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U.S. Government Sues Adobe for Hidden Termination Fees When Canceling Subscription

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The United States Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission today levied a lawsuit against Adobe [PDF] for imposing a hidden termination fee on subscribers who want to cancel their Adobe plans. Adobe is accused of forcing subscribers to "navigate a complex and challenging cancellation process designed to deter them from cancelling subscriptions they no longer wanted."

adobe-creative-cloud-purple.jpg

Adobe offers its Creative Cloud products on a subscription basis, with fees that are paid monthly. A monthly payment suggests that it's possible to cancel anytime, but that's not how Adobe works because most customers are actually locked into a hidden annual agreement.

Customers who sign up for a free trial and are then charged and signed up to the default Creative Cloud plan, which is actually an annual contract. Canceling the annual contract requires customers to pay a lump sum of 50 percent of the "remaining contractual obligation" to cancel, despite the fact that service ends that month.

Adobe does let customers sign up for a month-to-month subscription plan, but at a higher cost than the annual contract that's paid monthly, and the difference is not always clear to new or existing customers. Adobe even has a whole help page because of the confusing nature of its subscription. If you look at the Adobe website, for example, Adobe lists a $60/month fee for accessing its full suite of apps, but that's only if you agree to the annual contract. A true month-to-month plan that you can cancel anytime is $90/month, and if you pay for a year upfront, you get no money back when you cancel after a 14-day period.

According to the DoJ, Adobe's setup violates the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act (ROSCA) through the use of fine print and inconspicuous hyperlinks to hide information about the Early Termination Fee.
The complaint alleges that for years, Adobe has profited from this hidden fee, misleading consumers about the true costs of a subscription and ambushing them with the fee when they try to cancel, wielding the fee as a powerful retention tool.

The complaint alleges that Adobe has further violated ROSCA by failing to provide consumers with a simple mechanism to cancel their recurring, online subscriptions. Instead, Adobe allegedly protects its subscription revenues by thwarting subscribers' attempts to cancel, subjecting them to a convoluted and inefficient cancellation process filled with unnecessary steps, delays, unsolicited offers and warnings.
Click to expand...
The lawsuit asks for "unspecified amounts of consumer redress" along with monetary civil penalties and a permanent injunction that would prevent Adobe from continuing to use hidden fees to thwart customer cancelations.

Article Link: U.S. Government Sues Adobe for Hidden Termination Fees When Canceling Subscription
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/06/17/us-government-sues-adobe-hidden-fees/
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I used to live inside Adobe apps. But then when they switched to subscription — I never used any of their apps ever again. Bye bye.
With creative cloud, Adobe owns your images/files forever. You can’t open them unless you’ve paid for an outrageous annual subscription.
 
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Reactions: Chuckeee, danbuter, Frurro and 44 others
Cancelling my Creative Cloud subscription a few months ago was complete insanity. I got the impression that it must be hell to work in that call centre. Ordinarily I'd be pretty irritated at an agent being overly persistent in trying to get me to stay subscribed, but quite quickly I just felt sorry for the guy. It was a weird sort of desperation, like failing to salvage a cancellation attempt reflects extremely poorly on them.

Switched to Affinity Photo and Designer, and haven't looked back. I find Photo a lot more user friendly, and imo, Inpainting knocks the socks off Content Aware.
 
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"Adobe even has a whole help page because of the confusing nature of its subscription." 😂

This is the first clue that you need to re-design your subscription plan instead of having a whole page trying to explain how it works.
 
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This termination nonsense got me. Last summer I snagged the student plan since I didn’t know my community college covered CC with tuition (gotta cut costs somewhere). When I learned CC was covered, I went to cancel, only to learn it was contracted for all 12mos. I waited until the monthly cost intersected with the termination fee and cut it then.
 
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Reactions: Chuckeee, ldenning, CarpalMac and 17 others
Good. Hidden lock-in contracts like this are bad enough on their own, but Adobe has been abusing its effective monopoly for about as long as any tech company in the world now. I'd love to see them finally get dinged for the overt customer-hostility.

I used to put Adobe and Microsoft in the same small basket of "companies that I will only do business with if I have absolutely no other choice", but at this point I feel like Adobe feels far worse than even Microsoft.

Also, while this isn't related to their sketchy billing: I have no choice but to use Acrobat at work, and it is genuinely impressive to me how a company could make a product that bad. If it was a beta of a new product, I'd say "It has a lot of features, but it's incredibly buggy and the interface is nearly unusable, but maybe they'll work the kinks out by the time it's released." Except it's 30 years old.
 
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Philosophical & technical question to ponder:
If every user uploaded pictures of Nelson Muntz captioned “haa-haa” would Adobe’s AI tell them, or would it keep a diplomatic silence out of either tact, self-preservation, or both?
 
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Protip: use Privacy.com and generate a burner credit card number with Adobe with a fixed maximum charge amount. When Adobe comes for that auto-renew or surprise termination fee it'll never go through. Also use Apple's Hide My Email when generating new Adobe accounts in case they try to blacklist your main email. 👍
 
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