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I tend to agree on principle, but this whole concept of 'annual, monthly' is really scummy. Even YC startups are doing it now, showing you a per-month price wh

I tend to agree on principle, but this whole concept of 'annual, monthly' is really scummy. Even YC startups are doing it now, showing you a per-month price while de-emphasizing the fact that you're paying for a year up front. Adobe is the first one I'm familiar with that does normal monthly billing but forces you to stay a year. >Hanlon’s Razor shreds the assertion of deliberate malfeasance over a site-wide design system flubbing form follows function. Hanlon's Razor is a heuristic, not a law, and ceases to apply in the face of bad-faith actors. If Adobe wanted to be clear, they'd say "$X/month for 12 months", and not hide the commitment terms in WCAG-violating grey-on-white text. I offer instead the heuristic of "follow the money".

stjohnswarts 5y ago
I got caught up in one recently but was able to talk the operator out of it. I thought I was signing up for a 1 month trial not for a year. Evidently they didn't push the people on the other side of the phone to refuse just make you have to at least call and talk to a human. I could find no way on the website to do it. Some people would just have let it go for a few months after not being frustrated enough to call customer service, as it wasn't a lot of money $8/month if I recall correctly.
ElemenoPicuares 5y ago
> Adobe is the first one I'm familiar with that does normal monthly billing but forces you to stay a year. Really? The Commitment Subscription payment model is super common and old as time. Oracle. Microsoft for some services. Lots of random SaaS companies. Unity Pro. Gyms. Internet service. Webex since forever. POTS service. Mobile service until Verizon got greedy and they started letting phone subsidies do the same thing. Leases. Service contracts for everything from software support to pest control. Consulting contracts. Columbia's Record of the Month Club. I am firmly against blaming people who've been ripped off because they didn't' prevent it, but this is not new. It is a standard business practice across many industries. It's not even new to software. Beyond that, even with Adobe, you don't even have to use it— it's just the only one Adobe lets you sign up for a free trial with. If you go to Adobe's sub page: https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html And click on the 52 whatever a month plan, the three options for subscriptions— Month-to-Month, Monthly with a 12 month commitment, and annual paid upfront, are listed clear-as-day on the right. I think the Hanlon's Razor play on words is clear. When the two possibilities at large seem to be "Adobe, the world standard in creative software, maliciously styled their cancellation terms to trick the sliver of people suspicious enough to read the terms but not suspicious enough to realize the text was cut off" and "Adobe fell behind on user testing for infrequently viewed text-only fine print pages," Hanlon's razor is the heuristic people should use, and the results are self-evident.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

I got caught up in one recently but was able to talk the operator out of it. I thought I was signing up for a 1 month trial not for a year. Evidently they didn't push the people on the other side of the phone to refuse just make you have to at least call and talk to a human. I could find no way on the website to do it. Some people would just have let it go for a few months after not being frustrated enough to call customer service, as it wasn't a lot of money $8/month if I recall correctly.

ElemenoPicuares 5y ago

> Adobe is the first one I'm familiar with that does normal monthly billing but forces you to stay a year. Really? The Commitment Subscription payment model is super common and old as time. Oracle. Microsoft for some services. Lots of random SaaS companies. Unity Pro. Gyms. Internet service. Webex since forever. POTS service. Mobile service until Verizon got greedy and they started letting phone subsidies do the same thing. Leases. Service contracts for everything from software support to pest control. Consulting contracts. Columbia's Record of the Month Club. I am firmly against blaming people who've been ripped off because they didn't' prevent it, but this is not new. It is a standard business practice across many industries. It's not even new to software. Beyond that, even with Adobe, you don't even have to use it— it's just the only one Adobe lets you sign up for a free trial with. If you go to Adobe's sub page: https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html And click on the 52 whatever a month plan, the three options for subscriptions— Month-to-Month, Monthly with a 12 month commitment, and annual paid upfront, are listed clear-as-day on the right. I think the Hanlon's Razor play on words is clear. When the two possibilities at large seem to be "Adobe, the world standard in creative software, maliciously styled their cancellation terms to trick the sliver of people suspicious enough to read the terms but not suspicious enough to realize the text was cut off" and "Adobe fell behind on user testing for infrequently viewed text-only fine print pages," Hanlon's razor is the heuristic people should use, and the results are self-evident.