "good enough" for the limited uses I have for photo editing (though I'm definitely far from a professional). CorelDraw is, I think, a very decent vector drawing program if nothing else.

SomeCallMeTim
1 replies
14m

CorelDraw is great, but for years they were also subscription-only. In the last six months or so they finally started offering a single-price license again--at a prohibitive level.

I bought the previous single-price version years ago, and it's so stale that I prefer to use Inkscape, despite the more limited feature set, and I've been using the Affinity suite as a more professional replacement.

Now it looks like they let you buy it again, but at $550, I'm still giving them the finger. Their upgrade price used to be ~$200; I would pay that once ever 3-4 years or so, and consider that a reasonable expense to get a good product and have it available when I did need it. But for $550, I'd need to be planning on keeping it for something like a decade to get a similar value--and it's too much to justify buying at my limited usage level.

All of these subscription services should get over themselves and allow you to rent them for occasional usage for a reasonable amount of money. If I could give them $20 for intermittent (time-limited? operation-limited?) use, with no "auto-renewal", I might do that every time I actually needed the product.

But no, they need to be greedy and demand that you pay for a year of usage in advance (or by using deceptive practices like Adobe above).

I've used Paint Shop Pro, and I really don't like it. I can use Corel PhotoPaint and Affinity Photo, and they're fine, but PSP makes me crazy when I try to use it. I'd almost rather use Gimp.

tombert
0 replies
9m

Fair enough. I've never paid full price for any Corel product. They're frequently on Humble Bundle where you get a bunch of them on the order of like $30 total. It looks like right now there's even a sale going on: https://www.humblebundle.com/software/corel-productivity-cre...

My CorelDraw license is for 2020, so not super up to date, but I've generally liked it. I've not tried the Essentials package.

technothrasher
0 replies
18m

I bought the Affinity suite and have gotten good value out of it. If at some point in the future new versions go to a subscription model, I just won't buy them.

gmjosack
0 replies
51m

I ended up grabbing the Affinity bundle since it's half off despite concerns about Canva. I'd expect even if they end up moving to a subscription I'd at least have the versions I bought for an extended amount of time. I still have a working copy of Photoshop CS 5 as well. Hopefully we see Affinity remain committed to affordable non subscription plans but if they don't I think the one time purchase will last me a long time. If they put out a version 3 without subscription and it's compelling i'll upgrade, if not i'll continue to use 2 for I'm sure years to come.

duped
0 replies
12m

Is that the exact situation that subscription pricing (in principle) solves? If you only use it thrice a year then you can pay for it as you go instead of needing pay for the thing outright.

freitzkriesler2
7 replies
1h29m

I have a full paid license of acrobat pro. I want to pay for the 2020 version as that's the last one before it became rental software crap. I refuse to pay monthly for this software.

That and office, give me the full one time license. Im not paying for cloud crap.

lenerdenator
3 replies
1h23m

<sarcasm>Dear lord, did you stop to think of the shareholders before you wrote that screed?!</sarcasm>

SaaS is a virus that has drastically reduced the power of the individual creator for the benefit of people who really don't need more money. I wish there were a viable FLOSS alternative to more of Adobe's CS software.

dartos
1 replies
1h19m

SaaS itself is fine. A lot of software has recurring costs for the saas company (think clarifai, chatgpt, or circleci)

Subscriptions for software that you run on your own machine is a little much tho.

lenerdenator
0 replies
1h17m

The word for the activity occurring in your second sentence used to just be called "hosting".

The problem is that there are fewer and fewer pieces of software that aren't hosted somewhere.

hi-v-rocknroll
0 replies
1h10m

Gotcha capitalism with a side of rent-seeking.

If indies need it, then sure, it can be necessary to sustain smaller shops that have to support backend/cloud features and multiple OSes that churn APIs faster than a newspaper.

tombert
0 replies
54m

Genuine question; what does Acrobat Pro buy you over the free versions and/or OSS competitors?

I uses Apple Preview a lot because it lets me edit and sign documents pretty easily, and that came bundled with my Mac. What does the Acrobat Pro include that isn't in the free stuff?

downrightmike
0 replies
40m

The only problem is that ADobe is making the adobe engine incompatible with older versions. I've had PDFs that were made less than 10 years ago indesign etc that refused to load in Edge, which is where we work.

asnyder
0 replies
1h17m

I recommend a one-time Fox-it PDF pro purchase. While they too are getting into subscriptions they still make a one-time purchase available.

Haven't found any significant deficiencies, nice tool overall.

dylan604
7 replies
1h54m

The number of graphic artists working from home well before COVID definitely put a kibosh to that theory.

robertlagrant
3 replies
1h48m

Were they not working for a company?

imabotbeep2937
1 replies
1h40m

Presumably they mean gig economy aka artists are vastly undervalued.

For instance. It's not that AI is replacing artists. It's that people think you don't need to pay a license for generated images, even when they were clearly and provably stolen from copyright material. The bar was just lowered. If "AI" is used to remove the watermark from Shutterstock people think that's legal now.

So WHEN gig economy workers get picked up by a company. Yes they pay for a software license as a "tax" on going pro. But from personal experience. A vast amount of art and content is made by people from developing economies on Fiver or whatever. Many of those licenses are stolen.

And now everyone thinks you don't need to pay artists anymore. So nobody will generate licenses.

Adobe was basically right. They're just going at it in the maximally enshittified manner.

dylan604
0 replies
1h24m

No, this is not what I meant at all. I meant the independent artists that work without being attached to a firm or anything. The number of small owner/operator type places in the graphics/marketing type of world is apparently a much more common thing than the readers of this forum are familiar.

nickff
0 replies
1h46m

Many graphic artists operate as independent contractors/consultants.

acdha
2 replies
1h31m

An independent contractor using Adobe is still helping cement Adobe’s perception as a must-have for business. If you worked in that space at all, it was super common to have things like Illustrator or Photoshop specified in contracts for designers and print shops, and pretty much everyone needed Acrobat Pro for sone proprietary feature which didn’t exist in the alternatives.

Adobe wasn’t going to risk bad publicity going after some freelancer for $800, but they could count on everyone in that world needing to use Adobe products for compatibility reasons to provide the inertia which meant that the businesses who hired those freelancers kept paying Adobe rather than switching at the threat of a lawsuit.

dylan604
1 replies
1h16m

Anybody remember the Business Software Alliance[0] from years ago threatening to audit your company for using unlicensed software? I cannot believe any business would be dumb enough to allow them on their premises to even conduct an audit. Anyone with two brain cells would just laugh in their face.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Alliance

lotsofpulp
3 replies
1h40m

It seems their attitudes changed soon after, perhaps due to their almost total market dominance, and they became aggressive towards their users in the pursuit of profits

It was probably just the advent of new technology that allowed them to rent instead of sell their product, and they can do it at different prices to different customers (price discrimination).

_aavaa_
2 replies
1h32m

Not so minor nitpick, but afaik you never got to purchase and own the software, you only purchased a license to it.

swiftcoder
1 replies
1h14m

That license used to be perpetual, and only enforced locally (i.e. without connecting to the internet). That's about as close to "owning" as anyone gets in software.

_aavaa_
0 replies
8m

If you need to put "owning" in quotation marks it isn't owning.

grumpyprole
3 replies
58m

They drove me off Lightroom, I was just a causal user. The upsell spam and ads in Adobe Reader has also driven me away from that too. I would have considered buying an upgrade for both, but the price was never right for casual home use. Now I don't use any Adobe products at all.

ein0p
1 replies
47m

As someone looking to drop Lightroom, what did you move to? Last I checked everything else sucked pretty bad.

grumpyprole
0 replies
38m

I switched to Capture One. Not as easy to use as Lightroom, but the RAW processing is actually superior. It's a one time purchase. The professionals can choose to upgrade every year, the casual users can upgrade less frequently.

sib
0 replies
34m

I strongly dislike paying for subscription software that I don't use very frequently[1], but I do pay for the Photoshop & Lightroom bundle. At ~$10 / month, it ends up being a lot less than I paid for updating "perpetual" licenses to those products frequently enough (every two years?) to get the new features.

[1] I'm a hobbyist photographer, but not a pro.

hahajk
1 replies
49m

What have you replaced lightroom with? That's the one thing Adobe makes that I haven't found a good replacement for.

tombert
0 replies
43m

I've not really done enough with "real" photography to have strong opinions on this, but Aftershot (which was included in a Humble Bundle a few years ago) has been ok for the stuff I used it for.

CobrastanJorji
1 replies
27m

It's weird to watch Adobe make these fundamentally short sighted decisions. I can only assume the ultimate cause is the individual motivations of executives and managers. "Oooo, if we raise subscriptions $10/mo, we'll make lots of money, and it'll look really good on my annual review." "Oooo, this cancellation fee will really help our retention, which will look really good on my annual review." "Making Photoshop subscription only will do amazing things for our revenue."

When you have complete market dominance, you have little opportunity for growth. If your employees and investors have an insatiable need for growth, you have to try anyway, and that's where things fall apart. The #1 threat to your magical money faucet is something replacing your product as the photo editor of choice, and you should be 100% focused on making sure that doesn't happen. To do that, you need to be focused on keeping up quality, periodically adding the latest features, and making absolutely sure that the next generation of artists is coming up using your tool.

That Adobe rep 25 years ago was 100% correct, but "I keep the money pipe flowing and did not actively make it worse" does not get you a promotion.

alt227
0 replies
6m

When you make the industries best software and pretty much have a monopoly on the market, the only place left to go is adding markup to your product.

whywhywhywhy
0 replies
16m

Figma’s pricing is extremely exploitative too, it’s essentially designed in a way were trivial actions can instantiate new subscription seats that have to be manually removed.

stronglikedan
0 replies
1h25m

It meant people learnt their software at home and then insisted on using it at work, where it would be a paid for license.

That's also why so many companies practically give their software away through educational licenses.

spencerchubb
0 replies
7m

Somewhat reminds me of netflix's policy on sharing accounts. The CEO used to straight up say they don't care, and it's not really feasible to enforce account-sharing rules. Fast forward to today, and they "figured out" how to enforce it.

seemaze
0 replies
21m

I was an architecture undergrad (bricks , not bits) in the early 00’s and everyone had pirated software. And then we all got hired and brought our quiver of technical skills with is into industry and convinced our managers to purchase the tools we knew so well.

Now as the manager making decisions, I actively search out alternatives to Adobe due to the overwhelmingly poor experience (cost, bugs, support, tactics).

I know folks who keep VMs for the explicit purpose of running releases from 10 years ago.

mistrial9
0 replies
1h49m

new executives coming in, while the well connected ones leave completely to chase unicorns? maryhodderetc

hi-v-rocknroll
0 replies
1h14m

VMware and Citrix had a gentleman's agreement: they pirated each-other's stuff, and agreed not to break users' stuff in production and keep licensing issues to warnings.

denton-scratch
0 replies
22m

Now the only Adobe product most of us at work have is except Acrobat Reader.

[I think you didn't mean 'except']

I haven't had an installed copy of Adobe Reader on any computer I've used in the last 15 years.

0xcde4c3db
0 replies
30m

Bill Gates once expressed a similar view about rampant piracy of Microsoft software in China [1]:

Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-apr-09-fi-micro...

rightbyte
28 replies
2h1m

The bank should just have some sort of interface where you can cancel recurring charges on the card.

Changing card is a bit to blunt.

teeray
10 replies
1h59m

The problem is that that does not release you from your contractual obligation to pay every month. The company is still free to (and often does) send you to collections.

dylan604
6 replies
1h51m

That's fine with me. We can then let that "debt" linger until it is bought up by some company willing to settle for pennies on the dollar

teeray
3 replies
1h45m

Meanwhile, you can’t get a mortgage or a car loan because your SiriusXM bill remains unpaid because you “fixed the glitch.”

dylan604
2 replies
1h43m

Sure, caveats are always included, but if you don't need a mortgage or a car loan, fuck 'em.

ryandrake
1 replies
44m

Not just a mortgage or car loan. Credit checks[1] are being used by landlords to decide whether or not to allow you to rent. They are being used by employers to decide whether or not to hire you. They are being used by utility companies and insurance companies to decide whether or not to do business with you.

It's slowly getting to the point where a low credit score will bar you from participating in major areas of the economy.

1: https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/what-is-credit-c...

antihipocrat
0 replies
2m

21st century debtor's prison. No walls, chains or guards required!

judge2020
1 replies
1h45m

Then it ruins your credit, and technically the three bureaus disallow "pay for delete" agreements between consumers and debt collectors which would get it off of your report entirely (some still do it).

dylan604
0 replies
1h21m

That's cute how you assume I have credit that isn't already ruined or that I even care about it in the least. Also, if you pay all of your other creditors and let one thing like a gym membership take a knock, it's not the end of the world.

Some people are way OCD about that little bullshit number.

guntars
1 replies
1h33m

I'd argue that heavily lopsided TOS in favor of the company, that can be changed at any time by said company, and your access can be cut off unless you agree to the updated TOS, does not make a contractual obligation. In a B2C context, the business is the more sophisticated entity so it's up to them to make sure everyone knows what they are agreeing to. They could have put up a bold summary of "this is a yearly contract, you will be charged $79.99 to cancel, please type YEARLY CONTRACT in the box" somewhere in the signup flow. Had they done it, the case could be dismissed.

EMIRELADERO
0 replies
36m

Had they done it, the case could be dismissed.

You mean this case? Why should that get it dismissed?

This is about abusive (and unlawful) business practices, not a lack of knowledge on the consumer's end. If the customer had full knowledge of the terms before agreeing it would still be unlawful, the law generally doesn't care that the two parties consented to an abusive business relationship.

rightbyte
0 replies
28m

You put the ball in their court. They have to do something to get your money, which you might contest or ignore.

But ye it is not optimal. You'd probably want to have some record of trying to cancel.

defterGoose
8 replies
1h56m

Don't trust changing your card either. I had a predatory LA Fitness membership. When they made me jump through one too many hoops to cancel, I called up WF and had them issue me a new card (Visa). Well, Visa, in their infinite wisdom, gave my new credit card number to LA Fitness and they kept on charging me for almost two years before I noticed. I don't remember the name of that program at Visa, but I'm sure they and other CC companies continue to do this. Should be illegal.

dylan604
4 replies
1h52m

Netflix does this as well, and is how I found out about it. They claim that since you didn't cancel the service, it was clearly a lapse in your updating of the new number so they just helped you out. Of course it is in everyone's favor except yours when this happens.

0x0000000
3 replies
1h49m

It's only not in your favor if you changed your card to cancel Netflix specifically, in which case you should've just logged in and canceled.

kemitche
2 replies
1h45m

If someone steals my card, and uses it to pay for Netflix, how will I log in and cancel?

The simplest, safe route is to not give companies the newly updated number. If my Netflix lapses because I forgot to update the number after a card change (whatever the reason), they can email me, and then I will log in to my account and update the card on file.

dylan604
1 replies
1h26m

Do companies that do subscriptions know when multiple accounts are using the same card number? Just curious if they try to use something like that for fraud detection or anything. Then again, I don't think they'd care. Just take the monies and let the card people deal with it.

swiftcoder
0 replies
1h9m

During the whole clamping down on password sharing era, I'd be very surprised if some folks haven't had to pay for multiple Netflix subscriptions (for summer houses, or their kids off at college, that sort of thing...)

strickjb9
2 replies
1h47m

Don't trust cancelling your card either. I closed my account at Capital One, paid the final balance, and six months later I noticed a steep drop in my credit score. I had a $3 monthly charge that kept recurring even though I had closed my account.

Also, because my account was "closed," I didn't receive any statements notifying me that I was being charged. I only discovered this issue when my credit score dropped by 100 points.

stavros
0 replies
1h44m

The bank allowing a charge on a closed account is some bullshit.

kbolino
0 replies
56m

Closing a credit line penalizes your credit score in general. It's why the standard recommendation is generally to leave the accounts open, forever.

Another thing for the FTC to investigate/stop.

andoando
1 replies
1h42m

It needs to be some integration with the actual provider. You should be able to cancel through your CC, but they ought to get notified you canceled.

wmf
0 replies
1h3m

This is a huge advantage for subscriptions that go through Apple or Google since they have a central dashboard to cancel.

altairprime
1 replies
1h2m

Amex will let you permanently block a merchant that has previously charged you from making any further charges, but you have to call and ask for it. Goldman Sachs, under the guise of Apple Card, does not permit this by phone or by app. I have no other experiences to report data on. (Note that this does not exempt you from any contractual obligations to pay ETFs or whatever.)

rainclouds
0 replies
40m

Wow that is great. I’ve been told that was impossible by several cards and ended up reissuing.

tambourine_man
0 replies
59m

In some countries/banks you can generate one-off CC numbers that are tied to your real one. I use it all the time for online services.

judge2020
0 replies
1h40m

For Apple Pay, they did recently introduce this (or maybe it has been a thing for a bit).

https://rr.judge.sh/IMG_1150.PNG

crazygringo
0 replies
18m

It doesn't matter, because it's a contract. Even if you cancel your card, Adobe can send it to collections, and it will show up as unpaid debt and negatively impact your credit score, which means you might pay more for your next mortgage or car loan.

This is not uncommon for businesses that use annual subscriptions. Certain gyms are particularly known for this. And with Adobe being so sneaky and aggressive about subscriptions, it wouldn't even surprise me.

dagmx
24 replies
1h43m

Pro-tip if you ever want cheaper Adobe subscriptions is to cancel your sub and they’ll send you repeat offers at lower prices up to 60% off.

Though, obviously as per the article, this is a pain to do.

It’s really a shame there’s nothing comparable to Adobe’s products on the really pro-artist end of things.

Companies like Serif have tried with Affinity but it’s lackluster when you really need to do some high end work. OSS stuff like Krita, Inkscape and Gimp have improved a lot but there’s still a huge gulf.

Photoshop is perhaps the easiest to replace, but the rest of the suite like Illustrator really has no competition when it comes to functionality.

Affinity Designer lacks so many of the gradient tools, shape repetition, and even certain alignment tools.

InDesign similarly has many QoL features that Affinity Publisher lack.

After Effects has some competition but nowhere near the ecosystem it provides.

I guess premiere and animate (previously flash) have a lot of competition but that’s about it?

For reference of where I’m coming from , I own licenses to the full Adobe suite and the full affinity suite. I have professionally done art and programmed for features in multiple domains for a decade and my work has shipped with major products from FAANG-like companies.

I totally think the alternatives can replace Adobe products at some level, but the level of tooling I need and that Adobe has provided, is currently unmatched.

It would be great to see better alternatives someday.

imabotbeep2937
6 replies
1h35m

This is true of literally everything in the new economy.

Internet? Wait until the moment your "promo" cost ends and your bill goes from $80 to $150, threaten to quit, oh wow magically you can have $80 again and a free mobile phone line.

Any subscription service is like this. I sometimes grab a Blue Apron when it's 65+% off which is anytime I want. My ex used to do this with clothing subscriptions, up to 80% off.

There are laws against things being "always on sale". But now they're just being used to punish lazy customers who don't keep up on their promos. Only lazy or ignorant people pay the "real" price.

Oh hey would you look at that, another billion dollar IPO with no plan for profitability went bankrupt. Weird.

nkozyra
2 replies
1h20m

I had T-Mobile starting in ~2003 and it included unlimited tethering.

After they introduced the Netflix included offer I inquired and they offered an "upgrade" that they swore up and down would not change my current service.

After agreeing, I was traveling and tried to tether and boom nothing. Their upgrade that would change nothing got me out of this grandfathered situation. Over time the cost of Netflix resulted in a higher fee for Netflix and ultimately I pay more for less.

Can't trust any company not to do anything in their power to squeeze another dime out of you.

Almondsetat
1 replies
1h9m

Why accept oral promises when a contract with the term is definitely available? I guess you didn't record the conversation so why not giving the papers a look?

nkozyra
0 replies
1h4m

It's a lesson we all have to learn at some point, that was mine.

Recording calls is always tricky because of party consent rules, although telling people you're recording probably puts some guardrails on behavior.

ryandrake
1 replies
6m

Internet? Wait until the moment your "promo" cost ends and your bill goes from $80 to $150, threaten to quit, oh wow magically you can have $80 again and a free mobile phone line.

Careful though. Companies are catching on to the "threaten to cancel" trick. Last time I tried this with Comcast, the support rep put me on hold, and then instead of sending me over to the "retention" specialist, just canceled my service and asked if I needed anything else. Oops..

LegitShady
0 replies
2m

There's no need to be worried about it. Don't just threaten, actually switch when a competitor is having a promo and stop worrying about it. I switched internet service between a few providers almost every year for quite a while. It saved a lot of money.

nickff
0 replies
52m

All this back-and-forth about promos and cancellations is just the latest form of haggling; there's nothing new under the sun.

auggierose
1 replies
1h16m

That's why you always sign up for one of these things with something like Revolut, which will give you a new credit card number for each subscription.

chimen
0 replies
49m

I had no Revolut back then

acdha
0 replies
1h29m

Have you disputed the charge? If the bank is refusing to honor your request, that’s both reason to switch banks and to try small claims court to get your money back.

tomschlick
1 replies
1h12m

Pro-tip if you ever want cheaper Adobe subscriptions is to cancel your sub and they’ll send you repeat offers at lower prices up to 60% off

I have found the same to be true with SiriusXM radio as well. You can ask the chat bot to cancel your account when a promo runs out and it will take you back down from $19/mo to like $6/mo. I setup a calendar item so I know when the promo is going to expire and do this. It's a PITA but it only takes 5 minutes.

meowster
0 replies
54m

Their discounted rate is $5/month.

I once called them to stop sending me mailers, and they said they'll stop for two years, I said no, stop forever.

I took my vehicle to a place that sold my information to SiriusXM and they resumed the mailers.

But this time... I just created an account on their website and changed my address to their headquarters and phone number to their phone number. They can spam themselves for all I care!

(I've done this with other businesses that don't respect their potential customers with great success! Often the people I speak with don't seem to recognize it when I give them their company's address or the 800-number that I'm called them at.)

liendolucas
1 replies
1h16m

Is that a pro-tip? I mean, I wouldn't give them a penny more for having this attitude towards customers in first place. The real pro-tip at least for me would be to pay once for a product that I can use without being enslaved to a for-life subscription. It really really pisses me off how most commercial software is offered today. F** all that.

llamaimperative
0 replies
49m

The really pro-tip would be “try paying for an imaginary alternative I just made up!”?

whywhywhywhy
0 replies
15m

After Effects competition is the furthest away I feel. Everything else I could get by but nothing has the same toolset as AE

tambourine_man
0 replies
1h7m

Photoshop is perhaps the easiest to replace

I wish

spookie
0 replies
1h9m

I don't think there's such a huge gulf between Krita and Photoshop for digital artists. I do work with it professionally all the time, mostly dealing with texture work for CG.

oregoncurtis
0 replies
47m

Davinci Resolve is miles better than Premiere. I don't do a lot of compositing, but I know more and more people are starting to use it over After Effects as well.

jwells89
0 replies
1h4m

For Photoshop specifically (and perhaps other CC programs, but I'm less familiar with them) another problem compared to alternatives is that a great wealth of instructional material (tutorials, paid video courses, etc) are built around Photoshop.

While there are ways to make alternatives more Photoshop-like, there's always going to be unreconcilable differences which bring unwelcome friction when the goal is to learn whatever the material is teaching rather than screw around with keybinds and UI configuration.

More projects that aim to adjust existing FOSS alternatives to more closely clone Photoshop would be of great help here. There used to be GIMPShop[0] that did this for GIMP but it's unfortunately been defunct for a long time now.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop

giobox
0 replies
42m

Pro-tip if you ever want cheaper Adobe subscriptions is to cancel your sub and they’ll send you repeat offers at lower prices up to 60% off.

The issue though is this often only works for many subscribers for a small window each year, when the *annual* "renewal" occurs.

The problem with much of the Creative Suite subs, and what the FTC are also suing over, is that it looks and smells like a monthly sub you can cancel at any time, but you often can't - its “annual paid monthly” as the linked article describes.

The big problem is their ridiculous “annual paid monthly” plan - you often can't cancel, or it takes a ridiculous amount of effort to escape “annual paid monthly”. I know plenty of people who needed Creative Suite for one month who fell into the “annual paid monthly” trap assuming it was a typical subscription service.

"Adobe pushes consumers to its “annual paid monthly” subscription plan, pre-selecting it as a default. Adobe prominently shows the plan’s “monthly” cost during enrollment, but it buries the early termination fee (ETF) and its amount, which is 50 percent of the remaining monthly payments when a consumer cancels in their first year."
egypturnash
0 replies
1h16m

I get the impression from my friends in the animation industry that Toon Boom’s animation suite pretty much dominates the industry. Flash hung on a while but TB has so many features designed for the particular craft of assembling a small army of people who collaborate on making a moving and talking drawing.

I keep on thinking of ditching ~25y of specializing in Illustrator for TB lately but I really just do not feel like paying $1k/y for a subscription to it. They have cheaper subscriptions but one of the ways they differentiate them is by limiting the effects, and “constantly pushing the limits of Illustrator’s effect system” is one of the reasons I want to move on from it.

altruios
0 replies
54m

I've only ever used Krita, really. What features am I missing from photoshop? What is that gulf that I do not see?

extr
10 replies
2h10m

Good IMO. Adobe is a uniquely bad actor here, I can't think of many other services that operate in a similar way.

dboreham
6 replies
2h3m

Try canceling SirriusXM.

terinjokes
1 replies
1h45m

I did so at the beginning of last year. I was on and off the phone within 5 minutes and they refunded the last month.

I was canceling a several years old standalone radio subscription, and not trying to cancel at the end of a car's free trial, and I wonder if that's why I had such difference experience.

PNewling
0 replies
1h28m

I feel like something must have changed, because when we went to cancel ours on a previous car ~3 years ago it was a long-ish process, but only because they kept offering more and more discounts until it was essentially free.

A couple months ago when the trial ran out on a different car it was like you said, over and done with in 5 minutes.

meowster
0 replies
50m

I never paid them, but used to receive their mailers.

I once called them to stop sending me mailers, and they said they'll stop for two years, I said no, stop forever.

I took my vehicle to a place that sold my information to SiriusXM and they resumed the mailers.

But this time... I just created an account on their website and changed my address to their headquarters and phone number to their phone number. They can spam themselves for all I care!

(I've done this with other businesses that don't respect their potential customers with great success! Often the people I speak with don't seem to recognize it when I give them their company's address or the 800-number that I called them at.)

judge2020
0 replies
1h42m

If you call to cancel every time, you'll probably end up with a subscription equal to $10/yr every year.

heywire
0 replies
1h38m

It’s not hard at all. In fact, I use an iPhone, and they have an iMessage “service” or whatever it is called where I just text them for account related things. Every year I text them for a discounted renewal on my wife’s car. Last year I cancelled service on my car because I just wasn’t using it often enough. Of course they started offering a discounted price, but when I countered that I’m just not using it, they completed the cancellation without issue. Guess I’ve been lucky.

cityofdelusion
0 replies
10m

Sirius is easy these days, it’s a 2 minute phone call. They’ll offer a discount rate, decline it, canceled and refunded.

Gym memberships and newspaper subscriptions is what needs to get targeted next. They are aggressive and lots of gyms will only cancel in-person, even if you move away.

spike021
1 replies
1h42m

New York Times. Last year I wanted to cancel my Athletic subscription and not only do they use the positively colored buttons to cancel the cancellation flow rather than continue with cancelling, once you get to what seems like a final confirmation, it doesn't show anything to confirm it actually was cancelled. I ended up needing to wait until the next bill date to make sure I wasn't charged again. Their support was useless too.

gabinator
0 replies
29m

Several years ago, the only way to cancel was over the phone. Hallmark of scumbag business.

Planet Fitness requires in-person or a mailed note for cancellation (unless you “move” to California which legally requires companies to provide online cancellation if you can sign up online)

georgeecollins
0 replies
1h52m

I was just having a terrible experience trying to uninstall the "Adobe Creative Cloud". I have used it and paid for it. It's full of anti-patterns to make it difficult to uninstall, and now that I don't pay for it any more it just exists on my computer to nag me to renew my subscriptions.

They have good products and I gladly pay for software I use. But the whole cloud service experience has not been good for me. Cory Doctorow coined a word for this that I am too polite to use.

brink
6 replies
2h0m

While we're at it, can we sue Apple for making it too hard for us to export our data off of their cloud?

tempnow987
4 replies
1h56m

No - because that's clearly an attack vector to steal information as well.

stavros
3 replies
1h43m

What attack vector could that possibly enable for a session with a valid login?

tempnow987
2 replies
1h5m

The regulations generally have required businesses to respond to written requests.

While GPDR and others vary, at least with CCPA two data points are enough to get a release of data.

What's done is if general info on you has leaked (say email address / date of birth / social etc) then someone can use that to go to Apple and now request a full dump of everything they have on you.

So you can leverage one dump / leak, and now go after lots of players that have to comply with a data export request to get everything you want to know about someone.

Google / Microsoft / Apple / etc can have a surprising amount of sensitive data (every photo you have taken or that's been shared with you) and even though you've been hit by one data leak, you may not want those folks to be able to leverage that for more leaks.

https://dataprivacy.foxrothschild.com/2019/02/articles/europ...

The liability is usually very high if the companies DON'T release data - so the bias moves to releasing data (there are folks who go around putting requests in and complaining if the data dump is not easy to get).

stavros
0 replies
1h1m

But this seems trivial to stop: "you can find the 'Download Everything' button in your account settings".

MaKey
0 replies
42m

Do you have any other source than a generic warning about malicious data export requests? Otherwise your take seems like fearmongering to me.

nottorp
3 replies
1h35m

Hmm. So the FTC has no power to enforce the rules it makes? Has to resort to lawsuits?

How about the other US government agencies regulating ... something? Is the FDA as toothless as the FTC?

acdha
1 replies
1h17m

Agencies have the powers specifically delegated to them by Congress. That’s different in every case because there are different politicians in power when various laws are passed and the political factors vary. In cases like this, you really want to contact your congressional representatives because they will hear a lot from the companies who see enough revenue to make it a lobbying point and might figure that the general public doesn’t really see it as a priority.

nottorp
0 replies
24m

As an outsider, I'm just surprised to find out another weirdness of the US system :) I have no congresscritter to contact.

Around here if an agency is regulating something it also has the power to impose changes and/or fine. Those can be contested in court but involving the legal system for years isn't the first step.

kbolino
0 replies
53m

Civil action is enforcement. The standards of proof and costs involved are lower than for criminal prosecution.

ncr100
2 replies
2h4m

Does working at Adobe impact the individual 's ethics?

This seems like a case where Adobe is behaving unethically.

I wonder if long-term Adobe employees have the sense about their ethics being more flexible now, versus when they started at Adobe?

dylan604
0 replies
1h50m

Does working at Facebook, Twitt...er,X, TikTok, or any of the other soulless companies?

dogleash
0 replies
1h44m

To answer your question for real: Yes, obviously.

To answer your question practically: No, it's just a job, gotta pay the mortgage. And you know companies have a legal duty to be amoral in the quest for profit, right?

We live in a time where so many people work at and/or want to work at ethically dubious large tech companies, we experience overwhelming social pressure to see them as more morally-neutral than they are.

We don't want the cogitative dissonance of hanging out with friends and spending the whole time thinking about what it means to have someone in my life that enables $foo for a living. Are you financially and emotionally ready to quit your job as soon as your employer crosses your line? You did spend time developing and reflecting on your own personal line in the sand, right? And are you're comfortable unabashedly sharing that standard over dinner to your 5 closest friends? What if one works at the place you find most-evil?

mcpar-land
2 replies
1h38m

"FTC charges Adobe their annual Business Practices fee"

Not to be a pessimist, but what's the chance this is just another suit that's a rounding error compared to the revenue Adobe gains from these unethical business practices in the first place?

wmf
0 replies
1h5m

Presumably Adobe will have to stop these practices to settle the case.

josephcsible
0 replies
20m

IMO, fines for deceptive or unfair business practices should never be less than the total revenue resulting from them.

crazygringo
2 replies
30m

Thank goodness, it's about time!

My only question is, what the heck took the FTC this long? Why didn't they do this years ago?

The problems with cancelling Adobe CC are well known:

- Consumers think they've subscribed to a monthly plan only to discover it's yearly

- If they cancel before the year is over they still have to pay 50% of the remaining time, while the software stops working immediately, and they had no idea

- But worst of all, if you want to set it to NOT autorenew at the end of the year, YOU CAN'T [1]. You can't cancel renewal but keep the existing subscription through the end of the year. Which is insane. You have to wait until some brief "cancellation window" period at the end of your year, and cancel it AFTER the window has opened up but BEFORE it actually renews. Again, this is INSANE

And all this is on top of the complaints that people try to cancel over the phone even within the cancellation window, and either can't do it, or think they've done it but it hasn't.

There's no way the FTC won't win here. And I hope the FTC levies a truly massive fine on Adobe, ON TOP OF refunds to consumers of all previous cancellation fees.

It's absolutely despicable behavior, and there's no way Adobe would be able to get away with it if they didn't have network lock-in effects from what have become the industry file formats of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, etc. If you collaborate in the graphics space you need to use their tools period, so you can edit files people send you and vice-versa. Conversion tools never work perfectly, or even well, when they even exist at all.

[1] https://helpx.adobe.com/manage-account/using/manage-auto-ren...

hparadiz
0 replies
28m

I hope they get the book thrown at them. Absolute scum.

Night_Thastus
0 replies
25m

My only question is, what took the FTC this long? Why didn't they do this years ago?

In general, the government and its agencies move very slowly. Compared to the FTC, Adobe's move over to subscription is quite recent. Adobe's only been doing subscriptions for what, maybe 10 years? And these problems are even more recent than that.

It also takes time to build up a case, even if they had looked into it immediately. Get a nice long paper trail, lots of documentation, consumer complaints, etc. That can take years.

As they get more familiar with the modern world of software, I think cases like this will take less and less time to deal with.

42lux
2 replies
1h6m

If affinity would just get their act together and release their suite for linux we could all get over adobe real quick.

kstrauser
1 replies
51m

Has Adobe released their suite for Linux?

42lux
0 replies
31m

That's not the point. Industries such as VFX and game studios often either run dual-boot systems or provide two workstations per artist. If there is a usable equivalent for Linux, they will adopt it because the rest of their tooling runs on Linux anyways. Currently, they have no incentive to switch.

tempnow987
1 replies
1h54m

A reminder that like all good companies adept at scamming folks they have HUGE ethics policies :)

Ethics and Integrity At Adobe, good business begins with our commitment to the highest ethical standards.

We adhere to the following core principles:

Integrity, by conducting business according to high ethical standards Respect for our employees, customers, vendors, partners, stockholders and the communities in which we work and live Honesty in our internal and external communications and all business transactions Quality in our products and services, striving to deliver the highest value to our customers and partners Responsibility for our words and actions, confirming our commitment to do what we say Fairness through adherence to applicable laws, regulations, policies and a high standard of behavior

We encourage you to read our policies to learn more about the legal and ethical standards we embrace.

AI ethics at Adobe

Australia Modern Slavery Act Statement

California Transparency in Supply Chains Act Statement

Code of Business Conduct

Code of Ethics

Conflicts of Interest

Global Anti-Corruption Policy

Partner Code of Conduct

Public Policy and Government Relations Policy

UK Slavery and Human Trafficking Statement

Adobe Whistleblowing Privacy Notice

diego_sandoval
0 replies
1h46m

In Spanish se have a saying: "Dime de qué presumes y te diré de qué careces".

Tell me what you brag about and I'll tell you what you lack.

rglover
1 replies
37m

The funny part of this behavior is (I'd imagine) Adobe would make far more money if they just offered simple plans and a "cancel any time" option alongside a "pay once for one year of upgrades and then that version works/is supported until the support window ends" option.

So many great businesses have been ruined by the need for endless growth leading to dark patterns.

crazygringo
0 replies
21m

Oh no, I guarantee you the current way is making Adobe more money. They wouldn't be doing it otherwise. It's not a mistake.

powersj
1 replies
1h15m

Cancelled my lightroom cloud account last night and was very surprised at the "early cancellation fee". Only made me upset and more determined to move off to something else! Very happy to see this post this morning.

uptown
0 replies
18m

What'd you switch to?

BHSPitMonkey
0 replies
55m

AI will eliminate a lot of creative industry jobs regardless of what people at Adobe say.

martinky24
1 replies
2h8m

Would love to get the money I wasted on this problem back. Who knows if that's on the table... Class action lawsuits can result in payouts though.

strictnein
0 replies
1h29m

$17 coupon for future Adobe services coming your way!

iamleppert
1 replies
46m

Customers should be required to pay out the FULL contract enterprise value under force of law.

twosheep
0 replies
41m

"annual contract billed monthly" is a dark pattern - it's not monthly, it's annual, and deliberately confusing

aliasxneo
1 replies
1h5m

I recently used Privacy card to purchase a monthly subscription to Adobe Acrobat for a one-time need. They've been failing to charge me $30 for weeks now. Sad that I have to resort to this kind of stuff to protect myself from businesses.

ceejayoz
0 replies
58m

Be aware that they sometimes send folks to collections (with the corresponding credit hit) over this; most of the subscriptions are worded as annual commitments.

terpimost
0 replies
41m

As a happy paying customer of Photopea (photoshop in a browser by not Adobe) I’m glad Figma isn’t under Adobe but there is a revenue/investors pressure and Figma is becoming more and more affected by it.

I would be fine paying for Adobe if their software would be the beat example of UX and performance. But sluggish brush stroke on M1 is just not acceptable.

slater
0 replies
1h36m

Did anything ever come of those proposed "cancelling subscriptions must be as easy as setting up the initial subscription" laws?

I kept hearing about them in discussions about the infamously impossible-to-unsub NYTimes subscriptions, then nothing happens.

paradite
0 replies
1h51m

If you buy or still have the perpetual license of Lightroom, can you use it to process raws from newly released cameras?

otar
0 replies
2h1m

Long overdue

michael_vo
0 replies
16m

My dad was accidentally paying 89.99$ a month and hasn't used their service for a year. I cancelled it for him after going through his taxes/finances. They use all sorts of dark UX practices at signup and cancellation.

Honestly there should be a law where if you haven't logged into your account in 3 months you should get a notification asking if you want to cancel. It's one thing if the company is storing your data (like google photos) as that has an associated cost, but inactive accounts just feels like corporate theft.

lagniappe
0 replies
1h36m

To be a fly on the wall at Planet Fitness HQ right now..

kaetemi
0 replies
40m

I had the "cancel anytime after the first year" plan, and after that first year was over, they tried charging another whole year as cancellation fee.

jmount
0 replies
58m

I was at a party once and was introduced to a nice person who worked for Adobe. At the time I was heavily into photography, and I started praising Adobe Photoshop. Unfortunately (due to a lack of editor) I continued with how Photoshop was great, unlike so many other Adobe products. Then I attempted to apologize by saying I was wrong and rude, but it is just that Adobe policies are so nasty. Saw the guy on BART the next day, he didn't make eye contact. I still feel both bad and right.

jkaplowitz
0 replies
1h48m

Why does the version of the complaint embedded in the article have so many redactions? Any idea what kind of information those would contain and why they would be redacted?

imzadi
0 replies
1h56m

So, this might be fixed, but you could get around the cancellation fee by changing your plan to the Dreamweaver monthly plan and then cancelling that. You'd get a prorated refund when you changed plans and then an additional refund for the monthly plan when you cancelled it.

gyudin
0 replies
2h5m

From personal experience they refused to cancel subscription or close account as they failed to charge my card after a trial period. So I just blocked their emails for good :D

dynjo
0 replies
1h19m

Totally deserved for a morally corrupt business.

drra
0 replies
38m

I own an ancient box copy of Adobe Photoshop CS4 and use it just because of muscle memory. Since a year or so, periodically it bullies me with a popup that my unlicensed software is going to be disabled and it shows every 15 minutes regardless if I run Photoshop or not. Can't close it without going to Adobe website.

I'll never going to buy or support anyone in buying anything produced by Adobe. Not going to cry if they go down either.

djbusby
0 replies
1h6m

I had similar issues with OVH. Got an annual contract, didn't like their service, went to cancel but it had already renewed into second year and I had to cancel 30 days before that. So I missed my small window. Now stuck with another year because to cancel means just pay out the rest of the contract. Grrr.

blackeyeblitzar
0 replies
6m

They absolutely deserve it. A number of these companies have started abusing their customers in illegal ways by forcing them to accept new terms and conditions before they can even login to cancel subscriptions or access things they have already paid for.

This needs to be ended through legislation, but also needs to be retroactive, with fines and jail time for the senior most executives. Adobe is not the only problem company. Blizzard and Roku and TP Link and Sonos are all recent examples.

baal80spam
0 replies
2h8m

Good.

EncomLab
0 replies
1h16m

Went to GIMP years ago and never looked back.