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> Why, after the many years the problem has been repeatedly reported, doesn't Adobe fix their apparently terribly designed and maintained web site, which sends

> Why, after the many years the problem has been repeatedly reported, doesn't Adobe fix their apparently terribly designed and maintained web site, which sends many of their customers who are trying to unsubscribe into a frustrating infinite loop, instead of manually unsubscribing the few persistent squeaky wheels who one by one eventually find their way to the forum to complain and demand a refund? Our culture loves the safety of recurring revenue more and more every year. It's not a technical problem, it's a business one. How can eliminate market uncertainties in our cash flows? Easy! Auto billing! People are busy and miss line items on their credit card records. I sort of hope card companies start to look into people's frustrations regarding recurring revenue and implement policies based on it. Or the FTC. Policies such as 3 click cancellation, or maybe even higher merchant fees for recurring transactions. I'm not afraid to report recurring transactions to credit card company. They just block your number with the charging company if you explain to them that their site didn't allow you to. Eventually they're bound to set a nice letter to Adobe if we all start doing this.

dahart 10y ago
> Our culture loves the safety of recurring revenue more and more every year. It's not a technical problem, it's a business one. Both statements absolutely true. But the problem here is shady unsubscribe, not recurring revenue per-se, right? What Adobe is doing is pretty low and shitty, and I'm as averse to signing up for subscriptions as anyone, but software businesses do have recurring costs. The recurring part is actually simpler and more straightforward these days than the buy version 4.0 for $199 model of yesteryear, so I can see why it's popular from the business perspective. Updates and releases are continuous now, they didn't used to be. Forums, online help, support, upgrades, patches, servers, cloud storage & backup, etc. all things that cost and all things that consumers have much higher expectations for than we used to a decade or two ago. Saas businesses all run on AWS or whatever other cloud provider, and AWS charges monthly for their services. For a business to make the buy it once for a fixed price model work these days, they have to do the equivalent of an actuarial table, and use statistics to guess how much a customer will cost on average, in order to set the purchase price. Customers that cost the company a lot in terms of support and upgrades are actually being subsidized by customers that cost the company less. It starts to sound a lot like insurance. Looked at this way, a subscription might appear more fair, because the customer is charged for what they use, as opposed to the average of what everyone uses.
- tossedaway334 10y ago
  I fail to see how subscription vs one time purchase costs are any way related to how much a customer costs to support, both situations have edge cases of demanding customers eating up support staff time endlessly. If anything per-customer support costs go way up in a SaaS situation because of the (mostly artifical) introduction of having to run the software on your own servers.

dahart 10y ago

> Our culture loves the safety of recurring revenue more and more every year. It's not a technical problem, it's a business one. Both statements absolutely true. But the problem here is shady unsubscribe, not recurring revenue per-se, right? What Adobe is doing is pretty low and shitty, and I'm as averse to signing up for subscriptions as anyone, but software businesses do have recurring costs. The recurring part is actually simpler and more straightforward these days than the buy version 4.0 for $199 model of yesteryear, so I can see why it's popular from the business perspective. Updates and releases are continuous now, they didn't used to be. Forums, online help, support, upgrades, patches, servers, cloud storage & backup, etc. all things that cost and all things that consumers have much higher expectations for than we used to a decade or two ago. Saas businesses all run on AWS or whatever other cloud provider, and AWS charges monthly for their services. For a business to make the buy it once for a fixed price model work these days, they have to do the equivalent of an actuarial table, and use statistics to guess how much a customer will cost on average, in order to set the purchase price. Customers that cost the company a lot in terms of support and upgrades are actually being subsidized by customers that cost the company less. It starts to sound a lot like insurance. Looked at this way, a subscription might appear more fair, because the customer is charged for what they use, as opposed to the average of what everyone uses.

tossedaway334 10y ago
I fail to see how subscription vs one time purchase costs are any way related to how much a customer costs to support, both situations have edge cases of demanding customers eating up support staff time endlessly. If anything per-customer support costs go way up in a SaaS situation because of the (mostly artifical) introduction of having to run the software on your own servers.