Until schools stop teaching it and industries discontinue, you’re stuck with it regardless of relevance.
With Figma being one of their biggest competitors, it was quite a sigh of relief the buyout didn’t happen.
It's also not just all U.S. education institutions, it's global.
Ok I no longer use Adobe and I think their subscription model is wrong on many levels.
With that said I find it a bit odd people are confused by this. Subscriptions typically have a month to month rate and an annual rate which costs less per month. Online services typically charge that full annual price up front but it results is less cost per month. Nobody would be able to afford the $720 annual fee if it was charged up front so Adobe splits that up per month. You as a customer however promised to pay that $720 to use the software for a year as part of that per month discounted price.
If customers truly wanted the option to cancel at any time they would be paying $1,080 per year. Clearly people would rather pay $720 instead of $1080 so they choose the annual plan. Annual meaning a one year commitment. One year! When one commits to a one year plan its normal to have a penalty to cancel that promise.
While Adobe is absolutely horrendous at explaining this in clear language and always makes everything convoluted and confusing I don't really think what they did was illegal. I feel their cost in general is way over inflated for what it is. Thats why myself and many others have moved on many years ago already. I just don't see how people are confused by this. An annual promise is an annual promise. It's not rocket science. When I did pay for Adobe many years ago I knew without a doubt doing the annual plan meant I was going to pay $60 a month or whatever it was at that time until those 12 months were up. When I switched to Affinity I canceled Adobe as soon as my 12 month window was up. I did have to keep an eye on it and make sure I timed it right but it was not predatory at all.
I want to make myself clear here. I have no love for Adobe at all. I will likely never pay for anything they have ever again. I feel like the entire subscription model is a waste of money and a horrible business practice. I just don't feel there is any deception on the annual contract part. Unless their costumer service is even worse now than it was before. I'm mainly speaking to the concept of an annual commitment compared to month to month. To me it seems like a group of people wanted to pay less for the software and wanted to get rid of it whenever they want. Essentially doing a backdoor discounted cost. It doesn't work like that. If you want to only use it a few months you have to pay the monthly rate of $90. If you want the lower $60 per month cost you have to commit to 12 months. Period.
The lawsuit is about them advertising CC as a monthly subscription service and benefitting from the incentive/attractiveness of customers paying in monthly installments while the actual cost and length of the agreement runs for no less than 12 months, regardless of whether the customer pays in monthly installments or an annual fee.
For Adobe to get away with its bait and switch it should not have hidden the fact that you not only get penalized for cancelling the subscription but also lose access to CC.
You can go through with the purchase and the only sentence that alerts you of this is the term "early termination fee".
You literally have to dig through there TOS to get to the fine print.
This notion that it's such a great value because of all the numerous apps you get is also false -3/4s of the apps are not useful to the average user.
Those apps are therefore just more paying for software I never wanted and I'm never going to use while Adobe profits. And Adobe most certainly doesn't have increased costs as a consequence of my hypothetical access to several many apps I'll never install.
It's all a part of their business plan -A giant app buffet that you pay extortionately for, whether you use it or not. And no fair prices for a single "dish" or two instead of the buffet, if that's all you need.
They deliberately set the monthly payment plan extortionately high just to make the "Annual, paid monthly" plan seem like a good deal despite also being overpriced.
And then you never get to own it or even just lower your fee a little for subscribing to CC for years in a row.
Typical marketing and legal jargon that's screwing over consumers and destroying how the World values products and services instead of just being straightforward and transparent.
