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

[Flight Plan]

Good hopefully it teaches Adobe .

It’s only a lawsuit. We’re a long way from Adobe “learning a lesson”. Years, if ever.

Well, if they violate the law, go after them

The problem is, they might not have actually violated any law.

It's disappointing when a company can't keep their customers through satisfaction and instead has to lock them up with crazy fees. I wonder if they ever notice as they start moving away from keeping customers satisfied to *just* keeping customers.

Adobe is struggling trying to figure out if it’s going to be an ethical company going forward…or not.

No, don’t do this.

Their cancellation process is BS, but breaking a bona fide contract isn’t the way to go.

I know from second hand experience, if you try to cancel a credit card on a gym membership contract you will find yourself in collections quick.

Adobe has every right to collect on the debt they’re owed. The best solution is read what you’re signing up for and pay for the convenience of being able to cancel a month-to-month subscription.

In the US, you can have charges reversed if you think you were mistreated in the transaction. But you’re not wrong; a company can decide to go after you if they think you owe them money. So let’s get this all out in the open. I’ll bet that Adobe wouldn’t want THAT.

The point is that the 'bona fide contract' is illegal. In Australia, misleading and deceptive conduct will nullify a contract. If adobe promises '14 days free then $XX per month' and hides annual plans and hidden fees in small print, that would be misleading and deceptive.

To be clear, Adobe has always been terrible. It used to be cheaper to buy a return economy flight from Australia to the US and buy a US boxed version of Adobe Creative Suite, than it was to buy a digital version of Adobe CS from within Australia. This is not an exaggeration, there was a parliamentary inquiry into it - so apparently Adobe have learned nothing.

What you say is all true of course. And I don’t know how it works in Australia, but I’m sure that some people use the consumer laws as a lever with which they can get something for free. Some companies will fight that if they think they are being taken advantage of.

I think this came from a Louis Rossmann video, but it should be law that cancelling a contract must be equally as easy as entering into it (or easier). You want someone to spend 30 minutes on the phone, asking 20 times whether they really want to cancel? That’s totally fine as long as the only way to sign up is a 30 minute phone call where the sales rep spends the entire phone call trying to convince you not to buy it.

I saw one of the Louis Rossman videos, but I also heard that he may actually be mistaken about some aspects of this whole dramatic affair. Mistaken on the side of possibly harming Adobe.

...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...

You make an excellent point here. It’s very powerful to have the whole team working on a unified platform, rather than have everybody messing about with their own esoteric stuff. I have a couple of examples:

1. In one IT environment, we had two people who used Macs, and everybody else was on the standard Windows distribution being provisioned by our desktop provisioning team. The Mac users CONSTANTLY had problems connecting to both Microsoft Skype (and later to Teams), as well as to Zoom calls.
2. And then there was the drama with having to re-send some critical correspondence, file, or link to one of our Mac users.
3. In another example, the one guy on a particular team had written a long and detailed script that would automatically generate a new transaction server instance. The script worked very well, but it couldn’t front-end EVERY possible flavor, so the rest of the team did everything manually. The author was always frustrated that his team wouldn’t use his tool, and wouldn’t even try to understand it.
4. Had a conversation once with a Linux power user. He admitted to me that if he was ever made manager, he would move everybody on that team to Windows. His reasoning was that there was more software available for Windows and that you didn’t have to train anybody on Windows; you could pretty much bring any warm body that could fog a mirror into the Windows environment, and that ultimately, it would be easier for Linux users to learn Windows (in their roles as end-users) than it would b to train Windows users to become Linux users.

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.

That’s a very nice explanation; thank you.

What's new? Big corporation takes advantage of its "free trial" by marketing as such and was actually lying as it turns out! Wow! That hasn't ever happened before! Seeing you all fight about Adobe products is the entertainment I sorely needed tonight, so thanks all.

People complain en masse, because they have problems en masse. I’m glad you got entertainment out of it.

Machine learning in the cloud isn't spyware if the terms are clear and they aren't spying on your local files.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news but anytime you put your images online or your clients publish them everyone can see those images and copy your ideas or be inspired by your ideas.

That's all generative image models do. They learn from images and then let users apply visual concepts.

Yes, being inspired by other people's work sometimes results in lawsuits and arguments. The nature of capitalism is that people fight to protect their IP and hate being copied while at the same time rant that they believe in knowledge sharing and inspiring others. It's a contradiction isn't it? Openness and freedom to express, but not when your work comes too close to mine.

Instead of arguing against the technology, argue only against the abuse and misuse of it. Photography can be highly abusive but nobody calls the camera a 'spyware' that should be banned. The paintbrush can create abusive images and propaganda for dictatorships, but nobody says the paintbrush shouldn't exist.

I’m goin to flood the internets with pictures of DragonHamsters, stories about DragonHamsters, and songs about DragonHamsters. Look out, AI, I’m going to own you!

I love Adobe. My brain is too old now to learn a whole new way of doing things. Though as far as Adobe is concerned I'm just a young student paying the student discount prices

That works! Until they do some basic checking like Netflix did. Netflix found out that “families” somehow had an average of 187 people. I wonder what Adobe will do when they learn one day that you’ve been a student for 50 years! 😆

 

[avro707]

QuarkXPress is something I remember years ago, I never used it, I have seen it, but it is something I never used .

I started with QuarkXPress back on PowerMac G4s.

InDesign was a quantum leap in ease and abilities but Quark might have improved now. However everyone has gone over to Adobe so you can guess what that means.

 

[exmophie]

until they send it to collections and it hits your credit report. Then they sell it to some debt collection agency who proceeds to hound you to the heat death of the universe, even snail mailing your children after you die and other such 'reputable' business practices.

You obviously haven't used Privacy.com yet. Also no debt corp is going to buy sub-$100 subscription fees, the recovery just isn't worth the man hours. Adobe will just write it off as an intangible operation expense in their next investor quarter like any other public software company.

 

[ignatius345]

I work in an industry that relied heavily on Illustrator/Photoshop, but Figma replaced a good portion of those use cases.

That's great! Wouldn't work for my company because we have decades of Illustrator work that needs to be accessed, and also need to send clients files in formats they'll be able to use. Unless Figma can do rock solid import/export of .AI files, it just wouldn't fly for us.

 

[ignatius345]

I started with QuarkXPress back on PowerMac G4s.

InDesign was a quantum leap in ease and abilities but Quark might have improved now. However everyone has gone over to Adobe so you can guess what that means.

I was working in publishing right around this time too, at a newspaper and then at a magazine. Quark really was the industry standard and it really didn't have any competition. But, because of that they were pretty user hostile and stagnant because nobody had a choice.

Then I got a job where they were using InDesign and it was just SO much easier to use, and of course super well integrated with Photoshop (which was another must-have at that time). I don't think it took long after that for InDesign to become the new standard, and I think Quark just receded into the distance.

 

[lostPod]

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.

Do they have vector image tracing yet like adobe illustrator?

 

[Ad47uk]

I started with QuarkXPress back on PowerMac G4s.

InDesign was a quantum leap in ease and abilities but Quark might have improved now. However everyone has gone over to Adobe so you can guess what that means.

I had a peak at the few videos of Quark on Youtube and it looks, I don't know, as if it is still stuck in the past UI wise. In one way it is nice as it don't seem crowded, I presume everything is done by menus.

I also had a look at a video of InDesign and to be honest I think I prefer the Affinity publisher UI.

I know someone who uses Scribus and loves it for a start it is frtee and for a free bit of software it is wonderful, the U.I take a bit of getting used to, but once done. The other thing is, it works on Linux. While it can open a load of different formats, it can not export in many, whihc is a problem if you want to send stuff to a professional printer. But great if you want to doa club newsletter or something like that, which is what this person I know use it for. Use a colour Brother LED printer to print it out, and it is pretty fast, I know as I have one myself.

Affinty publisher is very good, for a start it is a one-off payment, and it supports a fair few formats which is good. The only thing I ever got from Adobe was Photoshop Elements, many years ago. I have used Premier as well, but I did not like it, used to slow down the computer a lot, so we went back to Vegas video editor, which was then owned by Sony these days I dabble with Davinci resolve. Also I am having a muck around with Capcut, there are some nice things in it, but no matter how much I try, I can't get Chroma key working that well, so I will stick with Resolve for that.

 

[stinksroundhere]

Affinity is owned by Canva, who have issued a pinky swear that they are not doing subscriptions.

I have never had an issue with Affinity opening a Photoshop image with layered files

Try exporting industry standard layered tiffs that can be read by Photoshop etc. Affinity can't do it. Comes out as a flat file. Their own Affinity layered tiff can only be read by their app.

It's budget software at the end of the day. It doesn't have all the power tools and scripting that Adobe's suite offers. Those are features that casual users barely know exist and it is those casual users who tend to be the majority of people ranting against Adobe. Most power users just get on with their job and know they can't switch to budget options. They rely heavily on Actions, compatible layer files, advanced proofing tools, integrations with After Effects and so on and so on.

 

[vladi]

Opening and saving PSD and AI files in other apps was never an issue. That's been possible for decades now and it shouldn't be your fear if you want to switch away from Adobe. CorelDRAW reads and saves AI files flawlessly. Just one example. Quark does IDML export now.

 

[vladi]

Do they have vector image tracing yet like adobe illustrator?

Tracing in Illustrator is trash, sorry for being harsh but that's the truth. It's ok for some low-freq abstracts and organic shapes but if you need to be precise your better option is Vector Magic. Here is a comparison between the two. No contest.

To be honest we are riding Illustrator 26.5 because we use CValley XtreamPath plugin which is now defunct, and it doesn't work in newer versions. That's how lazy Adobe is, over 20 years (yup two decades) they've never bothered to Illustrator plugin pipeline so developers don't have to touch up their plugins after every new Ai version release. XtreamPath doesn't bloat your system like Vectorscribe suite does.

 

[Lord of the Pies]

Do they have vector image tracing yet like adobe illustrator?

No, but even with Illustrator I had better luck with tools like vectorizer.ai.

 

[mistymac]

It’s about darn time! Hilarious that they have a whole webpage explaining it now. There used to be at least one sign up page for the service like 5-6 years ago that did not even have the tiny legalize font explaining the contract aspect at the bottom.

I remember when I first got bamboozled by their ‘contract’ in like 2017/2018. I tried to cancel because I was off a job and didn’t need it for a few months. Of course was shocked to find out they would be demanding $300 something dollars from me lol. After some digging online I found a comment on a random blog from someone who suffered the same fate but they figured out a trick. You used to be able to downgrade your all apps plan to a month-to-month photoshop/lightroom plan, and then cancel the month-to-month plan without any penalty.

It gets better.. Just the other day I noticed my most recent adobe sub charge was $60 instead of the $30 that they had continued to give me for YEARS after my education discount expired. They NEVER emailed me, or notified me once to warn about the increased price. I went to cancel so I could re-sign up under a new account to get a discount lol. I tried to access my account billing info and it was acting like I hadn’t even paid the $60 and would not let me change any information about my account until I changed my card info to pay even though they definitely already took that money from me weeks ago.

Aggravated, I hit up the support chat and demanded to have my service cancelled without penalty. The poor agent (don’t worry I was polite) must have been desperate to keep their numbers up or something because they refunded me the last months payment, gave me 3 months for free, and gave me back the discounted $30 rate.

 

[penlost]

I don't know why there is so much hate here for Adobe. Subscriptions are here to stay and Apple has its own bundled software. I currently pay les than £20 per month for all apps, which feels like a bargain. I have tried other software, espcially for sound file editing but nothing has ever been as easy to use as Audition.

 

[Ad47uk]

I don't know why there is so much hate here for Adobe. Subscriptions are here to stay and Apple has its own bundled software. I currently pay les than £20 per month for all apps, which feels like a bargain. I have tried other software, espcially for sound file editing but nothing has ever been as easy to use as Audition.

Where to start?

you say you are paying £20 a month for all apps, I can't see how you are paying that unless you have a dweal for a few months, Audition is £21.98 a month if you pay per year and Auditionm is just an updated version of Cool Edit, while i am not a musician, I am told by people that are, that other software available is easy enough to use. un;less you are using Dr T on the Amiga

The main problem with Aode is the terms and conditions, certainly nor that have changed them

Change to Adobe terms & conditions outrages many professionals - 9to5Mac

Update: Adobe has now clarified the meaning and intent. A change to Adobe terms & conditions for apps like Photoshop...

9to5mac.com

They have clarified some things now, but not sure if I would trust them to be honest.

Some people don't want their content stored on the cloud, but Adobe makes it a pain in the neck to., you can pause it, but some people don't want to pause it they want to disable it. Also, what do you do if you decide to stop paying? With files in Adobe file formats, that are not always compatible with other software. Subscription should be a choice./ even Microsoft with their Office software still offer a version which you can pay for outright.

I know a few people who have used Adobe software over the years, a few have dropped Adobe and even Windows and gone to linux, using open source software and they say it is one of the best things they have done computer wise. Others have not gone as far as using Linux, but have dropped Adobe and gone for software that don't require a subscription.

Adobe have got too large, just like Microsoft and other companies, and they think they can do what they like and sadly that is what they do. Thankfully, there are some countries that seem to be crnking some of these companies, but the U.S. seems to not care and allow them to do what they want most of the time, which is why I am shocked to hear that the U.S goverment is acting at long last.

I have no need for Adobe software, I used Premier many years ago, and I never understood why people was so crazy about it, I changed to Sony Vegas, which while the UI was a bit iffy, was a great video editor and very light, which meant it could run on lower end hardware, try getting Premier to do that.

These days, Resolve seems to be the on taking on Premier these days, for a start it is free to a certain degree, but it is a bit of a resource grabber, but not as bad as Premier.

 

[macduke]

The only reason I still use Adobe CC is because my work pays for it. If that ever stops, I'm not going to continue paying for it. Affinity's products are pretty good. I just wish they had a good replacement for Lightroom, as that's one of the few apps I might still pay for on the cheaper plan.

 

[hektor6tygr]

Pro tip: change your subscription to whatever is cheapest, you can then cancel within a few minutes for no hidden charge and you’ll be refunded for the new plan.

You're a life saver!! I managed to cancel my Illustrator subscription with that

 

[mac.ross]

I'm not really a fan of Adobe but most of the complaints I've seen on the likes of Reddit are just people that are basically idiots.

They have 3 plans and they literally spell out what each of them entails:

• Pay monthly, cancel any time with no fee
• Annual, paid monthly
• Annual, paid upfront

For some bizarre reason people *love* to choose Annual contract, paid monthly because it's cheaper than non-contract pay monthly then freak out after 4 months when they try to cancel it and aren't happy that they are held to the terms of their contract.

 

[dawindmg08]

I'm not really a fan of Adobe but most of the complaints I've seen on the likes of Reddit are just people that are basically idiots.

They have 3 plans and they literally spell out what each of them entails:

• Pay monthly, cancel any time with no fee
• Annual, paid monthly
• Annual, paid upfront

For some bizarre reason people *love* to choose Annual contract, paid monthly because it's cheaper than non-contract pay monthly then freak out after 4 months when they try to cancel it and aren't happy that they are held to the terms of their contract.

Agreed.
I see this a lot on Reddit. It's not a matter of reading the fine print, it's reading period.

 

[FireFish]

Whoooww, way to go, keep up the good work!!

I actually talked with a victim of this Adobe bs for less than 24 hours ago... ..interesting how things connect.

I'm a victim of this.

 

[Luckygreek]

Affinity has a 6-month fully functional trial of their complete suite, Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher or 1-time purchase for around $80 USD about half the price. No their not as robust as Adobe's products but nothing I can't accomplish with Affinitys products and for around $80 USD, I'm all in! I've got no skin in the game just tired of Adobe's gouging of their products and the sheer difficulty, hoops and bull*#ittery in canceling a subscription, I've used and loved their products for years but imma done with them.

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