Adobe exec compared Creative Cloud cancellation fees to 'heroin'

&gt; calculating and displaying that price isn’t easy since the fee is 50 percent of a customer’s remaining term<p>But I&#x27;m sure Adobe&#x27;s servers have no issue calculating that fee afterwards.<p>I can&#x27;t see how they can remotely argue in court against implementing such a simple requirement like &quot;show the exact cancellation fee before the client accept&quot;.

Adobe is trying hard to become the next Oracle. Shit products combined with predatory license practices.

LOL just don&#x27;t pay the cancellation fees. Make sure you had signed up with a privacy.com temporary card number. When it comes time to quit, delete the card and forget Adobe!

I bought the Affinity suite for 50% off. It’s a bit like designing with one hand right now because things are different, but it’s on par with CS6 in terms of functionality, and without all the superfluous bs that gets crammed into CC.

&gt; <i>The early termination fees in the FTC case represent “less than half a percent of our annual revenue,” Rao told me. “It doesn’t drive our business, it doesn’t drive our business decisions.”</i><p>This feels <i>extremely</i> disingenuous.<p>Because how many people see the early termination fee and then decide to continue with Adobe for the remainder of the year rather than switch to a competitor, because of the sunk cost?<p>The point of the early termination fee isn&#x27;t to get people to pay it. Measuring how many people pay it is to miss the point entirely.<p>The point of the early termination fee is to prevent people from cancelling entirely. It would be much more interesting to see how many people try to cancel, get to the point where it reveals how much they&#x27;ll be charged to cancel, and then don&#x27;t.

<i>&gt; The early termination fees in the FTC case represent “less than half a percent of our annual revenue,” Rao told me. “It doesn’t drive our business, it doesn’t drive our business decisions.</i><p>Great, so you should have no issue removing them altogether because it&#x27;s not really a material source of revenue and it would result in meaningfully more satisfied users.<p><i>&gt; “I look at a lot of cancellation flows that are out there. There’s people you can’t even cancel online, you have to call. That doesn’t seem simple at all. When you start talking about the the range of what a cancellation flow can and should be, we’ve always been in the category of good, and we want to be great.”</i><p>Who are you looking at that requires calling? Certainly not big names like Adobe. This is such a disingenuous argument that it almost counts as evidence that Adobe&#x27;s culture is one of trying to mislead.

Startup idea: A teams&#x2F;slack&#x2F;email competitor that takes everything you write and translates it to an AI summary before sending it, so it is therefore exempt from discovery

I don&#x27;t quite get what the problem is here. Has Adobe already updated their subscription offerings? I see both yearly and monthly subscription options. If anything, it&#x27;s unusual that you can subscribe to an annual plan and get out prematurely, without having to pay for the entire period. Over here, annual contracts for service subscriptions usually do not have a no-questions-asked early termination option at all, with or without fees.

I needed to temporarily subscribe to an Acrobat plan to work with a specific PDF file from a client for 1 day. They deliberately implement a dark pattern that doesn&#x27;t allow you to cancel a subscription immediately after creation. It claims that your subscription is &quot;processing&quot; and you have to come back later to cancel it.

I think they can just remove the annual plan all together and add a discount that &quot;you get monthly discount after you subscribe for 12 continuous month, and that discount is terminated after you stopped subscription&quot;. And then there will be no cancellation fee argument. Gyms use this type of discount all the time and don&#x27;t really have any issues.

&gt; Rao [said] that Adobe had already started an overhaul of its subscription practices in October of 2021…<p>&gt; Adobe updated the design again in June 2023.<p>Well, it’s been a few years Adobe, and whatever “overhauls” you did clearly didn’t solve the problem!

I think I will only torrent Adobe stuff until such time as I can pay once the present value to a 7% discount-rate perpetuity with equal cashflow schedule to their subscription, for a perpetual license.

It’s so disingenuous for them to say “early cancellation fees are less than one percent of revenue, they don’t affect our business.” Of course it’s a tiny chunk of revenue, because no one is canceling! That’s the whole point of the fee!

Not sure who Adobe is trying to convince with this press cycle. The FTC already has their sights set[0] on Adobe for precisely these fees and they aren’t going to be fooled by some half-assed bird-brained gish-galloping. These arguments from Adobe read like internal kool-aid shared in meetings between Directors and VP’s — not like any sincere attempt to actually address the FTC and their specific concerns.<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;news-events&#x2F;news&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;2024&#x2F;06&#x2F;ftc-takes-action-against-adobe-executives-hiding-fees-preventing-consumers-easily-cancelling" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;news-events&#x2F;news&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;2024&#x2F;06&#x2F;...</a>

&gt; disappointed in the way they’re continuing to take comments out of context from non-executive employees from years ago to make their case<p>Whenever someone complains that you&#x27;ve taken something &quot;out of context&quot; your response is &quot;OK, so what&#x27;s the &#x27;context&#x27;? &quot;<p>As for unexpected charges being placed on your credit card: you always use a temporary, amount-limited card, which a lot of institutions offer. I use privacy.com.<p>Someone always says here, &quot;Oh, but they can still come after you.&quot; But they don&#x27;t. You should make a best effort to follow their rules, stop using the service, and <i>then</i> close the card. &quot;Cards becoming invalid&quot; are an event handled in their normal course of business.

<i>unlike a regular monthly subscription, these “annual billed monthly” plans have a significant fee if you cancel early, and the specific fee is not disclosed anywhere on the order screen</i><p>Maybe the specific fee isn&#x27;t disclosed, but looking at the screenshot it&#x27;s quite clear that the monthly option says &quot;cancel anytime&quot; and the annual-billed-monthy option is a year commitment and &quot;fee applies if you cancel after 14 days.&quot;<p>Anyone who was later surprised didn&#x27;t read what they were buying. This didn&#x27;t look confusing or deceptive to me at all.