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 :)
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
They'll point you to the T+Cs which is something my bank did recently. Even though the company had changed identity to avoid their customers, the bank still went to the new web site for the new company and pasted the T+Cs from there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> why would you then decide to switch to a browser that makes the exact same mistakes without any extensions whatsoever
Adblocking among the browsers that are more user-focused. I personally use Vivaldi, which is from the same devs that created Opera before the company was sold off.
Difference is a mobile view is often designed with that in mind, so it works across the board.
On desktop, I've had random horizontal scrollbars even on big sites like GitHub. Non-functional as the content had enough space, but still there, because no one bothered to test.
I do think hiding it on mobile devices is bad as well, though. Leads to exactly the issue in the twitter thread, with more content not being noticed.
Meanwhile, there are a lot of web developers who use Mac as their dev machine; and the majority of them would never check how the website looks on Windows or Linux.
There's a setting on MacOS: System preferences > General > Show scroll bars > Always; but neither developers nor end users seem to enable it.
Plus — and this is a pet peeve of mine — there's a growing number of developers who would use the Tailwind CSS library and apply its "w-screen" class to their elements. The w-screen class sets element width to 100vw, which does not take into account the width of the vertical scrollbar. So the moment the page content gets taller than viewport height and a vertical scrollbar appears, the 100vw width of an element exceeds the available width of the page, and causes a horizontal scrollbar to appear as well. Argh!
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The stupid pandemic has made that impossible for us for quite some time, but our current workflow of having artists discuss stuff on krita-artists.org with developers listening, then making a plan and then working on works quite well for us.
But I miss the sessions where each artist present would have two hours to demo making something with the express message: tell us what you hate, and we're not allowed to tell you "oh, but you could do this using that."
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.
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.
A chargeback should be (I would imagine is required to be, but haven't checked) free. If the company wants to roll the number too then fine, but that should be just inconvenient not a cost.
If your credit card company is charging you, leave them.
For future reference, just tell the vendor "I did not authorize this charge. Please refund me". Don't engage them further.
When that call fails (or, if they don't pick up the phone in a reasonable amount of time), call your credit card company and say "I want to issue a charge back".
They'll ask if you tried to work with the vendor. Answer "yes", full stop.
There should be a phone number associated with the charge on your credit card bill. Start (and end your interaction with the vendor) by calling that number.
Edit: You can also say "this service wasn't rendered", or "I never received the product I ordered", as applicable. Those are specifically listed as valid reasons to issue a chargeback. The person at the credit card company has to enter a numeric reason code for the charge back, and by using those phrases (or similar), you're making their lives easier.
I can’t see Adobe going to those lengths because they’d know there is a good change they would lose any class action lawsuit that would come about. Which would not just cost them in damages but also in bad publicity plus likely get them ordered to remove the dark patterns too (thus removing any future revenue this dark otters generates).
I’m not as clued up on consumer laws as I once was but I’m pretty sure in Europe their sign up page is actually illegal. Not just immoral but literally classed as false advertising or something similar. And even if that’s not the case, we do have protections against being tricked into signing an unclear contract and this would easily fall into that category.
> Which would not just cost them in damages but also in bad publicity
Unfortunately I think Adobe is beyond the point where few months of bad publicity would harm their core business. Amateurs would vote with their feet but professionals have really nowhere to go. There just are no alternatives to some of their programs.
Which products do you feel truly have no alternatives, and which features define that for you?
The only one I can think of is After Effects, which appears to do a broader set of things than any other single package (but I could be wrong).
The rest, well I am not convinced, though there are some edge features in each package that undeniably would sell them to a few people, and that is, I guess, in the right way of things.
I don't know, I opened their page and the drop down was clearly labeled as an annual subscription to me. It also told me the exact date by which I should cancel not to infer any costs. The drop down offered me to pay the full year upfront, or a monthly plan which is cancellable at any time.
I don't think this stuff is illegal at all. What they effectively did here is put the email address and personal information form in front of the product details instead of below them, change the buttons that normally say "next" to "start your free trial, but the information was all in plain view. Complain to your browser vendor about the lack of scroll bars if that's what's gotten you.
The big scam here is the fact this program requires a monthly fee at all. All subscription services I know either have a minimum duration with similar cancellation fees (or you'd be on the hook for the full remainder of the fees instead of half) or they're advertised explicitly as being cancellable at any time.
I don't think anyone was getting tricked, but I do believe people were entering a subscription without looking at the details.
The author of this tweet thread even acknowledges it states the terms in the workflow.
> But what does "Annual plan, paid monthly" actually mean?
I don't understand how "Annual plan, paid monthly" could be taken as something confusing or requires some additional context to make any sense out of it. How are other people reading "Annual plan, paid monthly" any other way than that it is an annual plan broken out into monthly installments?
For me it is more that the overall presentation is not clear. That wording on it's own is clear, but at every other stage in the process the implication is that it's a month to month commitment and not a full year you're signing up for. The fact that if you cancel they take half the year of payments and then only provide you with service for the remainder of the month is another nice little "fuck you" too.
Every single button said "Start Free Trial", not "Start Annual Plan" and the cancellation terms were hidden and hostile.
I was actually considering trying out the Adobe line for my own work, but I'm going to be sticking with Affinity and Procreate now. Bad enough that they went to a subscription model, worse still that they run it like mobsters. I have too many kids, too little sleep, and not enough amphetamine salts to remember to cancel the membership in 7-14 days.
The thing is, that kind of
fine line between deception while still presenting just enough detail to claim the customer should have looked at the details might wash in an American court, but it wouldn’t in the EU. In the EU the rules state that the responsibility is on the company to ensure the individual is aware of what they’re signing. And you cannot reasonably say that is what is happening here.
Also I wouldn’t be so sure that a class action suit of this nature wouldn’t be successful. Large companies have lost flimsier cases.
> or a monthly plan which is cancellable at any time.
At any time, sure. But it’s the $300 dollar cancellation fee thats the issue.
> Complain to your browser vendor about the lack of scroll bars if that's what's gotten you.
This whole “dont hate the players blame the game” meme is pretty tedious. If an organisation is abusing a feature for their own gain then they should be responsible for abusing a feature for their own gain.
> I don't think anyone was getting tricked, but I do believe people were entering a subscription without looking at the details.
“Tricked” is a loaded term. I think the real question is whether Adobe intentionally made it easy for people to misunderstand the details.
Given what I’d seen I’d argue that was the case. This might not be an issue in the US but it is in the EU, where larger organisations have had to pay out because of less.
...I'm sorry; I know this is a typo/autocucumber, but now I can't help picturing these nefarious Adobe otters coming up with ways to scam us. Adorable yet evil!
I don’t think their agreement with the CC network lets them come after users for chargebacks the bank has approved. In a chargeback situation, the bank has to agree that the charge was unreasonable.
AT&T sent me to collections once because of an error on their part. I immediately disputed the charges with AT&T, then explained the situation to the collections officer.
Collections officers can't try to collect disputed debts, so they immediately left me alone.
Then, I spent over 24 hours on the phone with AT&T, and eventually paid them a bit under a hundred dollars that I didn't owe them. There was no credit report ding or harassment from the collections agency, at least.
> You can also say "this service wasn't rendered", or "I never received the product I ordered", as applicable. Those are specifically listed as valid reasons to issue a chargeback. The person at the credit card company has to enter a numeric reason code for the charge back, and by using those phrases (or similar), you're making their lives easier.
This is, unfortunately, not a panacea. I paid for tickets pre-covid for a concert that was indefinitely postponed - Ticketmaster refused to refund, and PayPal and my bank also both refused to issue chargebacks. My view was that I paid for tickets for a concert on a specific date, and a postponement to an indefinite future date was a failure to render the service I paid for, but none of the payment processors I went through agreed.
I did eventually get the refund from Ticketmaster, and the concert still hasn’t happened. I didn’t like Ticketmaster before, and I like them even less now.
Ticketmaster is definitely a great example of one company essentially owning the market, but they have a legal out against being a monopoly in that most places will also sell a few tickets through other channels like grocery stores or a hard to get to box office somewhere or “at the door”
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.
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...
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.
I think this is a question of fact, but isn't consistent with OP. Either Adobe tricked them and they genuinely didn't know and it's a dark pattern.... or it isn't a trick/dark pattern and they did know.
But if the part of the agreement that talks about canceling is above the fold and the part that says there are liquidated damages of half the remaining annual payments is hidden behind invisible scroll bars, I know which way I would be likely to rule if I were the judge.
Can they report you to a credit bureau and get your credit score lowered? I recently had my credit score lowered, I think because I canceled a Chase / Amazon credit card after only 1 month. Apparently that is a credit faux paus. No balance owed, but I did hit the measly $500 limit once - another thing bad for credit scores.
When my car + homeowner insurance renewed, it had a special section about how Lexus Nexus had lowered my insurance score, which is partially based on my credit score. Cost me several hundred dollars extra in insurance premiums.
In general, they can and do send this sort of stuff to collections since you did sign up for the terms and it's a non-trivial amount of money owed. Gyms do it for far less, so I don't see why Adobe wouldn't.
We had Time Warner send us to collections which then reported my wife to the bureaus, alleging that we had never returned our cable modem (this was just for $60, and it was 5+ years ago!!). First of all, I’m incredibly sure that we did. We had fiber after that, what would I want with an old DOCSIS modem anyway? And second of all, they were unable to offer any proof that we had not returned it. The company that was collecting tried to strongarm us, but after a few documented phone calls, it all went away. But why are companies allowed to report a fraudulent payment to collections, when they have no proof (if they had some proof surely they wouldn’t have dropped it) and there is literally no follow-up or accountability required of them? I’m glad we have the financial literacy and confidence to tell them to stuff it, but how many people get scammed by stuff like this?
We also spent a bunch of time on the phone with TWC directly, and they had no account in our name or any history of our account.
I had similar encounters with a shitty ISP where their salesperson signed me up on a yearly contract despite explaining very clearly that not only did I only want a 30-day rolling contract but that the reason I'm doing so is because of a temporary issue with the new ISP. Even if they somehow misheard the "30-day rolling" part, a yearly contract just wouldn't make sense given my planned use-case. I can only assume that the idiot simply wanted some commission and I guess they don't give any for monthly rolling contracts.
When it was time to cancel I learnt that I was actually on a yearly contract - this was a month later so past the cancellation period. The support advisor claimed that I not only received an email but actually opened it, at which point I knew they sent it to the wrong address or were outright lying as my email client never loads remote resources, making it impossible for them to see that I "opened" it. He also refused an IMO reasonable demand of reviewing the call recording (it was just a month ago so they should still have it) to determine who was in the right.
In the end, I simply blocked further payments. When collections reached out, I explained the story above and they went away immediately. Collections ended up having significantly better user experience than the original company.
They can send it to collections all they want, but ultimately if the debt isn't valid as per the law then you're all good. If the merchant is using bad-faith tactics to trick you into a contract (or outright lies as in my case) it is very unlikely to fly in court.
Until when you go apply for a mortgage and the underwriter makes you resolve all outstanding credit issues, which in many cases results in you paying the collection agency otherwise it could hold up your home purchase.
Theses systems were built by the creditors not the consumers.
I'm surprised gyms don't do it... It is my understanding that credit reference agencies pay money for this kind of information, and pay even more if they get to guarantee that the same debts won't be reflected on competing credit reporting mechanisms.
Where are you located? Privacy.com were first to bring this feature to the mainstream as a product but it exists as an add-on in various places. For example, in the UK it’s offered by Monzo and offered by Revolut in the many countries they operate in. If you want to use virtual cards, it should be possible where you live.
Wise (formerly Transferwise) also offers virtual debit cards. I don't think you can limit the amount or merchant, but it still works if all you need is to be able to cancel a card on-demand.
While virtual cards are technically a thing in Canada (e.g. you get a virtual cards if you add a card to Apple Pay), I’m not aware of any services that let you generate more than one at a time in a useful way.
This is why last year India's policy for auto debit rules for credit debit card makes very good sense.
Under the new norms, banks will be required to inform customers in advance about recurring payment due and transaction would be carried following nod from the customer (will need additional factor authentication from 1 April). This rule is likely to impact your monthly subscription charges for different streaming platforms including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+...
Love that. I wonder how much money is flowing from consumers on forgotten subscriptions. My bank should have a separate highlighted section for any recurring charge.
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.
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.
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.
The problem is these companies aren't evil but they are under considerably less pressure to be good. Perhaps the saddest thing about Adobe is that the subscription model has almost completely eliminated their support staff's ability to allow things like discretionary late free upgrades (which I've benefited from in the past, before I made the jump to Affinity Photo in 2015, after a year of Photoshop CC).
I agree there's no pressure on these companies as a whole. Ideally, they should be heavily investing in R&D while the moat is still wide.
I manage a product design team. We've long moved away from from using Adobe products. It's not that we detest subscription model or Adobe as a company; their products were no longer meeting our needs.
Only After Effects doesn't have an all-in-one competitor, really.
Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign, as a linked suite, has a very, very able competitor in Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher. Given the complexity of these products, expecting more than one fully-integrated competing suite might be too much.
You might find this video useful, to see the extent to which it is a competitor:
Last I looked for a replacement for Lightroom I didn't really find anything that worked well for me. Maybe the open source tools have matured in the interim? I've been sticking with my old copy of Lightroom 5 and until I buy a new camera that it doesn't support processing raw files for.
I don't really like Darktable for that job to be honest -- nothing against what it is capable of, because it is clearly capable, it just rubs me up the wrong way GUI-wise. Haven't tried RawTherapee in a long time but maybe?
Because I don't really like working in "sessions" and prefer folders, what I do is use DxO PhotoLab (which now comes in an "Essentials" version when you get it with their Nik tools, which might appeal to you). It's fast enough to cull in, though for really fast culls I use Fileloupe on the Mac.
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.
> 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.
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
Sure, me too. Annual plans are great. The issues here are:
1. All of the marketing language shown in the tweets present this as a monthly cost, rather than an annual commitment. This is deceptive. The other, truly monthly plans are default hidden on the plan selection page.
2. The enormous contract cancellation fee is buried inside the fine print.
Annual plan to me that you're agreeing to pay for the year. Disney did something similar, it was cheaper to sign up for a year. Typically you get 12 months for the price of 10.
The screenshot says you can have a full refund if you cancel before Feb 26th, assuming that holds, that's plenty of time to work out what's going on.
The US is clear, I've seen that setup several times. The UK one has several red flags
If a user will be on the hook for $300 when cancelling a contract, that should be made quite clear. The only hint that that lays buried in the fine print is small gray text intoning "avoid a fee" that gets shown after plan selection.
It's pretty clear Adobe has work to do on their sign up flow, here. That they've already done so on the US side makes it even more inexcusable, frankly.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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)
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!
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.
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.
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.
You can trivially ignore the debt collectors. If they still want their money after that, they can sue. At that point it's ultimately down to the court to determine who's in the wrong and who owes what.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> You're just defending the right of a giant corporation to communicate poorly in a way that enriches them.
Thanks for the downvote (I guess) but no, I'm doing no such thing. I'm explaining that the giant monopoly is going to do what the giant monopoly does.
Really almost all subscriptions are like this -- they depend on you forgetting to cancel. And this one is a bit more up-front than most.
> 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.
Sorry, this is a straw man. I didn't at all say that I thought those four words fulfilled their obligations.
What I said is, they have a maximally clear four word way of summarising the plan right at the beginning of the payment flow.
I'm quite sure they need to do a bit more to explain what the early cancellation options are at some point in the payment flow. But right before you even try to buy, they do explain you're buying an annual plan, don't they?
FWIW, if you do not grasp that "annual plan" means an annual plan and then think about what your early cancellation options might be, perhaps you shouldn't be using the company credit card.
Complaining loudly that you can't use something clearly marked as an annual plan for just one month is a bit of a stretch.
> You're just assuming that everyone doing this is spending someone else's money?
To be fair, you're also assuming that starving artists are paying for Photoshop. A quick "Adobe" search on your BitTorrent tracker of choice may change your mind.
Plenty of low-income people do their best to follow the law out of conscientiousness. I know some of them personally.
I object passionately to the idea that, when people misunderstand communication that's designed to be maximally misleading, subject only to the constraint of legal defensibility, they are entirely to blame for falling into the trap.
Adobe should be very clear and upfront about their early cancellation fees.
"Annual plan, billed monthly" is demonstrably not maximally misleading.
If it said "monthly subscription" without clearly identifying the annual commitment, that would be maximally misleading.
I will grant you that it could say "Yearly plan", not "Annual plan", and be less misleading; they do appear to use this alternative phrasing in A/B tests.
If anyone from Adobe is reading this thread: make that change.
(And sort out your Photography plan: make a slimmer version of Photoshop that really does have just the features photographers need, and offer a plan for that.)
Yes, but also we're talking about the whole Creative Cloud suite, not Photoshop here. There's a Photoshop-only plan that costs about £11 per month and there are Black Friday deals which are well understood by the budget photographer world to provide better value for money than this.
(Even then it is poor value for money, IMO; other packages cover 95% of the functionality of Photoshop and cost less than a year of this, and I really think the market understands that now)
I don't know who you're really angry at but it doesn't seem to be down to me. Maybe dial it back a bit.
> Company credit card? You're just assuming that everyone doing this is spending someone else's money?
The tweet talks about the the full Creative Cloud suite (something close to £750/yr), and yes, the majority of these people are either spending the company's money or that of their own freelance business. It's an eye-wateringly expensive commitment otherwise.
> Thanks for the downvote (I guess) but no, I'm doing no such thing. I'm explaining that the giant monopoly is going to do what the giant monopoly does.
Isn't it our job as consumers to raise awareness and try to change this behavior though?
There's something about this sort of argument that seems off to me. Someone complains about someone doing X, then someone else comes along and says it's always been like that.
> 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.
"Annual plan, paid monthly" seems pretty clear to me too, so help me approach this with a new perspective.
Is there a SaaS provider using the "annual plan, paid monthly" who does this "right"? Are you against this pricing model in general?
I reject the idea that everyone should know from these words that they will be subject to an enormous early cancellation fee if they forget to cancel before the 7 day trial period is over.
Adobe has a moral obligation to explain that up-front, so that consumers who cannot easily pay the fee are adequately warned of the danger they are getting themselves into.
> I reject the idea that everyone should know from these words that they will be subject to an enormous early cancellation fee if they forget to cancel before the 7 day trial period is over.
I hear you, and I want to dig in on that a bit if you'll be kind enough to indulge me.
I'm currently helping a SaaS vendor define their pricing plan, so I'd like to know what you would like to see in order to feel comfortable with an annual, paid monthly plan. If you have any thoughts on the two questions I asked, I'd really appreciate the feedback!
Haven't I been clear enough? If you're going to charge a giant early cancellation fee, that information should not be hidden behind a link and fine print. It should be explained on the payment page, briefly and in plain language.
I don't really get why the cancellation fee should be the issue here. When I purchase a subscription for a year, I assume that I will have to pay for the entire year. That's why it is cheaper per month than a monthly subscription.
The cancellation fee might be quite high, but it is absolutely expected that there is one. And if I'm not sure if I'll keep the subscription running for an entire year, then I'll look into the cancellation term beforehand or simply pick the monthly plan.
Because some people might not have the background to think exactly the way you do.
People are reporting that they were surprised by the cancellation fee. Is it reasonable to assume that these people were fully aware of what would happen? And chose this path anyway, in order to... what, exactly? It makes no sense. It's more reasonable to take what they say at face value, that they were in fact surprised and didn't understand in good faith what they signed up for.
Given that, what is so unreasonable about expecting companies to be upfront about the fee and explain it in the payment page? Why is this trivial disclosure and transparency to the consumer something to balk about?
I think the reason is pretty obvious. Companies have always loved it when confused customers have to pay money they didn't expect to pay. So the companies design their payment flows to encourage this, to the maximum extent the law allows.
It's sociopathic, and just because it's common and accepted doesn't mean I have to think it's okay.
In the interests of reaching a point of agreement, I concur that they could put, in or next to that initial wording, something like "early cancellation fees may apply".
But an annual plan really is that. They are telling you pretty clearly* what you're buying; the fact that there's a way to bail out half way for less is an advance on that position.
* though as I said in the other reply, "yearly" would be better
These four words are clear enough to be legally defensible, but they are the absolute minimum and they are designed to be the absolute minimum. They want to maximize conversion even if it traps people who didn't understand in good faith what they were buying.
It isn't hard to provide a complete explanation of what happens if you go past the trial period and want to cancel. All they have to say is, "if you don't cancel after the trial period, you are obligated to pay X over the next 12 months. Early cancellation is possible for a fee of half the remaining balance. For example, if you cancel immediately after the trial period your early cancellation fee will be X/2."
There's plenty of space to feature this explanation prominently. We all know why they don't. It's to trap people.
Many subscription plans work this way but it's no excuse. It's scumbag behavior. The fact that it's so common is just one of the many reasons why I believe the world is run by sociopaths.
> I concur that they could put, in or next to that initial wording, something like "early cancellation fees may apply".
Again, this wording seems unnecessarily soft to me - the inclusion of 'may' adds ambiguity to make the user think that there might not be exit fees - it should really be "early cancellation fees will apply".
Better yet, you could give the cost:
"Early cancellation fees of 50% of the remainder of the year will apply".
Fair point, though at that stage, early cancellation only may apply, because you can back out of the trial on/before seven days.
Early cancellation fees will apply after the trial, is the wording that is the clearest, I guess.
This is a really interesting exploration of word choice though. I must say, I had not considered that the word "annual" could be perceived to be unwieldy in this situation, for example.
I would probably understand it, but I don't think those two words would necessarily make it clear to every person of every background, and it's very easy for Adobe to briefly explain the early termination fee on the payment page where everyone can easily see it.
They don't explain it because they want everyone to convert, even people who did not understand what they signed up for and would not have signed up if they had understood.
Subscription fee companies have always behaved like this.
That's only "charitable" to the giant company. It's not so charitable to the people who say they were confused in good faith and signed up for something they wouldn't have signed up for if they had understood it.
These people exist and have made themselves known in the OP Twitter thread and other HN comments on this post.
I can't help but wonder if all this "how can people not understand" is just thinly-veiled contempt for people who don't have the same background or way of thinking or interpreting words as you do.
Who gives a shit about those people, am I right? Who cares if they're on the hook for hundreds they didn't expect to have to pay. Good on Adobe for imposing that stupidity tax on lesser minds than yours!
If people can't understand 'annual plan' then I'm not sure what it's reasonable to do? How can you conduct business with a person who can't understand language like that?
I already explained how Adobe could be more clear, by briefly explaining their early cancellation policy on the payment page. Amazingly, it's quite easy to be more clear by using more than two words to explain something.
You're just playing dumb and it's uninteresting and in bad faith, so, bye. Enjoy being baffled about how a giant rich company could possibly be less shitty to their customers.
It could easily mean "we will bill you monthly 12 times, for one year, and then stop billing you". It's not immediately clear that it means "we will bill you monthly forever, if you cancel within a year you owe us big money".
For plants it's exactly the opposite, actually. An annual completes its life cycle fully in a year - germination to death. Perennials come back year after year.
> I reject the idea that everyone should know from these words that they will be subject to an enormous early cancellation fee if they forget to cancel before the 7 day trial period is over.
For most users it isn't a bad deal at all. It's a 33% price savings over straight monthly, and I suspect many/most users have subscriptions much longer than a year.
This all seems a bit overwrought. Like the root post, I cannot fathom who would go through a purchase process that included the phrase "Annual plan, billed monthly" and not clue in. Or that that drop down includes a separate straight monthly plan at a significant price premium (50% higher). To give even more of a hint, a separate "you have until this date to cancel without a penalty" disclaimer gives another clue.
On the scale of dark patterns, this one is pretty eh. It clearly could be clearer for people who seem to just click straight through stuff, but I suspect a lot of the people chose the cheaper per month annual plan thinking they were hacking the system, and then discovered that it wasn't all upside.
> This all seems a bit overwrought. Like the root post, I cannot fathom who would go through a purchase process that included the phrase "Annual plan, billed monthly" and not clue in.
FWIW (mine is the root post and) I am definitely coming around to the idea that it should at least say "Yearly", and maybe say "in monthly installments", because that language may be more familiar to buyers. But the rest of your point about the other plan you can choose is right.
I don't yet believe Adobe is evil, either. Banal, corporate, plodding, slow-witted, yeah. It is definitely an 800 pound gorilla.
I am using a different definition of monopoly than the USA one.
They are a monopoly according to the EU definition (which used to be the UK definition; may still be). They control clearly more than 50% of the market; that is enough to attract regulatory scrutiny as a monopoly.
The reality is that a monopoly need not have 100% control of the market. It is more that they have control over some barrier of entry to the market. That, combined with half the market share, is a powerful tool.
In the case of Adobe, as well as market share, they also have de facto control over a set of file formats that the market depends on (the so-called 'industry standard'). And they have a level of product integration/tying in the Creative Suite that could be monopolistic. That limits the competing apps; they cannot together offer a truly competing suite.
Affinity is I think close to rolling back some of Adobe's monopoly power, because the Affinity Suite is so capable, and it might well be in Adobe's interest to allow them to do that; it certainly must help them when they talk to EU regulators.
The real question is whether they are an "abusive" monopoly. And I don't believe they are quite there yet.
There are some hints that they may risk becoming technically abusive but this "dark pattern" ain't one. One such hint is that you can't buy just the two arbitrary apps you want in the suite -- it's either one app, the photography plan, or the lot.
It is certainly the case that any further acquisitions by Adobe could attract monopoly regulation in the EU.
I disagree with your implication that people are basically dim for falling for intentionally malicious design. You could put a push sign on the door of the physics department in a Uni, but if the handle was designed to be pulled, most people would be doing so.
I agree with the rest of your sentiment for the most part. Vote with your feet. Affinity is great, and there are other good alternatives. Most people who are stuck on Photoshop used it when it wasn't as good, you can do the same again
I am not saying people are dim for "falling for intentionally malicious design", because I do not see what is intentionally malicious -- that word has a meaning. It is not malicious. It might be unclear; I'm not convinced it is even misleading.
I am saying I do not understand why people don't grasp that "annual plan, billed monthly" means something priced yearly but paid for in monthly pieces.
Not that I think they are dim, but I do want to understand what the comprehension gap is here.
After reading many replies I think that if people are saying that "annual plan" is too ambiguous for anyone with a credit card, then "yearly, billed in monthly instalments after free trial" should do the job. But then I expect we will still see people expecting this means they can cancel after a month. Because the thing is if they say "one year commitment, billed in monthly instalments" that is actually untrue; you can in fact get out before a year is out, it just costs you an early closing penalty.
(I _am_ saying they are dim if they are expecting to game it by cancelling after a month.)
> 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.
I tried to open a raw image and it didn't seem to process the XMP sidecar file I had alongside it properly. The photo looks quite different from what it looks like in Photoshop. This is despite the fact that I can confirm via Process Monitor that it actually does actually read the XMP file. It just seems to ignore the contents for some reason.
I think there are some elements of the XMP it is trying to make sense of, and perhaps failing. Or possibly the XMP-reading code is in production but none of the decoding is yet. Or maybe it will get keywords from XMP but nothing else? Not sure.
The thing is, XMP is not any kind of independent standard; it's largely a set of instructions specific to Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop. I do think we should expect them ultimately to be able to interpret most of it, and I half expect them to support XMP in their eventual DAM product as one sidecar type, (which is why I think there is probably code in Photo that is ready to read it) but they don't commit to it yet.
I must say that if I process a raw file in one package then open it up in a competitor's raw processing package, I expect the second to ignore the work of the first
The main thing that the suite really can't do is a Bridge-type function, though.
Sure, it says annual plan. But if we are going to be marking words, the very same screenshot also say: "You can cancel your subscription anytime", without any conditions declared up front, except a tiny "Learn more" link. Given this you'd likely win a consumer case or chargeback if you tried. If only this text had a more clear disclaimer i would give Adobe a pass, even though whole process contains a full load of other dark patterns.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 313 ms ] threadI 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Which Android browsers show scrollbars?
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-table...
What’s this a reference to?
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.
Adblocking among the browsers that are more user-focused. I personally use Vivaldi, which is from the same devs that created Opera before the company was sold off.
On desktop, I've had random horizontal scrollbars even on big sites like GitHub. Non-functional as the content had enough space, but still there, because no one bothered to test.
I do think hiding it on mobile devices is bad as well, though. Leads to exactly the issue in the twitter thread, with more content not being noticed.
Found an old discussion on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24293421
Working link: http://web.archive.org/web/20210226184710/https://svenkadak....
How many people develop web sites on Android?
Meanwhile, there are a lot of web developers who use Mac as their dev machine; and the majority of them would never check how the website looks on Windows or Linux.
Plus — and this is a pet peeve of mine — there's a growing number of developers who would use the Tailwind CSS library and apply its "w-screen" class to their elements. The w-screen class sets element width to 100vw, which does not take into account the width of the vertical scrollbar. So the moment the page content gets taller than viewport height and a vertical scrollbar appears, the 100vw width of an element exceeds the available width of the page, and causes a horizontal scrollbar to appear as well. Argh!
https://sbx.webflow.io/100vw-scrollbars
Which, for a block element inside a block container, is the default anyway.
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...)
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.
“By clicking here you agree that you would like to opt out of receiving newsletters”.
“By clicking here you agree to our terms”.
gotta show the investors that revenue growth thou!
they can't just override the law with their own Terms and Conditions
but yes, the scheme is very popular among telcos
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.
Free office apps are a great achievement but you seem to get what you pay for.
But I miss the sessions where each artist present would have two hours to demo making something with the express message: tell us what you hate, and we're not allowed to tell you "oh, but you could do this using that."
Looking back, I now see where I agreed, but the manner in which they attempt to deceive you is criminal.
If your credit card company is charging you, leave them.
When that call fails (or, if they don't pick up the phone in a reasonable amount of time), call your credit card company and say "I want to issue a charge back". They'll ask if you tried to work with the vendor. Answer "yes", full stop.
There should be a phone number associated with the charge on your credit card bill. Start (and end your interaction with the vendor) by calling that number.
Edit: You can also say "this service wasn't rendered", or "I never received the product I ordered", as applicable. Those are specifically listed as valid reasons to issue a chargeback. The person at the credit card company has to enter a numeric reason code for the charge back, and by using those phrases (or similar), you're making their lives easier.
I’m not as clued up on consumer laws as I once was but I’m pretty sure in Europe their sign up page is actually illegal. Not just immoral but literally classed as false advertising or something similar. And even if that’s not the case, we do have protections against being tricked into signing an unclear contract and this would easily fall into that category.
Unfortunately I think Adobe is beyond the point where few months of bad publicity would harm their core business. Amateurs would vote with their feet but professionals have really nowhere to go. There just are no alternatives to some of their programs.
The only one I can think of is After Effects, which appears to do a broader set of things than any other single package (but I could be wrong).
The rest, well I am not convinced, though there are some edge features in each package that undeniably would sell them to a few people, and that is, I guess, in the right way of things.
I don't think this stuff is illegal at all. What they effectively did here is put the email address and personal information form in front of the product details instead of below them, change the buttons that normally say "next" to "start your free trial, but the information was all in plain view. Complain to your browser vendor about the lack of scroll bars if that's what's gotten you.
The big scam here is the fact this program requires a monthly fee at all. All subscription services I know either have a minimum duration with similar cancellation fees (or you'd be on the hook for the full remainder of the fees instead of half) or they're advertised explicitly as being cancellable at any time.
I don't think anyone was getting tricked, but I do believe people were entering a subscription without looking at the details.
> But what does "Annual plan, paid monthly" actually mean?
I don't understand how "Annual plan, paid monthly" could be taken as something confusing or requires some additional context to make any sense out of it. How are other people reading "Annual plan, paid monthly" any other way than that it is an annual plan broken out into monthly installments?
I was actually considering trying out the Adobe line for my own work, but I'm going to be sticking with Affinity and Procreate now. Bad enough that they went to a subscription model, worse still that they run it like mobsters. I have too many kids, too little sleep, and not enough amphetamine salts to remember to cancel the membership in 7-14 days.
Also I wouldn’t be so sure that a class action suit of this nature wouldn’t be successful. Large companies have lost flimsier cases.
> or a monthly plan which is cancellable at any time.
At any time, sure. But it’s the $300 dollar cancellation fee thats the issue.
> Complain to your browser vendor about the lack of scroll bars if that's what's gotten you.
This whole “dont hate the players blame the game” meme is pretty tedious. If an organisation is abusing a feature for their own gain then they should be responsible for abusing a feature for their own gain.
> I don't think anyone was getting tricked, but I do believe people were entering a subscription without looking at the details.
“Tricked” is a loaded term. I think the real question is whether Adobe intentionally made it easy for people to misunderstand the details.
Given what I’d seen I’d argue that was the case. This might not be an issue in the US but it is in the EU, where larger organisations have had to pay out because of less.
...I'm sorry; I know this is a typo/autocucumber, but now I can't help picturing these nefarious Adobe otters coming up with ways to scam us. Adorable yet evil!
I get emails from them making offers to get me back on creative cloud. Nothing about the unpaid cancelled account.
Collections officers can't try to collect disputed debts, so they immediately left me alone.
Then, I spent over 24 hours on the phone with AT&T, and eventually paid them a bit under a hundred dollars that I didn't owe them. There was no credit report ding or harassment from the collections agency, at least.
This is, unfortunately, not a panacea. I paid for tickets pre-covid for a concert that was indefinitely postponed - Ticketmaster refused to refund, and PayPal and my bank also both refused to issue chargebacks. My view was that I paid for tickets for a concert on a specific date, and a postponement to an indefinite future date was a failure to render the service I paid for, but none of the payment processors I went through agreed.
I did eventually get the refund from Ticketmaster, and the concert still hasn’t happened. I didn’t like Ticketmaster before, and I like them even less now.
They keep insisting that it’s just “postponed” to 2021, and now 2022 …
It’s ridiculous, I’m never going to ever go to an Ultra show again in my life.
If they had just refunded me immediately I would probably have already bought tickets to & attended other Ultra shows (in the country I now live in).
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.
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.
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.
But if the part of the agreement that talks about canceling is above the fold and the part that says there are liquidated damages of half the remaining annual payments is hidden behind invisible scroll bars, I know which way I would be likely to rule if I were the judge.
When my car + homeowner insurance renewed, it had a special section about how Lexus Nexus had lowered my insurance score, which is partially based on my credit score. Cost me several hundred dollars extra in insurance premiums.
Canceling a credit card as you did may hurt your score though.
We also spent a bunch of time on the phone with TWC directly, and they had no account in our name or any history of our account.
Best part of this story
When it was time to cancel I learnt that I was actually on a yearly contract - this was a month later so past the cancellation period. The support advisor claimed that I not only received an email but actually opened it, at which point I knew they sent it to the wrong address or were outright lying as my email client never loads remote resources, making it impossible for them to see that I "opened" it. He also refused an IMO reasonable demand of reviewing the call recording (it was just a month ago so they should still have it) to determine who was in the right.
In the end, I simply blocked further payments. When collections reached out, I explained the story above and they went away immediately. Collections ended up having significantly better user experience than the original company.
Theses systems were built by the creditors not the consumers.
Not for those of us who don't live in the US unfortunately.
Under the new norms, banks will be required to inform customers in advance about recurring payment due and transaction would be carried following nod from the customer (will need additional factor authentication from 1 April). This rule is likely to impact your monthly subscription charges for different streaming platforms including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+...
https://www.livemint.com/industry/banking/debit-card-credit-...
> Create up to 12 cards per month
Does that mean you can create 12 in January, 12 more in February, etc? Or is it capped at 12 total?
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.
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.
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.
The problem is these companies aren't evil but they are under considerably less pressure to be good. Perhaps the saddest thing about Adobe is that the subscription model has almost completely eliminated their support staff's ability to allow things like discretionary late free upgrades (which I've benefited from in the past, before I made the jump to Affinity Photo in 2015, after a year of Photoshop CC).
I manage a product design team. We've long moved away from from using Adobe products. It's not that we detest subscription model or Adobe as a company; their products were no longer meeting our needs.
Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign, as a linked suite, has a very, very able competitor in Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher. Given the complexity of these products, expecting more than one fully-integrated competing suite might be too much.
You might find this video useful, to see the extent to which it is a competitor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVqJIaMlB6E
Not a 100% drop-in replacement, mind you, but almost nothing ever is. Very close, though, and capable of some remarkable things.
(I still don't have Publisher but I love Photo and Designer.)
Because I don't really like working in "sessions" and prefer folders, what I do is use DxO PhotoLab (which now comes in an "Essentials" version when you get it with their Nik tools, which might appeal to you). It's fast enough to cull in, though for really fast culls I use Fileloupe on the Mac.
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.
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
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.
1. All of the marketing language shown in the tweets present this as a monthly cost, rather than an annual commitment. This is deceptive. The other, truly monthly plans are default hidden on the plan selection page.
2. The enormous contract cancellation fee is buried inside the fine print.
Contrast this to the USA version: https://i.imgur.com/TDptfcI.png
The screenshot says you can have a full refund if you cancel before Feb 26th, assuming that holds, that's plenty of time to work out what's going on.
The US is clear, I've seen that setup several times. The UK one has several red flags
1) Free trial
2) "From" £x a month
3) It's Adobe
It's pretty clear Adobe has work to do on their sign up flow, here. That they've already done so on the US side makes it even more inexcusable, frankly.
The point where you enter your email states "Annual Plan Paid Monthly", and "Cancel before 26th Feb for a full refund"
Maybe I'm just cynical, but I would expect if I were to sign up I would be on the hook for a full year unless I cancel before 26th Feb.
Of all the dark patterns online, this is fairly low down the list.
Considering this behavior is likely illegal in the UK (where consumer cooling-off periods are 14 days or 30 days), I'd find that peculiar.
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.
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.
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.)
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?
Adobe is using sleight of hand to get you locked into a long-term contract. That's closer to fraud.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> "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.
Thanks for the downvote (I guess) but no, I'm doing no such thing. I'm explaining that the giant monopoly is going to do what the giant monopoly does.
Really almost all subscriptions are like this -- they depend on you forgetting to cancel. And this one is a bit more up-front than most.
> 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.
Sorry, this is a straw man. I didn't at all say that I thought those four words fulfilled their obligations.
What I said is, they have a maximally clear four word way of summarising the plan right at the beginning of the payment flow.
I'm quite sure they need to do a bit more to explain what the early cancellation options are at some point in the payment flow. But right before you even try to buy, they do explain you're buying an annual plan, don't they?
FWIW, if you do not grasp that "annual plan" means an annual plan and then think about what your early cancellation options might be, perhaps you shouldn't be using the company credit card.
Complaining loudly that you can't use something clearly marked as an annual plan for just one month is a bit of a stretch.
Everything you've written functions to blame the victim and leave Adobe harmless here.
To be fair, you're also assuming that starving artists are paying for Photoshop. A quick "Adobe" search on your BitTorrent tracker of choice may change your mind.
I object passionately to the idea that, when people misunderstand communication that's designed to be maximally misleading, subject only to the constraint of legal defensibility, they are entirely to blame for falling into the trap.
Adobe should be very clear and upfront about their early cancellation fees.
If it said "monthly subscription" without clearly identifying the annual commitment, that would be maximally misleading.
I will grant you that it could say "Yearly plan", not "Annual plan", and be less misleading; they do appear to use this alternative phrasing in A/B tests.
If anyone from Adobe is reading this thread: make that change.
(And sort out your Photography plan: make a slimmer version of Photoshop that really does have just the features photographers need, and offer a plan for that.)
(Even then it is poor value for money, IMO; other packages cover 95% of the functionality of Photoshop and cost less than a year of this, and I really think the market understands that now)
I don't know who you're really angry at but it doesn't seem to be down to me. Maybe dial it back a bit.
> Company credit card? You're just assuming that everyone doing this is spending someone else's money?
The tweet talks about the the full Creative Cloud suite (something close to £750/yr), and yes, the majority of these people are either spending the company's money or that of their own freelance business. It's an eye-wateringly expensive commitment otherwise.
This kind of commitment encourages due diligence.
Isn't it our job as consumers to raise awareness and try to change this behavior though?
There's something about this sort of argument that seems off to me. Someone complains about someone doing X, then someone else comes along and says it's always been like that.
Why does that matter?
"Annual plan, paid monthly" seems pretty clear to me too, so help me approach this with a new perspective.
Is there a SaaS provider using the "annual plan, paid monthly" who does this "right"? Are you against this pricing model in general?
Adobe has a moral obligation to explain that up-front, so that consumers who cannot easily pay the fee are adequately warned of the danger they are getting themselves into.
I hear you, and I want to dig in on that a bit if you'll be kind enough to indulge me.
I'm currently helping a SaaS vendor define their pricing plan, so I'd like to know what you would like to see in order to feel comfortable with an annual, paid monthly plan. If you have any thoughts on the two questions I asked, I'd really appreciate the feedback!
The cancellation fee might be quite high, but it is absolutely expected that there is one. And if I'm not sure if I'll keep the subscription running for an entire year, then I'll look into the cancellation term beforehand or simply pick the monthly plan.
People are reporting that they were surprised by the cancellation fee. Is it reasonable to assume that these people were fully aware of what would happen? And chose this path anyway, in order to... what, exactly? It makes no sense. It's more reasonable to take what they say at face value, that they were in fact surprised and didn't understand in good faith what they signed up for.
Given that, what is so unreasonable about expecting companies to be upfront about the fee and explain it in the payment page? Why is this trivial disclosure and transparency to the consumer something to balk about?
I think the reason is pretty obvious. Companies have always loved it when confused customers have to pay money they didn't expect to pay. So the companies design their payment flows to encourage this, to the maximum extent the law allows.
It's sociopathic, and just because it's common and accepted doesn't mean I have to think it's okay.
"Yearly plan, billed in monthly instalments"
makes the point more clear that you're in for a year. You can then put accompanying print that says "early termination fees apply".
But really, apart from people perhaps not understanding that "Annual" is doing the work of saying "yearly, not rolling", I don't get the logic here.
"Yearly plan, paid monthly, £678" --> [ minimum cost £456 [[ a href="terms-cancel.html" ]] if cancelled early ]
But an annual plan really is that. They are telling you pretty clearly* what you're buying; the fact that there's a way to bail out half way for less is an advance on that position.
* though as I said in the other reply, "yearly" would be better
It isn't hard to provide a complete explanation of what happens if you go past the trial period and want to cancel. All they have to say is, "if you don't cancel after the trial period, you are obligated to pay X over the next 12 months. Early cancellation is possible for a fee of half the remaining balance. For example, if you cancel immediately after the trial period your early cancellation fee will be X/2."
There's plenty of space to feature this explanation prominently. We all know why they don't. It's to trap people.
Many subscription plans work this way but it's no excuse. It's scumbag behavior. The fact that it's so common is just one of the many reasons why I believe the world is run by sociopaths.
Finally a point on which we agree. On average I suspect it is.
Again, this wording seems unnecessarily soft to me - the inclusion of 'may' adds ambiguity to make the user think that there might not be exit fees - it should really be "early cancellation fees will apply".
Better yet, you could give the cost:
"Early cancellation fees of 50% of the remainder of the year will apply".
Early cancellation fees will apply after the trial, is the wording that is the clearest, I guess.
This is a really interesting exploration of word choice though. I must say, I had not considered that the word "annual" could be perceived to be unwieldy in this situation, for example.
How can you misinterpret those words?
They don't explain it because they want everyone to convert, even people who did not understand what they signed up for and would not have signed up if they had understood.
Subscription fee companies have always behaved like this.
Being charitable, I would guess that they don't explain it because it seems like plain language and should be understandable.
These people exist and have made themselves known in the OP Twitter thread and other HN comments on this post.
I can't help but wonder if all this "how can people not understand" is just thinly-veiled contempt for people who don't have the same background or way of thinking or interpreting words as you do.
Who gives a shit about those people, am I right? Who cares if they're on the hook for hundreds they didn't expect to have to pay. Good on Adobe for imposing that stupidity tax on lesser minds than yours!
You're just playing dumb and it's uninteresting and in bad faith, so, bye. Enjoy being baffled about how a giant rich company could possibly be less shitty to their customers.
I'm playing dumb by understanding the sales copy?
And the people who pretend to be dumbfounded by 'annual plan' are the ones who aren't playing dumb?
Come on - people are putting on this outrage. Nobody was seriously confused at what 'annual plan' means. It's the plainest language possible.
If it said "one year", that would match the meaning you have.
Reading the twitter thread it seems to me that you can cancel within 14 days of subscribing without a cancelation fee. See also: https://twitter.com/darkpatterns/status/1489901691151519746
This all seems a bit overwrought. Like the root post, I cannot fathom who would go through a purchase process that included the phrase "Annual plan, billed monthly" and not clue in. Or that that drop down includes a separate straight monthly plan at a significant price premium (50% higher). To give even more of a hint, a separate "you have until this date to cancel without a penalty" disclaimer gives another clue.
On the scale of dark patterns, this one is pretty eh. It clearly could be clearer for people who seem to just click straight through stuff, but I suspect a lot of the people chose the cheaper per month annual plan thinking they were hacking the system, and then discovered that it wasn't all upside.
FWIW (mine is the root post and) I am definitely coming around to the idea that it should at least say "Yearly", and maybe say "in monthly installments", because that language may be more familiar to buyers. But the rest of your point about the other plan you can choose is right.
I don't yet believe Adobe is evil, either. Banal, corporate, plodding, slow-witted, yeah. It is definitely an 800 pound gorilla.
> monopoly
You lost me there. Are you using a different definition of monopoly than the usual one?
They are a monopoly according to the EU definition (which used to be the UK definition; may still be). They control clearly more than 50% of the market; that is enough to attract regulatory scrutiny as a monopoly.
The reality is that a monopoly need not have 100% control of the market. It is more that they have control over some barrier of entry to the market. That, combined with half the market share, is a powerful tool.
In the case of Adobe, as well as market share, they also have de facto control over a set of file formats that the market depends on (the so-called 'industry standard'). And they have a level of product integration/tying in the Creative Suite that could be monopolistic. That limits the competing apps; they cannot together offer a truly competing suite.
Affinity is I think close to rolling back some of Adobe's monopoly power, because the Affinity Suite is so capable, and it might well be in Adobe's interest to allow them to do that; it certainly must help them when they talk to EU regulators.
The real question is whether they are an "abusive" monopoly. And I don't believe they are quite there yet.
There are some hints that they may risk becoming technically abusive but this "dark pattern" ain't one. One such hint is that you can't buy just the two arbitrary apps you want in the suite -- it's either one app, the photography plan, or the lot.
It is certainly the case that any further acquisitions by Adobe could attract monopoly regulation in the EU.
I agree with the rest of your sentiment for the most part. Vote with your feet. Affinity is great, and there are other good alternatives. Most people who are stuck on Photoshop used it when it wasn't as good, you can do the same again
I am saying I do not understand why people don't grasp that "annual plan, billed monthly" means something priced yearly but paid for in monthly pieces.
Not that I think they are dim, but I do want to understand what the comprehension gap is here.
After reading many replies I think that if people are saying that "annual plan" is too ambiguous for anyone with a credit card, then "yearly, billed in monthly instalments after free trial" should do the job. But then I expect we will still see people expecting this means they can cancel after a month. Because the thing is if they say "one year commitment, billed in monthly instalments" that is actually untrue; you can in fact get out before a year is out, it just costs you an early closing penalty.
(I _am_ saying they are dim if they are expecting to game it by cancelling after a month.)
I tried to open a raw image and it didn't seem to process the XMP sidecar file I had alongside it properly. The photo looks quite different from what it looks like in Photoshop. This is despite the fact that I can confirm via Process Monitor that it actually does actually read the XMP file. It just seems to ignore the contents for some reason.
The thing is, XMP is not any kind of independent standard; it's largely a set of instructions specific to Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop. I do think we should expect them ultimately to be able to interpret most of it, and I half expect them to support XMP in their eventual DAM product as one sidecar type, (which is why I think there is probably code in Photo that is ready to read it) but they don't commit to it yet.
I must say that if I process a raw file in one package then open it up in a competitor's raw processing package, I expect the second to ignore the work of the first
The main thing that the suite really can't do is a Bridge-type function, though.