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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

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).
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  It's an annual price, billed monthly. Quite a lot of things are like this -- for example, the TV licence in the UK is a product that you buy for a year but pay monthly. Our council tax is, too. I don't believe the subscription has near marginal cost -- Adobe have a huge number of employees making hugely complex products, and this is how they choose to amortise it, instead of relying on people upgrading every three versions. It's not fraud; that's just not the right word to use. Is subscription pricing consumer-hostile? I don't know. But I do know that per-seat licensing of the prior Creative Suite was a non-trivial expense for a lot of design firms. My main objection to Creative Cloud is that it's a one-or-everything pricing model; that's the only thing I think risks being anti-competitive given their market share.

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).
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
It's an annual price, billed monthly. Quite a lot of things are like this -- for example, the TV licence in the UK is a product that you buy for a year but pay monthly. Our council tax is, too. I don't believe the subscription has near marginal cost -- Adobe have a huge number of employees making hugely complex products, and this is how they choose to amortise it, instead of relying on people upgrading every three versions. It's not fraud; that's just not the right word to use. Is subscription pricing consumer-hostile? I don't know. But I do know that per-seat licensing of the prior Creative Suite was a non-trivial expense for a lot of design firms. My main objection to Creative Cloud is that it's a one-or-everything pricing model; that's the only thing I think risks being anti-competitive given their market share.