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Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract

• douglee650 5y ago
  Never sign up for anything Adobe … except for CC of course, totally worth it. The photo stock, they keep renewing it yearly, even after you cancel
• hatware 5y ago
  Yet they wonder why folks would rather pirate old versions.
• friendlydog 5y ago
  Adobe is now blocked from the networks I control. A page pops up with links to Inkscape, Gimp and other open source alternatives.
• tlogan 5y ago
  So this is basically a complain that one can't use something marked as an annual plan for just one month. They do say “ Annual plan, billed monthly” don’t they?
• Handytinge 5y ago
  I had exactly the same issue about a year ago - missed the fine text. Adobe refused to reduce or remove it on contact, however the moment I mentioned I was happy to take this to consumer affairs to review, they were very quickly fine to cancel it without fee.
• IYasha 5y ago
  I don't quite get it - Adobe has half of world population of users. They have position of monopoly close to Microsoft and yet they seem to go over themselves making elaborate schemes to sponge off more users? Did the company become so monstrociously bloated that it cannot sustain itself without increasing income? :D I always disliked their policies and attitude towards users, but this...
• viktorcode 5y ago
  Is it legal in the EU?
  • holletron 5y ago
    I guess not, just tried that and there's an additional step at the beginning - where you have to explicitly choose if you want monthly billing ($79,49/mo), yearly but billed monthly ($52,99/mo), or yearly paid upfront ($599,88)
• jlengrand 5y ago
  They got me with this a year ago, and I can't wait to cancel my subscription at the end of this month and hopefully never have to be a customer again :)
  • cute_boi 5y ago
    Can't people contact their credit card provider to inform it as fraudulent charge?
    • cbg0 5y ago
      It would not qualify as a fraudulent charge.
      • Nextgrid 5y ago
        Disputes are not just for fraud. If you got tricked into paying for something or didn't receive the promised goods/services it's also a valid reason for a dispute.
    • davidg109 5y ago
      Given how low they are already stopping, they likely have a dedicated team for chargebacks that will fight tooth and nail to challenge it. I am currently dealing with a chargeback team for another company, and the amount of time they’ve dedicated into challenging me likely exceeds the chargeback value itself.
      • londons_explore 5y ago
        > the amount of time they’ve dedicated into challenging me They likely haven't used much time at all. Big companies get thousands of chargebacks, and can gather evidence all automatically in a matter of seconds. It'll all be templated documents anyway.
      • remus 5y ago
        > I am currently dealing with a chargeback team for another company, and the amount of time they’ve dedicated into challenging me likely exceeds the chargeback value itself. For the company the value is in keeping their chargeback rate down, not in the money itself. If your chargeback rate gets too high it becomes increasingly difficult and expensive to find a card processor who will work with you.
• johnwheeler 5y ago
  Speaking of dark patterns, has anyone noticed the DoorDash app sets the tip for you automatically and places the “place order” button above the tip form, which you must scroll to to make visible? there is no way to adjust a tip without calling customer support. This is such an obviously blatant deception. Off screen form fields _below_ a submit button? It’s insulting. I’m surprised I haven’t heard more complaining about this.
  • kingcharles 5y ago
    And the tips are their way of being able to limit the pay of their employees by offsetting their wages onto the end user.
  • bryans 5y ago
    I haven't experienced that on the website version -- they give you three suggestions or let you choose any amount -- but noticed my order yesterday was $4 more than it should have been after choosing a custom tip amount. I normally don't double check email receipts for that kind of thing, but maybe it's time to start. I'm still able to reproduce it on the website today. Trying to add a custom amount magically adds $4 to the order in a way that's not just superficially in the UI. It actually gets added to the order.
• matsemann 5y ago
  OT rant: > Ooh, I can scroll. That was not obvious at all. It is if you use a proper browser+OS combo. Why some designers thought it was a good idea to hide the scroll bar in their OS (which some browsers adopt to) is beyond me. It's also an annoyance as a user with a browser that display scrollbars. The amount of random scrollbars appearing because the devs never tested anything but Mac+Chrome is staggering.
  • lelandfe 5y ago
    > the devs never tested anything but Mac+Chrome Which Android browsers show scrollbars?
    • BenjiWiebe 5y ago
      Firefox does, briefly when you load a scrollable page. And then shows it again while scrolling, naturally.
      • tomrod 5y ago
        I suspect parent commenter is looking for more major browsers like Opera (4X market share [0]), Vivaldi, Brave, Chrome (leader), Safari, Samsung default, Android default, etc. Firefox isn't widely used anymore for mobile, especially with their recent user-hostile approaches of deprecating extension access, removing about:config, devs alledgedly flipping off users on twitter, and so forth. [0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile-tablet/worldwide/#monthly-202101-202201 https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile-table...
        • BMorearty 5y ago
          > devs alledgedly flipping off users on twitter What’s this a reference to?
        • jeroenhd 5y ago
          > Firefox isn't widely used anymore for mobile, especially with their recent user-hostile approaches of deprecating extension access, removing about:config, devs alledgedly flipping off users on twitter, and so forth. I don't get this sentiment. I understand that people are upset at Mozilla, so am I. But why would you then decide to switch to a browser that makes the exact same mistakes without any extensions whatsoever? That said, websites like Statcounter will always show a larger user base on Firefox because of anti tracking measures present and enabled by default in Firefox. It's definitely not what it used to be, but these statistics can't be relied upon ever since ad blocking first appeared on the internet.
• kayhi 5y ago
  How do these contracts hold up to charge backs through the credit card company?
  • sersi 5y ago
    I was able to cancel a while ago by threatening with a chargeback so at least the threat of it seems to help.
  • hedora 5y ago
    Also, consumer protection laws. I smell a pile of fines and lawsuits in their immediate future. As I understand the charge back process, vendors are generally assumed guilty until proven innocent, and it's not going to be worth Adobe's time to fight these. On the other hand, it costs credit card companies a boat load of money to acquire customers, and failing to issue legitimate chargebacks is a great way to lose customer. On top of that, the bank makes more money from a chargeback than a legitimate charge. I've successfully issued charge backs against Experian, for example. You can't get much more in bed with the credit industry than they are. (Though the operator at the credit card company did say that Experian was responsible for about 50% of their caseload that year...)
    • hashimotonomora 5y ago
      So what’s the chargeback reason?
      • hedora 5y ago
        In the Adobe case, I'd go with "unauthorized charge". Experian was running a similar con, and it worked with that incident.
  • Nextgrid 5y ago
    They don't. The business model relies on most people not challenging it or not being aware that chargebacks are a thing. Similarly, this may not fly in court either, but again the business model relies on most people not escalating all the way up (and in their case, they won't pursue it either, as they'd lose more in legal fees even if they ultimately win the case). Nasty business models like this won't survive if people stood their ground and knew their rights better.
• refactor_master 5y ago
  Wow, and I thought Ryanair was a masterclass in dark patterns. “By clicking here you agree that you would like to opt out of receiving newsletters”. “By clicking here you agree to our terms”.
• ushakov 5y ago
  pretty sure this is illegal in EU/Germany gotta show the investors that revenue growth thou!
  • oytis 5y ago
    That is literally the first thing I've encountered as a new immigrant to Germany. This scheme is ubiquitous here that nobody even considers it especially dishonest, it's up to the customer to be careful.
    • ushakov 5y ago
      we have a 14 day "Widerrufrecht" Adobe must comply with and return 100% of the funds they can't just override the law with their own Terms and Conditions but yes, the scheme is very popular among telcos
      • oytis 5y ago
        Gyms and online services too. Widerrufsrecht is useful, but if you are not aware of this scheme you're likely to miss this term.
      • djrogers 5y ago
        They don’t override anything - did you read the T&Cs? It clearly states you can get a full refund within 14 days of purchase.
• hirundo 5y ago
  Apropos of nothing, GIMP is pretty darn good, no charge, no subscription. Ditto Darktable, Inkscape et. al.
  • ugjka 5y ago
    Krita
  • tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    > GIMP is pretty darn good GIMP could be pretty darn good if they gave 20 UX designers another 10 years to redo their entire UX. As is, it's a usability nightmare. Whenever I'm forced to use it, it feels like I spend 70% of my time fighting with the horrible UI, 25% of the time Googling how to do trivial things because it's very much not obvious, and 5% doing what I actually want.
    • civilized 5y ago
      Most open source productivity apps are like this. Free office apps are a great achievement but you seem to get what you pay for.
      • tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
        I find Inkscape pretty good, and remember even preferring it over Illustrator. Certainly depends on the use case though, I wasn't doing anything super complex.
    • kingcharles 5y ago
      I tried to use GIMP for a few months because I'm totally broke, but I have to agree with the comment here. I ended up getting the full Adobe cloud plan for $30 a month on Black Friday and it's not a bad deal considering I regularly use Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere.
    • Kliment 5y ago
      That's exactly what made Krita so good. Every once in a while they'd shut a bunch of the developers in a room with a bunch of artists/users, have the users complain about everything that pisses them off, and get all those things fixed. The resulting application is obviously driven by what artists enjoy, and it feels that way. Strongly recommended.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• winternett 5y ago
  Me over here just happily running my super old but still viable copy of CS6... :|
• gavinclarke0 5y ago
  I fell for this. When I called adobe to complain the service rep said, in a manner not much polite than this, that "I don't believe you that you didn't know you were signing up for a year". Looking back, I now see where I agreed, but the manner in which they attempt to deceive you is criminal.
  • civilized 5y ago
    Fucking scumbags.
  • notyourwork 5y ago
    CC chargeback.
    • is_true 5y ago
      Depending on your card it could be a pain and cost you some money. Mine requires a new card if I want to do a charge back.
      • seafoam 5y ago
        You need a new credit card company.
        • stjohnswarts 5y ago
          I would definitely switch, it isn't hard and I've done it in the past just to get better terms or rewards several times.
          • behnamoh 5y ago
            But wouldn’t it affect your credit score?
            • stjohnswarts 5y ago
              Momentary dip. It recovers after a few months as long as you aren't doing anything else to mess up your score like not paying bills. I guess some people love those perfect credit scores but honestly anything over 750 is fine for most things even getting a mortgage.
• stavros 5y ago
  This isn't a solution and doesn't excuse Adobe's shitty behavior, but I use privacy.com which gives you single-purpose cards. That way, I can just pause the card and subsequent charges will fail. Then let them try to get their money. Pull-based payments are such a bad idea, implemented even worse. Privacy.com at least gives you per-merchant controls and limits, even though this really should have been a Visa default.
  • av8avenger 5y ago
    You're right here, they won't be able to charge you automatically via the credit card, but you're still legally obligated to pay for the subscription since you have agreed to the terms of service during sign up. Depending on the action that they would take, you could easily end up paying a higher amount than the original subscription price if they put additional charges on you...
    • torstenvl 5y ago
      > you're still legally obligated to pay for the subscription since you have agreed to the terms of service during sign up Except they didn't agree to them, because they didn't know about them, and they might not be legally obligated to pay, depending on the jurisdiction. It's pretty clear that there wasn't a "meeting of the minds" in most of these situations. I don't use Adobe but if I got bit by this I'd definitely take them to small claims.
      • Jare 5y ago
        > because they didn't know about them I want to agree with this, but can't in strict terms. "Annual plan, paid monthly" item description next to the price is hard to defend as something unreadable. Maybe it's just me, but anytime I see "annual plan", I know I'm signing up for a year, and that commitment pretty much always comes with advantages (less total price) and disadvantages (cancellation fees) compared to shorter commitments. It's hard to deny the pileup of dark patterns in this and many other subscription services is disgusting and I wish the legal precedent was clear that customer clarity and control always trumps service clauses. Over a decade ago I established as a rule for myself that anything "free" that requires me to enter my credit card is in fact not free. Anytime I consider sidestepping the rule, I know I have to be REALLY sure and read everything. Yep, "limited trial with pre-accepted subscription but hey you can cancel anytime!" which is common in mobile, is always a no no from me.
• DizzyDoo 5y ago
  I've been working at detangling myself from the Adobe lineup of products. I really like (or liked) Adobe AfterEffects, it's been very helpful for me in compositing trailers for my computer game business, but it's totally been replaced by the free version of Davinci Resolve. Which I've also found is an excellent replacement for Adobe Audition, which I was using for editing the Voice Over and raw Sound Effects for, again, my video games. But I can't see myself escaping from Photoshop anytime in the next couple of years. I have a lot of special export scripts in 'Adobescript' (yuck) that carve up my high res art assets, slice them this way and that, crop, hide/display different groups and export in particular ways. Nothing unusual, it's just a lot of grunt work, but I have it set up so that clicking a button in Photoshop will just Do It All and have it work. It'll take some time to set that all up again in a Photoshop alternative. The nasty payments stuff detailed in the twitter thread is just the usual Adobe nastiness, some product manager somewhere is trying to juice the numbers. My own billing experience with Adobe recently was needing to change my account's country from UK to Canada, as I've moved, and the VAT number and sales tax stuff is of course all different. The poor support person I spoke to couldn't fix it for me, they had to have a backend engineer manually change alter a field in a database somewhere - it all sounds like a terrible mess.
  • pcurve 5y ago
    That's the problem. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and After Effects have almost no competition and they know it. Even if there were, companies can't just jump to different tools because they would lose ability to open all their past work files. The migration will be slow.
    • inversetelecine 5y ago
      AutoDesk (CAD/BIM/etc) is also getting like this. Maybe not totally Adobe yet, but they too also basically have a lock on their industry. Just like with Adobe, some alternatives exist and a few might be good enough, but AutoDesk bought so many competitors and/or companies that most of the time they are the only game in town. Bentley (not cars) is another company I loathe, but I've already gotten off topic. The professional software industry is a cesspool across all industries.
• ta78373764 5y ago
  The billing page does say "annual plan, paid monthly" but it is a bit non obvious at first glance. Oddly this seems to be only in the UK version, the US version has a much clearer pricing layout.
  • lelandfe 5y ago
    > But what does "Annual plan, paid monthly" actually mean? Let's fill in our email address and press continue. Maybe that's explained on the next page. This Twitter thread appears to be a person who indeed noticed that and had to delve into the fine print to figure out what it actually implies for the contract.
    • iso1631 5y ago
      Seems pretty obvious to me, it's an annual contract you pay for monthly, I have many such contracts
      • bennyp101 5y ago
        But thats a monthly plan? I would pay monthly... an annual plan I would pay once per year... or is that their cunning terms - 'contract' rather than 'plan' kind of thing
        • iso1631 5y ago
          A monthly plan would be one that you can cancel with a month's notice An annual plan would be one you can cancel with a year's notice The payment terms might be all in one, or in daily, weekly, or monthly amounts
        • howeyc 5y ago
          No, the term of the plan can be separate from the terms of payment. Auto insurance is usually a 6-month plan you pay monthly. Some are easier to cancel/change mid-term than others. Mortgage is an X-year plan you pay monthly. Auto loan is an X-year plan you pay monthly. This is fairly standard stuff.
• rgj 5y ago
  Adobe, a company of the past, playing tricks because they never will understand - or be - SaaS.
  • granshaw 5y ago
    I’d wager the opposite, that they have this scheme precisely because through all of their optimization they’ve discovered that this was the most profitable
• NelsonMinar 5y ago
  It's such a shame Adobe acts like this; they used to be a reputable technology leader. These days most of their products seem like scammy upsells.
• irrational 5y ago
  I cancelled an adobe subscription years ago. I still get constant emails about renewing. I hate subscriptions so much. The only one we have right now is Disney+ for the kids.
  • rectang 5y ago
    I want to watch _Get Back_, but the only way to see it is to sign up for Disney+. It's not worth the agony of navigating a subscription. The US legal environment and lack of consumer protections makes it too difficult to spend money and get what you want in return. It's incredibly hard to avoid getting ripped off by technically-legal-but-predatory schemes.
    • CharlesW 5y ago
      > I want to watch _Get Back_, but the only way to see it is to sign up for Disney+. It's not worth the agony of navigating a subscription. This is where the Apple ecosystem absolutely earns it's vig with a consumer-friendly, self-service, no-hassle experience. Subscribe for a month for 8 bucks and watch everything you can, then unsubscribe.
      • rectang 5y ago
        Returning to the original topic, would this technique also work for subscriptions to Adobe products purchased through the App Store? I've considered getting Illustrator for my iPad Pro, but have held off because of reticence about subscription terms. (For what it's worth I used to work in graphic design and prepress a while back and learned Illustrator, so it has a familiarity advantage for me over worthy competitors like Affinity Designer.)
• xp00ky 5y ago
  Cool!
• tomrod 5y ago
  I am so sick of companies doing this. Google bait and switches your unlimited-forever suite into limited workspaces, fails to support products, and generally makes it so you can't trust they will be there in two weeks unless you're an ad buyer. Facebook tracks you everywhere, even VR glasses. Adobe nickels and dimes, takes away permanent software with kludgy, awful SaaS billing and UX. Why are we okay with these practices?
  • stickfigure 5y ago
    These are not the same things. I'm annoyed by the workspaces thing too but at least I got a decade of free service. Adobe is using sleight of hand to get you locked into a long-term contract. That's closer to fraud.
    • bmarquez 5y ago
      Google was also using deceptive language (pay or lose access) to hold previous G Suite purchases hostage. Only after backlash did they add info to their FAQ and say that there would be some sort of purchase migration available.
• bennyp101 5y ago
  Use a virtual card if you can, delete that card once you start the 'free trial' then cancel after the trial, or within 1 month to not get charged. Thats some hoops to go through just to get a 'free trial' to see if the products actually work for you! At least back in the CD days you got 30 days to actually try it out, then either buy it, crack it, or stop using it!
  • oliwarner 5y ago
    That stops the money being automatically taken, but you'd still be legally responsible to pay the contract, no? Reneging seems like a great way to get yourself sued for the balance, possibly the costs of recovery and even having your credit score ruined in the fight.
    • Nextgrid 5y ago
      They are welcome to sue, but they'd have to justify their shenanigans to the court, which I'm sure would take a very dim view of intentionally tricking the user into signing up to something they didn't understand. The business model relies on most people not escalating it there and making noise about it. If they start getting hit by chargebacks or start clogging the legal system with these cases it will end pretty badly for them.
      • jeroenhd 5y ago
        Why would they need to sue? Can't they just send invoices to your email, followed by debt collectors? The annual subscription is in plain sight. The cancellation terms are the result of bad web design for people using browsers whose browsers have made the idiotic choice to hide scroll bars by default (i.e. all mobile browsers and Safari) but that can be defended if the devs used Windows to make the website. Actually, on mobile the terms and conditions get cut off halfway through a sentence so if you'd actually read them you'd see that they continue below the fold. Maybe that's not the case on iOS, though? Their cancellation terms definitely suck but the terms and service and subscription term seem quite clear to me. "I didn't read what I was getting into" is hardly a defence. These details weren't hidden at all.
• barbazoo 5y ago
  At some point they switched from "free 7 day trial" to "if you cancel after 14 days" so I don't know what's really going on there.
  • hunter2_ 5y ago
    I assume this means days 1-7 are completely unpaid, days 8-14 you've begun paying but without annual commitment, and after that you're both paying and annually committed.
    • barbazoo 5y ago
      Seems like it shouldn't be surprising then having to pay something after the 7th day?
• umrashrf 5y ago
  For me my student membership fee went up without me noticing it. From somewhere between C$20 to C$44 or so,
• djrogers 5y ago
  Meh. It’s not great, could definitely be clearer, but it’s also bordering on intentionally obtuse to claim you have no idea what ‘annual contract paid monthly’ means. I mean, all of the words are right there. Any time I sign up for an annual contract I assume I’m in it for, well, about a year. If I didn’t want an annual contract, or wanted to see if there were options, I’d simply hit that little drop down box there and voila - it’s even clearer.
• unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  I am not quite sure why people don't grasp that it's an annual plan for really expensive software. "Annual plan, billed monthly" is about as easy as it's going to be in four words on a button or by a button. If you could rent it for just a month now and then, wouldn't you only rent it in the months you need it? They make it so you can't. There's a solution: DON'T USE IT. Ask yourself seriously: what is it you want to do that the Affinity Suite (which costs about, what, £150 and then £20 each for the two iPad apps) cannot do for you. It's not toy software; it's enormously capable (and improves on Adobe's approach in several places). It has surprisingly complete PSD and Illustrator import, it runs Photoshop plugins, it's cross-platform and it runs well on old hardware (at least on the Mac). Failing that, you have Krita, Inkscape, Scribus, Darktable, Rawtherapee, GIMP if you must, and they are all pretty surprisingly good. Plus there are video options that are cost-effective or free (Resolve, for example, runs on Linux). There are all sorts of viable competitor apps on other platforms. Adobe aren't really evil -- they are a giant, slow-witted, largely benevolent monopoly, weighed down by a lot of cruft. (They are also fairly reasonable on the phone and support portals). But you don't need to use their stuff; you can create a sane workflow that routes around them with decent tools. Complaining about a "dark" pattern that up front tells you that you're getting into an annual commitment for something incredibly expensive strikes me as missing the point; the point is subscriptions are tricky and you shouldn't expect to be able to game them. Vote with your feet.
  • civilized 5y ago
    You're just defending the right of a giant corporation to communicate poorly in a way that enriches them at the expense of customers, who are often struggling artists. > "Annual plan, billed monthly" is about as easy as it's going to be in four words on a button or by a button. It's absolutely insane that you think Adobe has fulfilled their obligations to communicate to the customer what they're getting into by putting "annual plan paid monthly" in a drop-down next to a button. Adobe should warn the user of the early cancellation fees in big red letters. We all know why they don't: because they benefit from some users taking a deal that they don't realize is very bad for them. That's what you're defending.
    • 5y ago
• sibit 5y ago
  For anyone stuck in this dark pattern here is a trick I've used in the past: Adobe won't let you cancel without paying the remainder of your subscription fee however you can switch to a different plan. As soon as you switch you'll have the ability to cancel your "new" plan within 14 days. If you cancel after 14 days they'll charge you the early termination fee.
  • tomrod 5y ago
    In other words, they are hopelessly broken and you have to social engineer a loophole?
    • toyg 5y ago
      No, they are purposefully evil but not competent enough to close all loopholes (or leaving it open on purpose to have an escape hatch for the most litigious customers).
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • achow 5y ago
        Agree. It is a constant wonderment why Adobe is not called out ‘evil’ more often like its other SV brethren. They are not even good at software engineering and UX.
        • NetOpWibby 5y ago
          They used to be but then competitors sprang up so Adobe got less attention.
          • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
            Back in the early days they were really good, I remember phoning about some PostScript problems I was having and whoever I spoke to clearly knew it inside out. Now I can't even get a response about obvious bugs in their software. It's not just Adobe though, this is an industry wide problem.
• DethNinja 5y ago
  I think customers are a bit to blame for such shady companies. So many good alternatives to Adobe ecosystem exists but customers are mostly unwilling to switch to them and as result Adobe doesn’t have to worry about keeping customers satisfied.
  • ljoshua 5y ago
    Eh, this one's a little tough. Both my wife and I extensively use Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign on a frequent basis, and we're not even designers, we just like to make stuff. I've tried alternatives like Gimp and Inkscape, but they really don't even come close. I've never found an alternative to InDesign at all. There are some applications (especially photo editing apps on Mac) that are nice, but still don't really give you everything the CS suite gives. Do I hate that I used to pay a (large) one time fee for a version and now I've given them thousands of dollars more than I'd have preferred? Yes. Do I think this 12-month contract dark pattern is scummy? Yes. But I also can't find suitable alternatives either, so in a sense they've earned their money in that regard.
    • salamandersauce 5y ago
      Have you tried the Affinity suite? They even have an Indesign alternative (Publisher) and at reasonable prices. Sometimes they even go sale. Free updates too. Of course if you need EVERY feature of CS nothing else will do but there's some good stuff out there that's significantly more affordable.
      • CharlesW 5y ago
        > They even have an Indesign alternative (Publisher) and at reasonable prices. Scribus also looks like an interesting open-source solution. (Anybody here have an "InDesign vs. Scribus" perspective?)
    • commoner 5y ago
      The most fully featured free and open source alternative to Adobe InDesign is Scribus. It's available for Linux, macOS, and Windows: - Website: https://www.scribus.net https://www.scribus.net - Download ("Development Candidates" recommended): https://www.scribus.net/downloads/unstable-branch/ https://www.scribus.net/downloads/unstable-branch/ - Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/details/net.scribus.Scribus https://flathub.org/apps/details/net.scribus.Scribus - Source: https://www.scribus.net/websvn/listing.php?repname=Scribus https://www.scribus.net/websvn/listing.php?repname=Scribus
• mrtksn 5y ago
  Just yesterday, on a local streaming platform that has a series that I want to watch I was offered "7 days free". Great, I can watch the accumulated episodes and if I still feel like watching the new ones that come weekly I can keep the subscription, right? Nope, the "7 days free" wasn't a a trail but 7 extra days when you purchase a full year subscription. I was considering to get a monthly subscription to try it out but since they tried to trick me into a yearly one I simply decide to Torrent the crap out of their content. Sorry not sorry. That's one of the things that's great about Apple's iAP and Apple being the handler of transactions. There's no tricks, it's standart on every app: If there's a trail period you get the trail and if not you directly start paying. Also no tricks in the cancelation process, it's all in one place so you can review and cancel easily. You can also change plans right from the same screen. If somehow you manage to purchase something you don't want, get refunded easily. I really hope that if Apple is forced into allowing 3rd party payments, we end up getting a standardised interface like the one we have currently on Apple's platforms but with an option to choose the alternative payment method(in the same screen but a different card or account kind of thing, like choosing a card in Apple Pay).
  • londons_explore 5y ago
    > we en up getting a standardised interface like the one we have currently Of course you won't. Apple will do everything in their power to make third party payments as painful as possible for both the consumer and the merchant. They'll do things like preventing those apps from auto-filling credit card numbers, and denying them camera permission to scan cards. They'll insist credit card data is sent to an in-country server owned by the same company as the app (for privacy reasons obviously, but knowing that for a small app developer hosting certified credit card processing servers in every country their app sells in is very hard).
    • mrtksn 5y ago
      So, if that's Apple fault on Android it must be really good, right? How is the Android side of things going? BTW, there's this thing called MasterPass. It's MasterCard's payment system that applications can request you to authorise the use the cards in the MasterPass wallet. It's quite good experience, they are also very aggressive to collect all your cards in there so if you don't already have a MasterPass there's a option(on by default) in the CC entering screen to add the current card in the MasterPass wallet. There's no explicit account creation step or anything like that, if you tick that option the next time you encounter a payment you will have a MasterPass(At least that's how I remember). I think they must be using some kind of keychain magic to make it possible because it's almost as frictionless as Apple's. You only enter the SMS code if you choose to give access to an app. The only problem is, there's no easy way to manage your payments and cards in the MasterPass. The payments are credited to your cards so it's good as your bank UI. There's a website that claims to be an UI for MasterPass for managing your cards but it's not on the main mastercard.com domain, therefore I never tried to use it as I can't tell if it's a phishing attempt or a legit one. I guess if I call them they can tell me but I would have expected to see at least a link to that website from my bank website or mastercard website.
• lukevp 5y ago
  This happened to my wife and I. We both have advanced degrees and write software for a living. The fact that it had these cancellation terms was not at all obvious to either of us, and only realized it when she went to cancel. It’s one of the few trials that I absolutely remember and I’m so glad it was just the photography bundle and not the whole creative suite. It’s absolutely designed to trick you and it works. Fuck them for doing this. At least it wasn’t a lot of money to us, but what about struggling artists/photographers who sign up for creative suite trial but plan to only buy one or two apps, and are now on the hook for a year of everything? It’s pretty dang close to a scam if you ask me.
  • ummonk 5y ago
    Did you try a chargeback? Or make a report with the bureau of consumer protection?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• cpach 5y ago
  If you’re on macOS and just want a good and convenient image editor, I warmly recommend Acorn. The Muellers (owners of Flying Meat Software) have put a lot of effort to make it feel like a really solid Mac application. The price is good and from time to time they offer discounts. The whole experience reminds me of using good old Paintshop Pro back in the late 90s (^_^) Other options are Affinity Photo from Serif Ltd and Pixelmator. IMHO Acorn has much better GUI though. (FWIW, Affinity works fine on Windows too.) I realize that some people need the features from Photoshop and then I guess they have to pay the “Adobe tax”. But if you’re not a photo/graphics professional, you can come a long way with the above options. AFAIK there are also lots of good alternatives for Illustrator and InDesign.
  • danaris 5y ago
    I can strongly second the recommendation for Acorn. I'm not a graphics professional, but it is very often useful in my job to have access to an editor on par with Photoshop—which, aside from some of the more advanced stuff, Acorn definitely is. It's extremely polished and well-put-together—and can also both read and write Photoshop PSD files.
  • yokoprime 5y ago
    Thank you! Acorn looks pretty solid, I've got Pixelmator on my iOS devices, so I was wondering if i should go for Pixelmator pro on macOS. For very lightweight stuff, I've often used https://www.photopea.com/ https://www.photopea.com/, even when i had photoshop installed. Works pretty well for å browser image editor I've moved away from Adobe recently, both because of their scummy business practices (but when you know how it works, its predictable at least) but moreso because creative cloud is such a resource hog. Core sync often was listed as a process using significant energy, even though file sync was turned off and the finder extension disabled.
    • unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      Pixelmator Photo on iOS is also the mutt's nuts; I have been cynical about Pixelmator on the Mac until recently but Photo really makes the point that they intend to compete. Stay away from the Skylum stuff, IMO; it's usually half-baked and instead of evolving the product they have a habit of abandoning it and launching some new product, which is maddening. Affinity Photo is very very good too (bit confusing on the iPad).
• filmgirlcw 5y ago
  They’ve done this for close to ten years (or however long Creative Cloud has been around) and you have to be careful to cancel before they renew you into another yearly contract. I swore I would never have a personal subscription again (and just use the one I have at work for personal projects, which is against TOS but prove it), but then they had a 50% off special and I caved. I also set a calendar entry to remind me to cancel before I get renewed for a second year.
  • unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    While I am sure this is not really a "dark" pattern, Adobe's subscription terms definitely discouraged me from subscription software generally. As soon as Affinity Photo was stable in beta (March/April 2015 time) I cancelled my Photoshop Plan subscription at the first opportunity.
• vero2 5y ago
  I wonder what the dark patters programmers/coders' of hn-community think about this? I really like to get their point of view.
  • EasyTiger_ 5y ago
    “Just doing their job”
• josefrichter 5y ago
  Adobe is the dirtiest company in the industry. And some bugs in their software remains unfixed for years. I refuse to touch anything they produce.
• pcurve 5y ago
  https://www.adobe.com/downloads.html https://www.adobe.com/downloads.html Click the Start Free Trial and experience the flow for yourself. You're presented with 3 options, but it defaults to the 2nd option. Instead of using more straightforward "Annual Subscription - Billed monthly", it uses rather unusual "Yearly - Billed Monthly" phrasing. The default selection makes it less likely that you're going to read the fine print. You also don't get the Total Cost comparison between the 3 options. 7 day free trial, but 14 day to cancel creates another unnecessary disconnect intended to confuse. It's clear they 'optimized' the funnel towards maximum conversion at the user's cost. Really scammy. They are riding on the coattail of their former glory products that are slowly becoming irrelevant.
  • morsch 5y ago
    I think the language is pretty clear. The fact that there is a much more expensive monthly option makes it even more obvious that the "yearly" option is a year long commitment. Not sure why you'd need to read the fine print. It also says "Fee applies if you cancel after Feb 26" -- as long as that implies that you can cancel without paying a fee until then, I think that's pretty clear? Though seeing how many people feel tricked by it, I may be missing something.
    • pcurve 5y ago
      I think it's partly because you're looking at this through HN posting and you are aware of the dark pattern issue. Even if it poses no problem for 95% if people, if it does for 5%, it's a big number. the problem is, they're deviating from the norm by doing things: > Offering annual pricing, but with monthly pay option. > Imposing rather stiff penalty. Stuff like this... is not that common in ordinary e-commerce. You either pay 1 full year price and enjoy substantial savings or go monthly. They could've made this info much more clear so that the comprehension wouldn't be a problem for 99% of the people. But they didn't.
• gryzzly 5y ago
  Yes, totally, my wife wanted one month of InDesign and got a yearly subscription, spent hours on the support without success. I wonder if there was a way to fight the dark patterns like this. They managed to show her some small print in a screenshot. Disgusting. I am extremely careful these days touching anything with "Adobe" on it. Extremely frustrating.
  • rdtwo 5y ago
    Someone pointed out that you could switch accounts types and cancel immediately
• henriks 5y ago
  I encountered this when canceling my Lightroom CC subscription. Changed me from ”potential future customer” to ”never buying anything from Adobe again” pretty quickly.
• langitbiru 5y ago
  You can replace Adobe Photoshop with Affinity Photo or Gimp. You can replace Adobe Illustrator with Affinity Design or Inkscape. But what do you replace Adobe After Effects with?
  • commoner 5y ago
    Natron is a free and open source node-based conpositor for visual effects and motion graphics, similar in functionality to Adobe After Effects. It's available for Linux, macOS, Windows, and FreeBSD: - Website: https://natrongithub.github.io https://natrongithub.github.io - Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/details/fr.natron.Natron https://flathub.org/apps/details/fr.natron.Natron - Source: https://github.com/NatronGitHub/Natron https://github.com/NatronGitHub/Natron
• fitnessrunner 5y ago
  This isn't just Adobe. Unity3d does this too. While I like the Unity product, I was trialing others too (Unreal) and didn't realize I was being locked into an annual contract. They don't even have an early cancellation fee; you are on the hook for the entire year, no way around it. Be careful.
• basicallybones 5y ago
  They tricked me. Now I will bend over backwards to never buy anything from them again.
• francis-io 5y ago
  I got caught out by Grammerly in a similar way into signing up for 12 months. Any good will I had towards the product is now in the gutter.
• zgiber 5y ago
  I would be interested to hear an expert opinion about whether such arrangement falls under 'unfair contract terms' descibed by the Office of Fair Trading: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/284426/oft311.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... Not sure if such regulation exists in the US, if so it would be worth to probe into it.
• onelastjob 5y ago
  I have loathed Adobe for this for years. Even worse, Adobe was supposed to make all of their products available under this single subscription, but now they want to charge users a separate additional subscription to access Substance Painter/Designer which they recently acquired.
• goldenchrome 5y ago
  This is why I sail the high seas.
• binarymax 5y ago
  I now obsess over cancellation policies before subscribing. Yesterday I signed up for Peacock premium so we could watch the Winter Olympics and beforehand made sure I’d be able to cancel anytime. $10 per month and I can cancel easily whenever I like - but they still go out of their way to extract every cent of worth by selling all your personal information, and had to go through a rats nest to opt out.
• babyshake 5y ago
  The worst part of this stuff is you can bet the PMs and others working on this feature have some BS terminology that helps them feel like this is not actively hostile toward their customers.
• drorco 5y ago
  It's one of the reasons for why I intentionally avoid Adobe, despite often contemplating using their products. I wonder if these kind of tactics are really worth their while, leaving stung customers from ever coming back.
• annoyingnoob 5y ago
  Adobe licensing practices are pure evil. I've been in IT for over 30 years. I was a fan of Adobe products for a very long time but no longer. Even the supposedly stand-alone products require a continuous connection to Adobe's cloud, which is not only a way to verify licensing but to track users. There is a consistent pattern with companies that do advertising, they go pure evil in the name of profit. See Roku and others.
• acidburnNSA 5y ago
  Screw those guys. At least for amateur/hobby work, I've used the following for years and love them. I also try to regularly donate to them. Instead of Illustrator for drawing, use Inkscape https://inkscape.org/ https://inkscape.org/ and/or Krita https://krita.org/en/ https://krita.org/en/. Instead of Lightroom for developing digital photos, use Darktable https://www.darktable.org/ https://www.darktable.org/ Instead of Photoshop for touchups, use GIMP https://www.gimp.org/ https://www.gimp.org/. Instead of Acrobat Reader, use MuPDF (mobile) or Atril https://wiki.mate-desktop.org/mate-desktop/applications/atril/ https://wiki.mate-desktop.org/mate-desktop/applications/atri... (Linux)
  • IshKebab 5y ago
    Krita is closer to a Photoshop competitor than Illustrator. Inkscape is like Illustrator but honestly it is not very good, mostly due to seriously poor performance. I don't know if Atril is a good Acrobat Reader replacement either. Does it support PDF forms and annotation? That's what most PDF readers are missing. Apple's preview is pretty great from that point of view. I've also used Xournal++ for that in the past.
  • chansiky 5y ago
    If you want something more professional you can look to the Affinity products which have a very reasonable one time fee: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/ I personally like Affinity Designer and have designed quite a few things with it. They are behind illustrator on features, I can't deny that, but I've been able to find answers to everything I needed. Also they have solid developers working on the app. Check out this technical explanation of performance improvements to their rendering pipleline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnfxzknVK_0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnfxzknVK_0 For a photoshop replacement, however, I would say Krita hands down. Again, its not as polished as photoshop, but I prefer it over Photoshop at this point even with all its rough edges. I really need to make a video or something about how to set it up and use it correctly but I think its got a lot more going for it.
  • tasha0663 5y ago
    I've been using Inkscape since it was SodiPodi. It's gotten better, but the interface is still too jumbled. Affinity is much nicer to work with. I will say that if I really need the end result to be an SVG that I can modify in a text editor later, Inkscape is better for that.
• martinskou 5y ago
  By far the easiest way to quit : Close you credit card, and order a new...
• zerotolerance 5y ago
  Change your card to a prepaid debit card with a few bucks on it. Don't update.
• Brajeshwar 5y ago
  I was a victim once. That was when I removed every trace of Adobe from my life and ended my relationship with Adobe that spanned decades. On my way out, and to serve my nostalgic need, I bought the software from Serif's Affinity[1] - Publisher, Photo, Designer. I really wanted to build up a workflow with Lightroom but that was cut short. For now, I'm good with MacOS Photos and some plugins such as Skylum's[2] Photo Editing Software. 1. https://affinity.serif.com/ https://affinity.serif.com/ 2. https://skylum.com https://skylum.com
  • cormullion 5y ago
    The Adobe you started your relationship with decades ago was a great company. I wonder when it started to go wrong…
• mr_tristan 5y ago
  Subscription models are great for professionals (and companies), but amateurs, a single year of the Adobe Photoshop + Lightroom bundle is over 2x what a perpetual Affinity Photo license costs. (I just wish Serif came out with a photo management product, but in the meantime, it's not too bad to use digiKam for some management and `aws s3 sync` to back photos up in an s3 bucket.) What's sad is that it was not easy to even see that there's still a Photoshop Elements product these days with a one time price, though I have no idea what the support is, and what upgrades cost. I had to search around to find it. It costs $99, though there's sales and bundles yada yada yada. The Adobe "comparison" page (which I still don't know how to navigate to) just seems like they want to funnel everyone into the subscription offering: https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography/photoshop-vs-photoshop-elements.html https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography/photoshop-vs... It seems like Elements would be the "hobbyist" license, the subscription model would be the pro version, but it's very, very not clear. The product that gets subscriptions right is Autodesk Fusion 360. There's a Personal Use tier that's free, which provides pretty much all the features you need for most hobbyist style 3D design and CNC usage. You need the serious features, you pay the expensive license, but, you're probably making money at this point, so it's a necessary tool. Fusion 360 changed it's licensing in 2020 which confused a lot of people, but really, they used to have a "startup license" or "personal use" license that was really vague, and I think was being taken advantage of by actual businesses. It's just simpler now, and I think it's more obvious.
  • vr46 5y ago
    Previously - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26786563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26786563
• rdtwo 5y ago
  This is why I use privacy or eno burner cards for all subscriptions. Simply turn off the cards when you are done, they also accept fake names and addresses so they can’t attempt to send you to collections.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• xyhopguy 5y ago
  I recently dealt with this. Right before my free trial expired, I went to cancel. A support rep offered another 3 months free. The first red flag was not receiving a log of our conversation. Three months go buy and sure enough, when I went to cancel, they told me I had already committed to a year. Incredible. After some persistence and vague legal threats I managed to receive a full cancelation and refund.
• DangitBobby 5y ago
  This is fraud, not a dark pattern. You are intentionally making designs with the intent to deceive, knowing that if people understood the terms they would not agree. Free trial? Actually it's a minimum $150 obligation. I don't understand how companies that do this aren't being fined or having people put in jail.
  • unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    No, it's a free trial, because you can cancel it. And if you look in the screenshots in the very tweets this item is about, you can see that they tell you this up front, on the third screenshot, including the date by which you can cancel to get a full refund. It's not "fraud". Could it benefit from clearer language -- there are some small tweaks they could do.
    • DangitBobby 5y ago
      Would you say the goal of the setup is to deceive the user into paying for a much longer term than they would agree to if they knew? To me, two things stand out. 1) The fact that they have a "monthly price billed anually" could only be used for deception. Either you bill monthly or annually. Telling me how much per month is not helpful, it's deceptive. That's the billing scheme in my head. I am thinking of monthly billing. 2) The fact that they will charge you 50% of the full term no matter how soon after you cancel. The subscription is automatic and has near 0 marginal cost to Adobe. Clearly, the goal is to suck money from the pockets of people who either didn't find the software useful after all or didn't even intend to buy a full year. Together, I see a clear intent to deceive with the goal of financial gain. Fraud. The fact that you can know what you are signing up for is immaterial. They could and would make it clearer if the goal wasn't to deceive, and they wouldn't charge you 50% on cancellation if the goal wasn't to profit off of people who mistakenly paid for more than they need.
      • unfocussed_mike 5y ago
        No, not at all. They may not be communicating well enough with the word "annual", which people clearly don't seem to grasp, and perhaps they should use "Yearly". The one thing I found frustrating when I cancelled after a year is the relatively short window of time you have to actually cancel; well, that and the slightly tiresome retention process I was dropped into -- would you like a free month instead? two months? (I half expected to be offered a kitten). But generally Adobe think you want this software for the longer term, not for a month, and economically they would be hosed if people could just use, say, InDesign for a couple of months, since a lot of InDesign tasks are annual tasks (brochures, reports, catalogues).
• jupp0r 5y ago
  Just out of curiosity: what happens when you cancel the paypal subscription or chargeback the credit card transaction? Will banks be sympathetic to fraud like this?
• cebert 5y ago
  This is almost as bad as the dark patterns employed by Intuit’s TurboTax.
• 7373737373 5y ago
  This is something businesses should be fined millions for
• tssva 5y ago
  I just went through most of the process of subscribing. The Twitter feed seems to be missing a screen that I was presented with. The screen includes 3 cards to select from. One is monthly at a price of $79.49/mo and has a clear note that you can cancel anytime with no fee. One is annual billed monthly at $52.99/mo with a note that fees will apply if I cancel after Feb. 26th. The 3rd is annual billed upfront at $599.88/yr and a note that there are no refunds if I cancel after Feb. 26th. It seems pretty clear to me and I wonder the motivation was in not including this screen from the sign up process.
  • kossTKR 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure they do all kinds of AB testing essentially scamming people in various ways - i always read very carefully and was trapped for very expensive year. Then suddenly they will have a non-scummy front page. I'm from Europe though and it was in no way clear that you signed up for a year. I work in software, and know how to read legalese pretty well.
• arihant 5y ago
  One way to cancel is to chat with them and say that you now have an enterprise subscription via your company. They cancel without fee in that case.
• philip1209 5y ago
  Expensify does something similar.
• teilo 5y ago
  If Affinity Publisher had the needed tools for book publishing, I'd drop CC in a heartbeat. But I need footnotes and cross-references, and ideally, book collations of multiple Publisher documents with contiguous page numbering. InDesign is the only game in town for this, and it's frustrating. So I'm stuck feeding that beast.
• boingy 5y ago
  I found a loophole to get out of their contracts for free online and was amazed it worked. Tell them that your employer now pays for your Adobe subscription so you don't need it anymore. They must have a policy around this because these magic words seem to get them to cancel for you no questions asked. Also, the easiest way to contact them (good luck finding a live chat on their website) is via twitter DMs. Sounds bad but using this method I got my account cancelled with no fee in around 10 minutes and with just two messages.
• Ghostt8117 5y ago
  I fell for this using Adobe stock photos. I did not see anywhere that I signed up for a monthly plan as I was only getting free credits to use. Well, a few months later and I noticed the charges on my credit card bill. It took me a few hours but I was able to get back all of my money. Not until after, though, the representative on the phone cursed at me and told me I was an idiot for not realizing what I signed up for. This was a few years back and I no longer use any Adobe product and never will again.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• oldstrangers 5y ago
  Graphic designer here: I got hired at an agency recently, signed up using my company's account so I could save $50/m doing away with my subscription and ran into this issue. Very fun. Anyways, the future isn't going to be kind to Adobe. Figma has replaced a lot of my Adobe workflow, it's just infinitely a more pleasant experience. Canva has replaced things that require 3 different Adobe products to do. For serious video editing I'm using DaVinci Resolve. InDesign kind of remains a necessity but I can see Figma filling that gap too. That really just leaves Lightroom and Photoshop that get a lot of use, and the things they're necessary for are decreasing by the day.
  • bambax 5y ago
    Affinity products are really great. Not yet on par with Adobe's but almost there for most tasks, and more than enough for casual users.
    • schleck8 5y ago
      I actually prefer Affinity over Adobe in many regards. The UI is nicer with colored icons and everything i've ever needed is there and very polished. Frequent updates for a single charge of 50 usd is just amazing.
    • unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      It is an interesting mix of things, actually. Some things are missing -- a JavaScript or AppleScript interface for example. And small stuff like you can't reseed the perlin noise generator in Photo. But some things are surprisingly better. Affinity Photo has live filter layers that work much better than smart objects, it has a frequency separation tool that is genuinely easier to use, it has proper blend curves that are enormously powerful (sharpening just the highlights? noise reduction just in the shadows?), and you can do things like use Lab curves on an RGB image. Affinity Designer I know less well, but the symbol and artboard support is astounding (bordering on what Sketch can do), and small things like the rounded corners support is amazing. Its one omission -- it doesn't have an autotrace. I am sure there are several things InDesign does that Publisher can't, but Publisher's integration with Photo and Designer is absolutely remarkable. This mix of missing features and improvements is exactly what you should hope for in a competing app; they don't have quite the same objectives in mind and they have started afresh rather than chasing a feature set.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• cprogrammer1994 5y ago
  Is it legal to be forced to pay a fee that was never on the screen?
• threshold 5y ago
  Disgusting. What you should do is call your bank and reverse the charges for fraud. Unless you bank at Mercury in which case customer service will just laugh at you because they’re a shit bank (that I’m ditching today)
• wly_cdgr 5y ago
  The most important (not to mention blindingly obvious) rules of running a subscription based business are "make sure the customer knows exactly what they're signing up for and on what terms" and "make it memorably pleasant and easy to cancel", so it's pretty funny to see big names like Adobe and the NYT be too scared and insecure to live by these rules
• ninkendo 5y ago
  What am I missing here? It’s a 7-day free trial, but if you go 14 days into the trial, you have to pay 50% of the remaining contract. I mean, that sucks that you can’t cancel without having to pay the remaining money, but the “7 day free trial” part still seems honest enough, right? As in, if I cancel before the 7-day period I don’t get charged anything? I was expecting “tricks users into a 12 month contract” would imply the “free trial” part was a lie, but it isn’t. It’s what happens after the trial that is sketchy.
• glassprongs 5y ago
  I experienced Adobe's toxic business practices years ago when I tried to reduce our DC license count by 1. It made me no longer want to work with them.
• jamespetercook 5y ago
  I fell for this too. I wanted InDesign for 1 month to make a decent looking CV when switching jobs. I felt really stupid when I tried to cancel and realised I’d be charged the remaining balance. Adobe lost me as a returning customer.
• kossTKR 5y ago
  I stopped using all Adobe products after they did this exact trick on me. When i actually tried cancelling normally their cancel page "didn't work" and i had to call and e-mail wasting hours and days. Absolute thrash company. With Adobe, always pirate, never recommend them, pay for competitors.
• diamondage 5y ago
  Shutterstock do the same thing.
• aurizon 5y ago
  This must be desperation due to losses of paying subscribers due to the diversity of Microsoft ways to do this, as well as many others that make pdf's. Time for Adobe to fade into another company. Are they also losing share in their other photo products = a broad decline?
• atlanta90210 5y ago
  I manage adobe subs for my company. When you log into the adobe user management portal you can see all of your users and the products we pay for but you can’t pull up a “last used date”. This way I would know who to cancel if not used in a long time. I have complied to adobe about this for years and they say it would violent the privacy of the users we are paying for - yet I have their email addresses. I try all the time to get users to try others products when they ask for an adobe product subscription.
• diamondage 5y ago
  Surely with the right data, we can quantify the exact effect of a dark pattern. Once quantified. We can we bring a class action suit against this kind of practice!? Once established as a precedent, the existence of this kind of lawsuit would universally improve web experience
• danpalmer 5y ago
  I got hit by this at work while managing our subscriptions. Adobe customer service attempted to bribe me to not chase it further by offering me a free subscription on a personal account. I declined and pushed and they eventually agreed to let us out without payment.
• ummonk 5y ago
  What would happen if people performed chargebacks?
• ineedasername 5y ago
  I switched to Gimp and Inkscape a few years ago for exactly this reason.
• fblp 5y ago
  I could recreate this deceptive workload on the Adobe UK site but not the Australian or US sites. It looks like they're playing fast and loose in the UK. In Australia this would be prevented by Australian consumer laws which has broad protections for behavior likely to mislead consumers (fine print, unclear total contract price etc).
• taneq 5y ago
  Adobe got a permaban from all of my devices the moment they slipped a bundled Norton Antivirus installer past me by hiding the checkbox to include it on the Acrobat Reader installer download page rather than in the installer itself. Adobe can fuck right off and die as far as I'm concerned.
• aldebran 5y ago
  As a serious hobby photographer (I do birthday parties, portraits, etc for friends and family), any alternative to Lightroom that works on windows and Mac? I tried a few but either performance was poor or features were missing along with .CR3 support.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• w4rh4wk5 5y ago
  Seeing this thread, I just realized how easy the hidden scrollbars in macOS can screw you over. Would the terms and condition page by worded slightly different, the Cancellation Condition heading would not even be visible and you won't even notice that there is still content you are agreeing to. This feels bad, like really bad!
• ziml77 5y ago
  Is it really a trick when it says right in the subscription term selection that it's an annual subscription? I hate Adobe's insane subscription prices and the fact that they don't give any reminders that your subscription is going to renew is evil, but nothing seems wrong about the 1 year subscription. If anything, it's a courtesy[1] that they're letting you cancel in the middle of the subscription term at all. Imagine if you paid a lump sum for an annual subscription. Do you really expect to get any portion of your money back if you cancel? The annual-paid-monthly option is still an annual term, you just opted to spread the payments out. It's similar to if you bought something from a store using the store credit card to get 0% interest on the purchase for 12 months. [1] A courtesy while they're fucking you over, but a courtesy nonetheless.
  • dev_tty01 5y ago
    >Do you really expect to get any portion of your money back if you cancel? Yes I do. I stop using their app and service so I expect to stop paying for their app and service. I have cancelled several annual subscriptions from other vendors and they all refunded the prorated balance. Sometimes there was a small cancellation fee, but in all cases I received the vast majority of the balance. Your analogy is flawed. In your example, I still have the thing so of course I have to fully pay for it. In the software case, the company can turn off the license and I no longer have it available to me. Refusing to turn it off is just bad customer relations policy. When you do rude crap like that you get (deservedly) written up on HN and other sites. Plus, you eliminate the possibility of a future customer relationship. It is just ugly and stupid on their part.
    • ziml77 5y ago
      I'm really not seeing the difference between this and the early termination fee that phone companies charge.
• nunez 5y ago
  Right, and this is why I use Privacy one-time-use burner cards (or Blur burner credit cards) for almost everything online these days.
• qwertox 5y ago
  I don't understand this. It's a free 7-day trial. If I cancel during the 7-day trial, the following cancellation terms apply: If you cancel within 14 days of your initial order, you'll be fully refunded. 7 < 14. Also, it's not even clear if the 7 days do even count towards the 14 days, since in that case they could just as well state "first 14 days are free". But they are not free, since they belong to the first subscription month. They'd be 14 consumed days of the first month if no cancellation is made. This should mean that the 7 days are not a part of the initial order. The initial order would get placed automatically after 7 days, you are just expressing your intent to automatically order after the 7 days of trial. If this is not true, then they are definitely scamming their users, but I doubt that they would risk going to court for this. But what I definitely think is a big scam is the 50% cancellation fee of the initial order, with the condition that you only get to use the remaining days of the month. For example, if you cancel in the third week, you still have to pay around USD 300 (the tweets indicated a USD 600 per year cost), but you only get one week for that, instead of being able to use the full 6 months (50% of a year) you are actually paying for. --- If I go to that page, there is the following text (it's also in his Tweet): Cancel before --> 26 Feb [today is 5 Feb] <-- to get a full refund and avoid a fee. You can cancel your subscription anytime via your Adobe Account page or by contacting Customer Support. Learn more. This means that they are actually giving you a cancellation right of 7+14 days, just as mentioned in the "subscription and cancellation terms" plus the 7 days. According to Wolfram Alpha "today + (14 + 7) days" = Feb 26, 2022 So no, you are not getting scammed with this free trial.
  • ElemenoPicuares 5y ago
    No, that's correct. If you cancel within 7 days you pay nothing. If you cancel after 14 days you have to pay for half the year. I'm not sure what happens between those two points— I'd guess it's a grace period but I'm not sure— but personally I'd be surprised to have any reduction in cost if I went beyond a clearly stated free trial I agreed to. Folks have legitimate bones to pick with Adobe— including the cost alone— and I think that’s why folks want to pig-pile on them for something like this. That said, I don't think this is a dark pattern. I don't even really think it's critique— more like conspiracy theory. Dark pattern: Buttons confirming difficult-to-undo actions not in a user's best interest hiding in buttons styled and positioned like cancel buttons. Dark pattern: Ad modals with undersized X closing symbols in low-contrast colors with transparent backgrounds over complex graphics making it hard to find and harder to not click on the ad. Dark pattern: Cookie consent boxes w/an “accept all” option but only line-item rejection of dozens of entries requiring 2 or 3 clicks each. Dark pattern: Cookie consent boxes with “reject all” options which don’t reject cookies selected in other tabs/cards not visible unless you click on them. Dark pattern: Inconspicuous opt-out adware in Windows installers that rarely require user interaction beyond clicking next. Dark pattern: One-click sign-up requiring in-person, written, or phone cancellation via a ‘retention specialist.’ ... this pattern: Bait link that doesn’t tell the whole story leads to a screen with a prominent order form. It has only one line item near the top that’s labelled commitment which says "annual plan, paid monthly £49.94/mo" with the monthly price. It clearly states the length of the free trial, twice, including the explicit date you need to cancel by to not get charged. The terms modal, which could be more clearly styled, explicitly states the penalties for not cancelling before twice the length of your free trial passes. So if a user signs up for an annual subscription and doesn't cancel until more than double the time their free trial passes then they get charged a penalty. Ok. Adobe has room to improve here, but sorry— this is just not a dark pattern by any good faith measure. The first page is obviously a bait link, It should prominently state a 12 month commitment and save non-interested users the click. While it's overly salesy, it's a standard advertising tactic and incredibly mild compared to what you see at your average car dealership. Newer SAAS companies (e.g. Slack) do a much better job, here, and Adobe should follow suit. I would absolutely levy a dark pattern accusation if users only saw that before committing more than a click, but it's not. I don't understand how anyone viewing an order form occupying ~ 1/3 of the screen with a prominent box labelled "commitment" saying "annual plan, paid monthly £49.94/mo" would not understand that you're making an annual commitment to pay £49.94/mo, and that the total cost will be £49.94/mo * 12. Never has any phone plan or car lease or gym membership or anything else I paid for monthly with some multi-month commitment prominently displayed the explicit total price. The free trial end dates are prominently mentioned twice. The cancellation terms box styling should more clearly convey the document structure, but even someone quickly skimming the first 8 paragraphs would see the content didn't end with the headline “Cancellation Terms:”. Hanlon’s Razor shreds the assertion of deliberate malfeasance over a site-wide design system flubbing form follows function. Normally love a pig pile on Adobe’s pricing practices, but this looks a lot more like histrionics intended to drive twitter traffic than a useful analysis of Adobe’s sign-up process.
• octavqq 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• snehk 5y ago
  I had this problem many years ago and that was when I decided to never, ever use or recommend Adobe products to anyone for that very reason. A bunch of people at work wanted me to green light purchases of Adobe subscriptions for Premiere but we decided to go with Apple instead. Never in my life will I install another Adobe Cloud software on any of my machines again. And that's in addition to the fact that once you decide to install their software they'll install about three hundred different things that are somehow needed and are pretty much impossible to easily remove. I really hate Adobe with a passion.
• jijji 5y ago
  Negative Option billing practices, as this is referred to, has been a violation of Visa rules since at least 2010 and MasterCard rules since 2021 [0] and also an FTC illegal practice [1]. [0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.chargebackgurus.com/blog/negative-option-billing%3fhs_amp=true https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.chargebackgurus.com/blog/ne... [1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/part-425 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/part-425
• tgtweak 5y ago
  Tons of dark design patters in the "Adobe Sign" platform also, formerly free for gsuite users it is now pay only. When you try to send a document out for e-sign it gives you an option to upgrade for as low as $2.99/month. Seems reasonable. After you upgrade (which is the YEARLY price... 2.99*12 = $36), you find that this plan doesn't have the e-signing... That one is $19.99/mo. But that's the yearly pricing... obviously. Who in their right mind is paying $240/yr for this? I cancelled 20 minutes after buying the yearly, and they took 10 days to return the funds. In 2022, a refund transaction using the new auth-method is SAME DAY, just like a purchase. Really terrible design patterns and 0 intention to fix.
• FearlessNebula 5y ago
  I fell for this a few years ago when I was in college. I intended to sign up for a month, and see if I liked graphic design. After a few weeks my school ended up offering any student a "free" (paid for by my tuition really) Adobe CC subscription if you fill out a Google Form and tell them what you want to do with it. So I tried to cancel and learned I would be hit with a massive early cancellation fee (I think it ammounted to something around $240). I called Adobe support and in my experience their customer service politely cancelled my subscription and waived all fees. Thankfully they did not give me a hard time about it whatsoever. But when I signed up I had absolutely no idea that it was a yearly plan paid monthly, since Adobe was the first and last time I have personally seen such a model for SaaS.
• tartoran 5y ago
  Why don’t more people use burner one use cards and cancel them after entering them in trials? That way you don’t need to worry you forget to end the trial and enter the contract
• sgustard 5y ago
  I just tried this in USD and at least the initial screens were more clear about the options. To wit: after "start your free trial", there's a choice of "$79 monthly, no cancellation fee" or "$52 yearly billed monthly, fee if you cancel". It is pretty common to discount per month when a user agrees to an annual contract.
• teekert 5y ago
  They did something like this to me, 3 persons on the phone (all English speaking) later some manager finally caved after me repeatedly stating they were breaking Dutch law with 1 year renewals (after one year it’s always monthly if there is no new approval, it was my 3rd year). I reported this to the relevant instances here, heard nothing from it.
• msavio 5y ago
  Fell for that trick once. Avoiding Adobe products since. Found Capture One instead of Lightroom, the Affinity Suite instead of Photoshop/InDesign/Illustrator. I am upgrading Capture One every year, so I probably pay the same as what I would pay for Lightroom. But it just feels like a fair contract. And I love the product (probably because I know it well by now).
• readingnews 5y ago
  I will get "downvoted" into oblivion, but dear god does no one want to write a small blog/page anymore? I read so many "this is super interesting useful information" blurbs about contracts, laws, etc, but they are in the smallest possible digestions given to us by twitter. Either "when did I get so bitter" or "when did the web go to hell" thoughts enter my mind.
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
    You reach a much wider audience with twitter, it's sad but it is what it
• Deivuh 5y ago
  I still remember when they didn't even give me an option to cancel my subscription from the website (because of my location). Instead, I had to contact tech support and ask them to cancel my subscription. IIRC, the first time I tried, it was around 1AM, so no tech support, so I had to wait til the next day, but it was until a couple of days later that I actually did. This is when I started to dislike Adobe. At least a very good competitor surfaced recently, Affinity, and they have a pretty good Photoshop and Illustrator alternative. I just wish that they would make a Lightroom alternative, which is not on their roadmap.
• gregdoesit 5y ago
  I'm someone who tends to double check terms before I sign up for any recurring billing... and somehow Adobe still got me with this exact dark pattern. I thought I was paying for a monthly subscription, only to be told I need to pay 50% of the remaining annual charge AND lose access immediately if I cancel. I was convinced I signed up for what was a monthly plan... and somehow Adobe hid the fact that this was an annual plan, paid monthly (WTF??) This level of a dark pattern made me move away from all Adobe products. Congrats on the additional revenue per user: it's also a sure way to have churned users like me not return.
• jhawk28 5y ago
  I ran into this the first time I tried out the new Lightroom plan. The customer support rep waived the fee for me. I then used LR6 until I upgraded to an M1 Mac Mini where I was forced to upgrade. I don't think these subscription models provide good incentives for software companies. I don't see LRCC has much better than LR6. It has a few more features (that I've never used), more camera support (haven't upgraded), and a recompile to ARM64.
• yoyopa 5y ago
  as a subscriber to CC, i was thinking of canceling after reading this... but it seems it isn't a dark pattern at all? they advertise two rates: one if you pay month-by-month, and one if you pay for a 12-month term, billed monthly. An early termination fee is common if a contract is ended early, no?
• scottbelsky 5y ago
  i am told origin of this was customers who subscribe for 1+ yrs wanting a big discount (without needing to pay upfront). but clearly the experience must improve, and there are many good suggestions for UX and copy in thread below that I’ll share w/ that team. frustrating to see, especially because the team we have today building our future products and services are here for the right reason. we can do better.
• phgn 5y ago
  £49.84/mo is way too expensive already, even without the contract lock-in...
• aceazzameen 5y ago
  I remember being extremely frustrated when I cancelled my long term subscription a few years ago. I knew to cancel right before the yearly billing date. But they had so many hoops to go through on the website! Multiple times they were showing me free offers to continuing using the software for a month or whatever. Of course they were trying to trick me into a new subscription! The buttons to actually complete the unsubscribe process were well hidden next to the bold offers. I was pissed that they almost got me. Never again Adobe.
• basisword 5y ago
  "But what does 'annual plan, paid monthly' mean?" - is it just me or is this completely self-explanatory? I think it's a bit shitty of them to require a yearly contract but it's very clear.
  • djrogers 5y ago
    They don’t even require a yearly contract, it’s just one of the 3 choices
• gouggoug 5y ago
  My trick to avoid this has been to use single-use credit card numbers that I generate via privacy.com. You can create credit card numbers and assign a spending limit to them. Some service can detect that and will refuse the card, but many don't. Once you're done signing-up, simply delete your generated credit card.
• thewebcount 5y ago
  I just hit something like this with Amazon Prime. I haven’t used Amazon in a while and forgot that they push it very hard during checkout. Well, they got me. I accidentally clicked on the wrong button. I immediately realized my mistake and hit the back button before the next page loaded. Too late. A second later an email arrived letting me know my Prime account had been activated. I immediately went looking for the cancel link. It’s not as terrible as some. (You don’t have to call them or anything.) But it’s still pretty bad. I didn’t need to confirm even once that I wanted the Prime subscription, but had to confirm 3 or 4 times I want to cancel with a bunch of confusing options to only pause my subscription, etc. I did eventually cancel, but I don’t see how this can be legal. If you accidentally press the wrong thing, you’re suddenly obligated to pay for something you didn’t want, but if you try to cancel, it’s a bunch, “Are you sure? Are you really sure?” nonsense. I don’t think I was charged as it was still during the 30 day “free” trial.
• graphenus 5y ago
  If you are looking at Adobe for Lightroom, get Capture One instead. No trickery and it's a much superior product. I switched to it in fact after getting burned with the Adobe cancellation thing. Never looked back. I also tried darktable. But Capture One does magic. The photos turn out always much better than what I could do with any ohter product.
• dkersten 5y ago
  And this is why I avoid Adobe products like the plague and why I paid the small once off payment for Affinity Photo for my photo editing needs instead. Fuck Adobe. But really, this is why I avoid subscription software as much as possible. I will pay for streaming media (because I'm paying for the media not the software). If I buy software, I expect a once off payment to be able to use it forever (I'm ok with having to pay for a new version sometime down the line as long as my old version continues to run). I do sometimes use SaaS web products, but I do try to avoid it when I can. Since most things are subscription these days, I don't buy much software and tend to stick to open source stuff where I can.
• jonplackett 5y ago
  The fact that this is legal is the real problem here. Also, anyone whining about Apple's AppStore lockdown on subscriptions by in-app payment only (I know I have complained about this myself) there is no better argument for why letting a 3rd party manage subscriptions is a good thing.
• Mandatum 5y ago
  Similar thread last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26786563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26786563 I made a complaint to ACCC in Australia last year regarding the way they advertised monthly pricing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26786563#26787160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26786563#26787160
• BonoboIO 5y ago
  Adobe ... they have good products, but i will never give Adobe money.
• ajxs 5y ago
  Under Australian consumer law most of what's discussed in this Twitter thread is actually illegal. Just because it's part of a company's business process doesn't mean it's legal. I ran into the same problem when trying to cancel my service, and found myself presented with some utterly onerous cancellation fee. I told them I'd make a complaint with Australia's consumer affairs regulator, the ACCC[0]. They waived the fee pretty much the moment I mentioned their name. I'd advise anyone in the same position to check your country's consumer laws, and contact your local regulatory bodies. https://www.accc.gov.au/ https://www.accc.gov.au/
  • edwinjm 5y ago
    Same for Europe. You should receive what you could reasonably expect to receive, even without reading the fine print.
  • acherion 5y ago
    What staggers me is that everyone knows (in Australia) that the ACCC can be quite the toothless tiger in many aspects, yet the mere mention of those 4 letters can make Adobe fold over instantly. It's so telling that Adobe reacts in this way, when they present their terms of conditions in such a dark-pattern manner. It's like they know what they're doing is super dodgy, but want to toss whatever reputation they have left out of the window, for the sum of just a few bucks a month. It's revolting.
    • stubish 5y ago
      I wouldn't call an organization that makes companies 'fold over instantly' toothless. Companies fold if they are in the wrong or even if things are in doubt, because losing at arbitration is an indelible black mark. I know those 4 letters got me a full refund the next day when brought to the attention of the parent company after failing to deal with a local franchise owner. Before hand having followed the ACCC guidelines trying to get the order back on track (and creating the paper trail to ensure there was no doubt I was in the right).
    • dannyw 5y ago
      ACCC may be a toothless tiger, but suing the business in your local Tribunal is absolutely effective. The filing costs are $80 or so, and generally, if you make a good faith effort to resolve the issue before hand with the business and they don't resolve it, the magistrate will give you costs. I've only had to do this once and it was a fairly simple process. Lawyers are not allowed. Just point to the specific consumer guarantee being breached, provide documentary evidence, and show up.
• mrjin 5y ago
  Adobe is for sure one of the worst dark pattern practioner. Was trapped by them once and had to talk to their support. And it turned out their terms were much malicious than it looked. So once you get past the 14 days trial period they will charge you till the end of the year. If you do not notice and do not cancel before the last day, then from the very first day of the following year, if you want to cancel, they will charge you for the rest of that year.
• josephagoss 5y ago
  On the topic of Adobe and things to look out for: I paid for the full subscription for years as I got a lot of use out of it for many projects. What made me quit Adobe was their iPad Pro apps. I found myself using the iPad Pro for visual art projects more often, and I eagerly awaited Adobes eventual iPad Pro offerings. The only file storage option in the iPad versions of Photoshop and Illustrator is Adobe cloud online with offline cache allowed on a per file basis. Every project has mandatory upload to Adobe cloud. No way to disable. I am comfortable having client work stored on iCloud, and sometimes will use Dropbox, both have decent enough reputation for secure storage of IP. But Adobe? I’m sorry but any company forcing professionals to store client IP on their cloud offering by definition cannot be considered secure, who knows what data mining they do if they are willing to pull stunts like this. On principle I found alternative apps and ditched Adobe.
  • boogies 5y ago
    > But Adobe? I’m sorry but any company forcing professionals to store client IP on their cloud offering by definition cannot be considered secure. Not to mention that they stored and leaked the unhashed passwords of their entire userbase.
• mattkevan 5y ago
  Adobe are full of dark patterns - if you install After Effects, they also drive-by install Cinema4D without warning. Nearly had a heart attack when I found it on my computer and it took a lot of digging to discover how it got there. There’s been an outstanding issue on the Adobe forums about it for years and the attitude from Adobe staff there is shocking - just can’t comprehend people might not want random multi-gigabyte software installed on their computers without asking.
• mabedan 5y ago
  Under commitment dropdown it says annual… where’s the surprise for being committed annually? What am I missing? I’m actually surprised that you don’t have to pay the 100% of a full year fee, since you’re committing for a year. Maybe I’m used to too much long term commitment in contracts living in Germany.
• bhouston 5y ago
  I got caught in this a while ago and got out because I got mad at the service rep and said it was unfair. This was like 2 year ago now though.
• paulpauper 5y ago
  cancel the credit card, dispute billing, many options
• endofreach 5y ago
  Adobe is one of the worst companies.
• woodylondon 5y ago
  It gets worse. So you fall for this trap you get to the end of your contract and you forget to cancel they just start it again with no warnings!!!! Total scam.
• ChefGabe 5y ago
  Change your payment method to a virtual card (like privacy.com) then freeze it. Problem solved.
• heartbeats 5y ago
  Now, see, I've been using Photoshop (and Premiere, and After Effects, and...) for all my life, and yet I've somehow never had this problem. Haven't had to pay a single cent, in fact. With each new headline like this, I feel more and more satisfied in my decision. Why pay more money than you have to for the exact same service? Worse service, even - I don't have to bother with the DRM nonsense.
• russellbeattie 5y ago
  How do people at Adobe justify this to themselves? In addition to management who made the decision to fuck over their own customers, there are dozens of others who were involved in implementing this scam. This is near criminal, if not outright theft. If you are an Adobe employee, you really should talk to your manager about your misgivings working for such an unethical company, and question whether you should still be working there.
• dhosek 5y ago
  I had a small task that Illustrator would have been the right tool to use. However, with all the [expletive deleted] around dark patterns on the free trial, I decided that I was better off doing it with Affinity Designer instead. I've bought multiple editions of the full Adobe suite (dating back to before it was called Adobe CS or whatever it is now) and they've since lost me as a customer.
• champagnois 5y ago
  Give Affinity products a try. They cover a variety of very serious use cases and they offer some of the highest production quality tutorials on their website to quickly train someone.
• wbharding 5y ago
  This dark pattern smacks of an IBM esque legacy co that will be vanquished by better competitors in due time. But as a user that keeps his process monitor open, Adobe’s greatest sin is their multiple mandatory Creative Cloud processes that soak up memory and CPU whether an Adobe product is open or not. Rotten at the core.
• sli 5y ago
  It's all well and good to pretend that Adobe transitioning to a subscription-based model was to give more people easier access to their products, something I never truly believed to begin with, but it gets really hard to take that claim even remotely seriously when Adobe turns around and completely dismantles it by trying to trap people in this way. You just cannot argue that they're making it accessible when they're trying to trap people into paying the amount they were trying to avoid (or couldn't afford) in the first place. It's corporate rent-seeking and that's pretty much all it will ever be.
• ahmd 5y ago
  i enjoy watching big companies like Adobe being under the radar of the internet community
• blinding-streak 5y ago
  If you're replacing Adobe with something else, whatever you do, stay away from Skylum software like Luminar. And the rest of their suite. I feel so burned after being a customer of their crap for a few years. Constant frustration with upgrades and broken promises.
• throwaway874653 5y ago
  I was just thinking of switching to non-faang where the work life and salary tradeoff were just right. With this business model Adobe may not last long
• disillusioned 5y ago
  Even better, if you've been bamboozled onto an annual Teams plan, you get a weird single 30-day window at your renewal period to change your license/seat count downward without penalty. Otherwise, you're just perpetually on the hook for the full number of licenses contracted. And the Twitter thread that shows someone's chat experience with canceling is the exact sort of 25 minutes in support agent hell it appears to be. It's complete madness.
• joiewjf23ij 5y ago
• joiewjf23ij 5y ago
• valdiorn 5y ago
  Skillshare just pulled the same trick on me. I decided to go with the free trial. Was enjoying one tutorial and decided to get, what I assumed, was the first month of subscription. Nope, got slammed with 130 pound charge on PayPal for 12 months. I decided to keep it, but cancelled the recurring charge and just decided I will never renew it on principle.
• parkersweb 5y ago
  What’s worse is that you can’t say ‘end my subscription when the current billing period expires’ - you can only cancel when you’re in a magic 1 month window when your plan is about to renew. I was 15 years + user of Illustrator and Photoshop - now I actively avoid embedding myself any further into their eco-system.
• hynco 5y ago
  hey, just seeing this I don't want to hold back on what we are working, it might help some. It's an Adobe Illustrator alternative for the web. Still not launched officially but many designers use it in a beta mode. Feel free to check it out here. Happy about any feedback. Point is - it is free. Paid plans will come later with more expert features. https://home.heritagedesigner.com/share/ckzbdfl8y017j1ktw9geqdcas https://home.heritagedesigner.com/share/ckzbdfl8y017j1ktw9ge...
• tomjonesey 5y ago
• hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  This information seems useful[0]: "I fell into this trap also and my state's bureau of consumer affairs was able to help, resulting in a refund and no cost contract cancelation. I encourage everyone in the US with this issue to do the same. Find your office here[1]" [0] https://twitter.com/trevorgoodyear/status/1490008546267865095 https://twitter.com/trevorgoodyear/status/149000854626786509... [1] https://www.usa.gov/state-consumer https://www.usa.gov/state-consumer