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

[Rodney Williams]

These cancellation fees apply in the first year only. After that you can come and go and switch plans on the fly.

Cellphone contracts and internet providers have been and still do charge cancellation fees and they will do it no matter how many years you have been a loyal customer.

Adobe had a cult following at one point as an industry standard for the software they make. I think going the subscription route left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. I believe had they offer an option to buy it outright besides offering a subscription based service. I believe the people would eventually warm up to that. But just straight subscription based and no other options to buy outright. That didn't sit well with a lot of people. I don't have anything against that. Adobe is just so difficult in how they do things. Now, as for the cell phone services, contracts will have in fine prints that cancellation fees will be charged if they terminate the service BEFORE the contract expires. That's what contracts are for. I used to have a contract for cell phone service. After a while, I stopped signing contracts and went month to month. Everybody is different in their own way. The best part? I have a choice to either participate or not participate. Nobody can force me to.

 

[AlexisV]

Sadly it is not, certainly if you do work for other companies, as they expect files in Adobe file formats. A friend have been doing graphics design for years using Adobe software and most of the companies she did work for wanted he to do the work in Adobe software, be that Photoshop, illustrator, InDesign or other Adobe stuff.
A few months ago she decided a slow-down a bit and have gone for smaller clients and now use the Serif affinity software. But some of them still asks if she uses Adobe. I think her susbscription for Adobe stuff comes to the end in August and she is not going to renew it.
The problem is now is that Affinity has been taken over by Canva, which is little worrying.

There really is not a lot of competition for Adobe out there, Video editing yes maybe and Audio yes, but graphics wise, nope. Desktop publishing therer is very little out there either. You have Affinity publisher, quarkexpress if you can afford it, Xara page and layout something or other, not really a true desktop publisher. Scribus if you want to go open-source.
MS have decided to stop producing their desktop publisher.

Exactly. I have InDesign but much prefer to use QuarkXPress (everyone ditched it around 2008, but they overhauled the software in 2018 and to be honest Quark 2024 wipes the floor with clunky InDesign 24, but the boat has sailed).

The number of people who want "the Indesign files", even though in my day you owned the copyright and you never handed over your intellectual property. But seems to be the done thing now and they get huffy if you refuse.

 

[stinksroundhere]

Ugh I am not getting into a fifth discussion on a message board about useless lawyers. I have multi-millions of contracts and NDAs that I could be fined. Yes, I listen to my lawyer.

Affinity Photo DOES NOT have Generative AI. Maybe in Version 3 it will scan files, but not now. And the benefit is I do NOT need to upgrade. I payed once and have the product forever. Let's just leave it at that.

I know how to run my business and with my Lawyer assisting to make sure I don't owe dozens of millions thank you very much.

How does it make a difference which app you use for photo editing if you have to deliver to the client via the cloud?

All the cloud file sharing services are moving into generative AI training now and have sold your meta data before that.

The apps we use locally make no difference to this. You either have to encrypt your files like someone suggested or have a courier physically deliver a hard drive.

 

[stinksroundhere]

I bet if EU had done that people on Macrumors would shout CoMmUnIsM all over the forums….

The EU parliament and regulators are notably free trade capitalists and the union was formed to allow rich people and corporations to move around freely, take advantage of cheap immigrant labour, allow oligarchs to launder their money and buy golden passports. There's nothing lefty about it.

 

[Mainyehc]

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 won’t happen overnight; likely schools will start teaching alternatives, like in the olden days when they still had serious competition from Quark, Macromedia, etc. And incidentally, with Serif’s acquisition by Canva, Affinity apps will now be free for education users, which is about the worst news Adobe could’ve gotten this year; shooting themselves in the foot with their latest shenanigans was about as stupid and untimely as Microsoft’s Recall blunder, it’s almost as if both companies wish to exit their traditional markets…

If Canva doesn’t blow it and resists the urge to foist an Affinity subscription (or Canva+, or whatever) upon everybody, they stand a good chance of eating away a big chunk of the traditional photography, illustration, design and DTP market from the incumbent. As for the other market segments…? Well, Adobe has also had much more credible competition for years, and they’ve really been pushing their luck for a while now.

 

[Mainyehc]

The EU parliament and regulators are notably free trade capitalists and the union was formed to allow rich people and corporations to move around freely, take advantage of cheap immigrant labour, allow oligarchs to launder their money and buy golden passports. There's nothing lefty about it.

You’re not entirely right, but also not entirely wrong. While on that subject, you should sign the Edri20 petition against the horrendous CSAM-protection system the European Parliament will vote on tomorrow, ChatControl. It’s every bit as creepy and intrusive as the name makes it sound.

 

[nikon1]

This news has made my day! Adobe’s corporate logo should have always been a eye-patched pirate standing on a leaky pirate ship!

They are the worst Software Company for both their subscription policies and their software support (the old, third world voice asking, “Have you rebooted?”)

 

[penlost]

I really love Audition to edit audio so feel stuck with them. I tried Pro Logic and could not get my head around it!

 

[x-evil-x]

Never liked adobe when they made photoshop a subscription model. I used to own the old one and couldn’t boot it up anymore and had to pay for this new plan they started

 

[jlc1978]

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.

Sounds like my experiences with SiruisXM. They tried desperately to get me to accept x more months free...

I also hate Apple for deactivating an account as soon as you cancel a trial like Apple is literally the only service where this has ever happened to me. Usually I subscribe to a trial and cancel it right after to make sure I do not forget but normally the service still works for the rest of the trial period. This is not the case with Apple.

I wonder if that is app specific? Whenever I have cancelled a subscription I always got it until the end date and then no renewal. At least Apple makes it easy to cancel.

I saw this posted on X that lists alternatives to the different offerings of Adobe.

The problem is not alternatives but compatibility. A others pointed out, in a commercial environment, 99% compatible is not good enough; so you have to use the standard. That's why I use MSOffice becasue I know my clients will get a working file with no issues; other than having to enable macros.

 

[3304614]

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. 👍

That’s… not the best protip ever.

Not paying your bill (via an invalid credit card number) doesn’t make the bill disappear. It still exists. You still own the money. Adobe (or whatever company/retailer) probably won’t bother coming after you themselves. But they could sell your debt for pennies on the dollar to a debt collector (like PRA Group).

In this specific case it seems like Adobe itself is breaking the law. So for that reason maybe you’ll be okay. But… not great advice overall.

 

[Lord of the Pies]

Never liked adobe when they made photoshop a subscription model. I used to own the old one and couldn’t boot it up anymore and had to pay for this new plan they started

The subscription model isn't an issue imo. Everything is a subscription these days. If the value is high, who really cares.

Adobe's problem is that their plans are too expensive. They're still pricing themselves like they have no competition. If they're happy to give out 50% discounts via live chat support like candy, they should just make their public-facing prices half what they currently are. At least for personal plans.

They could also make a better effort at letting you pay for only the apps you need. The Photography plan doesn't include Illustrator and is therefore useless to designers and people who work with design files. This really screwed me while I was a subscriber and made me resent Adobe somewhat, even though the apps I cared about were actually pretty good (Photoshop, Illustrator and occasionally Acrobat Pro and Premiere Pro).

Also, I'm not sure how many people here know, but earlier this year Adobe changed how their cloud storage works in Finder, and you cannot remove it from the sidebar or even hide it. It doesn't show up in your Finder sidebar settings like other items do. So that 100GB facility that I had never used, nor planned to ever use, became a permanent and prominent feature in my Finder. Their support said that was intentional and wasn't under consideration for being changed.

 

[Astro7x]

I shared Steve Jobs hate of Adobe. They've always thrown up their hands and wondered why everyone pirates their software.

Dropping the ball with not updating Final Cut Pro for years and then the initial release of FCPX is the reason Premiere is so widely used in post production.

If they just released a proper FCP8 I’d guarantee Adobe wouldn’t have as big of a market share as they do now. I know so many post houses that held onto FCP7, but had no choice to switch software when X just didn’t do what we needed it to do.

 

[polyphenol]

There is a lot of talk of alternatives, but what if those alternatives are not widely used in the professional world?

For my personal use, that wouldn't be an issue. (Especially if there were some form of export - even just to word processor format files that lose a lot of the benefits of InDesign.) But when we look back at how InDesign made inroads into the Quark market... It took time but it showed that major changes can occur.

 

[medazinol]

Adobe used to be a good company until they decided to impose subscriptions for their apps, then they went full draconian on the design community.
Haven't used Adobe products in years, I've switched to alternatives that are just as good with reasonable prices

 

[stinksroundhere]

I shared Steve Jobs hate of Adobe.

??? That's news to us. He had Adobe present on the stage very often.

They've always thrown up their hands and wondered why everyone pirates their software.

Anyone pirating software (which is often infected with actual dangerous spyware) has no right to complain about their data being pirated. If you say it's OK to copy then corporations will say they have the right to copy too, because people and corporations have the same rights under the law.

 

[Pandyone]

Instead of arguing against the technology, argue only against the abuse and misuse of it.

Well that is exactly what I did (even though I can argue against the technology too).

Adobe changes the terms and conditions (that you can't decline) on the already bought products, they have very many applications/services running in the background and installed on computer (bloat) and they want to manually check on your photos when they want to.

When a company abuses and misuses the technology it must be counted as worse than one single creator?

 

[avro707]

Dropping the ball with not updating Final Cut Pro for years and then the initial release of FCPX is the reason Premiere is so widely used in post production.

If they just released a proper FCP8 I’d guarantee Adobe wouldn’t have as big of a market share as they do now. I know so many post houses that held onto FCP7, but had no choice to switch software when X just didn’t do what we needed it to do.

and now Premiere is so widely used it’s probably very difficult for Apple to claw back that market.

One thing for me is that Adobe support is excellent - at least for what I use.

Though I suspect I’m probably far higher up the food chain compared to a lot of others here so that’s playing a part in the support. They are great.

 

[Astro7x]

Sounds like my experiences with SiruisXM. They tried desperately to get me to accept x more months free...

I wonder if it still works if you just tell them you’re moving to another country they’ll cancel you immediately. Excuse if they can’t sell you a service there is no point in trying to retain you.

 

[msackey]

"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 work.

Not unless it's by design to create that confusion, which I think is the case.

 

[stinksroundhere]

Not unless it's by design to create that confusion, which I think is the case.

I was never confused by Adobe's contracts. When I had my first sub with them I wanted to cancel early because my new employer was letting me use their employee Adobe accounts. That was in 2015. Adobe told me about the early termination fee.

After I went freelance again I found out that I could rejoin, change plans whenever I want, cancel and rejoin whenever I want, and there were no more termination fees because they only applied in the first year.

I am currently on the full Creative Cloud plan with 40% discount because I saw an offer, cancelled my old plan, and joined up again with the discount.

 

[msackey]

I was never confused by Adobe's contracts. When I had my first sub with them I wanted to cancel early because my new employer was letting me use their employee Adobe accounts. That was in 2015. Adobe told me about the early termination fee.

After I went freelance again I found out that I could rejoin, change plans whenever I want, cancel and rejoin whenever I want, and there were no more termination fees because they only applied in the first year.

I am currently on the full Creative Cloud plan with 40% discount because I saw an offer, cancelled my old plan, and joined up again with the discount.

Sure, you didn't find it confusing. The lawsuit is in part around confusion though, isn't it?

 

[avro707]

That's news to us. He had Adobe present on the stage very often.

Probably Adobe Flash (aka Macromedia Flash).

I remember there was a big stink about Flash. I still remember Macromedia Director!

 

[DEMinSoCAL]

Affinity is owned by Canva. Look up the direction they are taking.I have no doubt Affinity Photo will end up doing generative AI in the future and there's only one way to do it. Even the Krita community developed a plugin.



Personally I believe anyone dumping Photoshop for an Affinity product isn't serious about their career. They'll run into all sorts of file compatibility issues with layered files and exports. Clients and teams need compatible files especially in the age of remote working. It's not feasible for everyone on a team to be using different apps for the same tasks.

They'll also be frustrated with some of the shortcuts and UI ideas Affinity had.

So it sounds like you think Adobe has a monopoly on graphic arts software then? So many complain about Adobe products quality but no one has the "courage" to try something else?

 

[NEPOBABY]

So it sounds like you think Adobe has a monopoly on graphic arts software then?

Speak politely.

So many complain about Adobe products quality but no one has the "courage" to try something else?

I complain about bugs in every app including Affinity's crap. I have almost every kind of app from almost everyone installed. They all have their own flavor of crapness but I wouldn't replace Photoshop's crap side for Affinity's crap side.