> A person making an automatic renewal or continuous service offer to a consumer must provide the consumer with the option to cancel at any time using a simple cancellation mechanism that is as easy to use as the mechanism that the consumer used to provide consent and that is through the same medium that the consumer used to provide consent
So if a startup lets someone sign up using Stripe, for example, does this mean that they need to have a way to unsubscribe that is as easy as Stripe? Lots of companies have a way to unsubscribe electronically, but it requires logging in to your account, going into settings, saying you want to unsub, and possibly declining various offers to stay.
Surely at some point a company could cross the line of "a simple cancellation mechanism that is as easy to use as the mechanism the consumer used to provide consent". But where is the line exactly? Surely you don't have to have a big red cancel button on every page of your platform, but at the same time surely it can't be hidden 8 levels down in the settings.
Some examples would be helpful to let businesses and consumers know what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.
Maybe those people who’ve spent so much time A/B testing where to put the signup buttons can use those skills to figure out where to put the cancel buttons so that they are as easy to find.
Worse. We are going to see signup flows that are initially simple but take the user through several steps to do it but not in a way to make them abandon the process.
In my country the rule is "unsubscribe the same way you subscribed". So no bullshit with having to write a literal physical letter through the mail (yes really this happened) or having to call a callcenter in India and having to explain why you want to your stop subscription.
I don’t think anyone will have trouble figuring out a good way to comply with this. It’s not clear exactly where the line is, so just don’t go near it. Make it easy to cancel, job done. If a company wants to push the boundaries by making it as difficult to cancel as the rule allows, they’re running the risk of being on the wrong side of the line and suffering the consequences, and that’s their choice.
The only reason any company would have trouble complying with this rule is if they want to abuse customers to keep them from canceling when they want to cancel. The amount of sympathy I have towards such companies requires advanced scientific notation to quantify.
> ...and possibly declining various offers to stay
Unless there were several efforts to get you to think twice before subscribing, clearly trying to get you to think twice before unsubscribing is not as easy to use.
This is what courts are for. It's a case by case basis sort of thing.
Surely you don't have to have a big red cancel button on every page of your platform
Why not?
Some examples would be helpful
The text you quoted is clear enough to me, and it's probably clear to any reasonable person (most rules are written this way). If you're worried about gaming the system to find the exact process that just on the "legal" side of things, you probably aren't reasonable.
Ya, a reasonable interpretation would likely mean that where you sign in and manage your accounts and payments you have the means to discontinue further service. Anyone trying to push these boundaries will likley find themselves on the wrong side of the law.
well we have done it before, cookie banners. Notwithstanding that a users software running on their system (ostensibly a web client), chooses to store cookies, which are not in fact edible... now we have to suffer through it.
> This is what courts are for. There is no exact line because many situations are different.
So now you’ve opened a bunch of businesses up to liability from an upset customer who files a complaint, even if they are making a good faith effort to follow this law.
That is why clear and specific details should be in the law, not vague hand wavy things that require lawyers and judges to interpret.
What does malicious compliance mean to you? I've heard it used, but never in a way that makes sense in this context. If they had examples, it would be clearer what the intent was, and businesses would be able to be held the appropriate standard. As it stands, I can't figure out if many of the businesses I deal with are in compliance, and anyone who claims to know is naive, or simply hasn't read the rule closely.
Complying in a way that follows the letter of the law, while clearly contradicting the spirit.
For example, finding a loophole to keep it difficult unsubscribe. Or making it easy to unsubscribe, but adding an egregious cancellation fee to all subscriptions.
Or when NYC passed minimum pay laws for delivery drivers, and the delivery companies hid the normal tip screen behind a bunch of submenus (until eventually forced to change it back).
The last thing I'd want is to have to end up in court in NY to figure out what is or is not in compliance with this law. They should include examples, like many regulations do. We don't need more lawsuits for laws that could have been clarified in the first place.
They did include examples. The city’s own website has a dedicated page describing the rule with a multitude of examples[0]. What exactly do you think is missing?
> - You were not clearly told the terms of the subscription.
- It was hard to cancel the subscription. For example, you signed up online, but were forced to cancel your subscription on the phone, in person, or another way.
- The business delayed canceling your subscription
Heres what you should do to be safe.
On the user's settings/profile/whatever user page you have, add a cancel button. When the user clicks it say "are you sure? Yes/no". If the user clicks yes, cancel the account.
I've seen people count clicks and complain that is not as easy as signup.
To signup they just went to foo.com and there was list of plans with links to their sign up pages right there, so click one of those, fill out the one page form, click submit.
To cancel, they have to go to foo.com, click the login link, full in the login form, click to submit, then on their home page click on the profile icon to get the profile menu, click account in that menu, and then click the cancel button on the account page.
That's 2 clicks to sign up and 5 to cancel--6 if the cancel button asks if you are sure.
This is exactly my point. It's never going to be as easy to cancel as to sign up because signing up just requires entering cc details. Canceling requires authentication to an account to ensure that the one being canceled belongs to you, and of course finding the settings and the place where the subscription is modified. That's always going to be more clicks than landing on startup.com's website, clicking sign up now, and entering your cc details.
You skipped over the part where the cancel button isn't on the front page of literally any website. It's somewhere in account/settings/subscription/edit. No word if this is allowed under NYC's desired regime. I don't have a lot of faith in their reasonableness, considering the politicians that are getting elected there these days.
Find me one web site that lets you sign up in one click.
Plenty of sites have a sign up button on the front page. That's going to take you to a form where you create an account and put in payment info. It's inherently a multi-step process since it requires multiple pieces of info.
Many companies currently require that you call in person - during business hours only - to cancel, wait half an hour (or more) on hold to speak with a person who will get fired if too many customers successfully unsub.
Adobe's call centers have a script where they offer some "bargain" deal if you don't cancel which converts your for-real-monthly-with-no-cancellation-penalty subscription into one that has an annual requirement and a "cancellation fee" that is in effect the rest of the year's subscription charge.
I like Sirius XM’s handling - I submitted a cancellation, they offer me a year for the price of a month, I accepted. I don’t know if it will happen again, but it isn’t worth more to me.
> Lots of companies have a way to unsubscribe electronically, but it requires logging in to your account, going into settings, saying you want to unsub, and possibly declining various offers to stay.
My local paper on the west coast is owned now by USA Today. They often have specials (digital edition for $8 for only 6 months) sales. Takes a CC, and a few clicks. If you go past that time, you get switched to the $15/month subscription.
But to cancel the digital version of the local paper, I have to call customer service, that is based out of the east coast, that seems to be open from 9-4 east coast time. And then of course, they try to get me to change my mind, bargain with me, etc.
its bad enough, last time I used privacy.com, and set a max limit, and just ignored their emails about my card declining. and they are ALMOST as bad a cirrusXM was when our free trial with a new car was expiring.
It’s an easy rule to comply with and nothing stops you from complying with it everywhere.
We will see a patchwork regime, where companies make it easy to cancel if you’re in NYC or another jurisdiction with similar rules, but difficult otherwise. When you see this, you must remember that the easiest thing would have been to make it easy for everyone to cancel regardless of location. That would be perfectly legal and it would be the cheapest option to build. If a company didn’t do that it’s because they made a deliberate choice to spend more money just so they could continue screwing some people over.
Alternatively, let people cancel easily everywhere. If you think it’s worth the extra revenue to geofence easy cancellations, then—well, you do you, but you are making a business judgment that the additional development cost is justified. This is different from VAT/sales tax etc., where it is in fact impossible to comply everywhere without discriminating by jurisdiction.
Worse by following NYC laws and putting everyone else in a different harder to get away from bucket you may be setting yourself up for future legal problems. You now have a chain of documentation on your evil practices rather than them just being a norm you may have verbally agreed on before.
> While I think this is a good idea, we already have so many different regions to comply with, now we're adding cities....
Lina Khan's FTC passed a rule to make click-to-cancel nationwide in 2024.
It was killed on procedural grounds by the highly conservative Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The take-away from how it was killed boils down to "we (companies) know that we'd lose more than $100 million dollars if people could reasonably unsubscribe rather than deal with our dark patterns".
The old FTC would have been able to fix the procedural problem, but then Trump took office and gutted the FTC and destroyed all the good work it was doing.
Since the federal government is failing us, I support local governments doing the right thing. If enough do, companies will eventually be forced into compliance nationally because it won't be worth the complexity to have regional carve-outs.
You can't seriously think this makes you sound like a sympathetic party, right? "Oh no, we have to maintain two codepaths now: the pro-social one for places with functional governments, and the slimy anti-consumer fuck-you one for everywhere else. Won't anyone think of our plight?"
I imagine both states would end up with single-payer healthcare pretty quickly, and both already have GDP greater than all but 3 EU countries... what exactly would the EU bring to the table?
It seems like a good rule, and I am eager to see what NYC’s enforcement is going to look like. I have historically been disappointed (as a life-long resident) by the discontinuity between the city’s eagerness to legislate and its recalcitrance around enforcement, particularly when public interest in any given topic fades.
(Compare the city’s historic problems around preventing illegal de-stabilization of rental units, inability to prevent the NYPD from parking on sidewalks, and so forth.)
I would settle for a bit of towing, or even just fining the individual cops who park their personal cars on the sidewalk. Parking of city-owned vehicles is also a problem, but the former seems easier to enforce per your point.
Parking enforcement in NYC is currently also handled by the sanitation department. They can and do ticket cars blocking street cleaning operations, which parked personally-owned vehicles of cops do interfere with.
I'd love to see a division of DOT have a bounty program for illegal parking. They do it for idling trucks, why not do it for vehicles parked in bike lanes/illegal double parking/etc?
It only works for idling trucks because the person letting the truck idle is almost never the owner and the person idling the truck is usually doing work so they're not around to notice they're being reported.
If you open up the floodgates of anyone v anyone that generic parking enforcement entails I give it about a week before some "super reporter" gets curb stomped by an uber driver who's having a bad day. And then you'll have public scrutiny, the tough question that come with that and the entire program is likely to be walked back as a result.
Not a NYC-only problem though. There are tons of federal, state, and local laws that go under-enforced or unenforced. Legislators love the performance art of writing these kinds of popular laws, but law enforcement often doesn't care enough to enforce most of them. In this case, the website says the penalty is "starting at $525" which is basically nothing to a corporation, and nothing to the police/government. So you can file a complaint but it will probably go to /dev/null. After a year of this people will give up on even filing complaints.
What needs to happen for rules like this is: 1. the complaint should be easy/automatic to validate and rule on, 2. hard for the company to appeal and stonewall, and 3. the fine money should go to the person who filed the complaint as a bounty to motivate people to look for violators.
It's not clear why enforcement would be needed necessarily.
Assuming that you pay with a credit card, I would assume you could dispute the charge on the basis that they're violating the law and win any faceoff immediately on that basis.
If the business simply doesn't offer click-to-cancel, so you haven't actually canceled your subscription, how could you successfully claim the payment was made fraudulently? The law doesn't mandate that you can unilaterally exit any agreement, it mandates that businesses have to offer an easy way for you to do so.
The example of a yearly subscription paid monthly should make this obvious. You can't exit this arrangement after 6 months and expect to simply not pay the remaining 6 months, as the contract was for a whole year. All this law does is force the business to make it easy for you to cancel any auto-renew for a second year. But if the business doesn't do that and you dispute a payment, how hard do you expect your bank to work to figure out if this payment was for a part of the original contract, or for an auto-renewal you should have been able to easily canceled, but haven't?
Have you ever actually submitted a credit card dispute? It's like a little miniature arbitration. You can submit whatever documents and justification you want.
My point would be that the argument would be clear. It stands to reason that a business cannot consider an unlawfully collected payment to be legitimate. If you can demonstrate that you attempted to give them notice of cancellation and they ignored it unlawfully, then that's your justification that the payment wasn't authorized. You can, of course, revoke authorization to collect payment anytime you want.
This is a really common kind of dispute that businesses have with credit card users. Typically, their response is that the user did, in fact, authorize it because they agreed to a variety of terms that mandated this and that for cancellation, and so on and so forth. In essence, if they can get the user to admit that they gave the original authorization, their argument would be that it was never withdrawn because the user previously agreed to some T&C buried definition of how cancellation would be defined.
The counter to that, of course, now, is new, which is to say that those terms are unlawful and thus negated. It seems completely sound to me as a strategy.
By my understanding, the new law says "a business must offer a way to cancel a subscription that is at least as simple as creating the subscription, and in the same medium".
However, if a business fails to do so, and the only way they have to cancel your subscription is via, say, a notarized letter, I don't see how you can convince your bank that you tried to unsubscribe unless you have sent such a notarized letter.
That's not how the burden of proof works. In a credit card dispute the merchant needs to have there be no ambiguity that you did, in fact, authorize the transfer of money to their account and that the authorization is still in effect. The absence of evidence means you win.
Typically, the way it would work is that they would say, "You authorized it," and you would say, "Actually, I didn't authorize that payment. I only authorized the prior payments. I never authorized the subsequent ones because I logged in to their site and attempted to cancel, but they did not provide me with a means to do so."
To which they could say no your initial authorization should also apply to these subsequent charges because that cancellation method is not one we accept. In the past, that defense could work. Your NEW counterargument would be: Sorry, but they cannot rely on and profit from unlawful behavior.
Their part of the proof is simple - they can prove that you signed a contract to receive service. They keep offering this service. It's then up to you to claim that you attempted to resign from this contract. How would you prove this? It is you who are claiming you attempted to close the contract.
The contract as you signed it might well contain a clause that explicitly says you have to perform arcane rituals to stop the subscription: now you have to have the bank analyze the law in your place of residence on whether the contract itself might be illegal. I do not live in the USA and don't have experience with the credit card dispute system, but I personally doubt that this level of legal analysis would be performed by the bank for your, free of charge even.
I have no doubt that you would win this in court, by the way.
Surely we agree that clicking to cancel will not produce cash in your hands, and that, by definition, you physically were in a location when you paid the cash, and going back there to collect the cash is no longer unreasonable.
> the discontinuity between the city’s eagerness to legislate and its recalcitrance around enforcement
For consumer-corporate disputes, learning to leverage New York's regulatory state is a bit of a superpower. Basically, sending in a written complaint with the regulator copied and then having them open a regulatory-investigatory file is real leverage because even if you're full of shit, it's going to burn legal dollars on the other side. That, in turn, makes a letter to the company threatening regulatory escalation as the next step land seriously.
One abstract idea is to convert every digital event into a hook. The hook then goes into a local LLM that has a rule to figure out what to do with it. I use DDG or mozilla email aliases as much as I can. All my emails go to a local email client and for the non-spam classified mails I have a few rules(**) I am toying with right now:
1. If non-money sub, categorize its content and create a P1 watch event and a set of follow up actions.
2. If its a money/trial sub, create a P0 watch event and its own set of followup actions.
All watch events are queued for me by priority where i ask on the weekend: "Tell me P0 events", it then asks me what action. The ergonomic factor here is I the human can tune this valve on the information hose. There is also a dashboard for P0 notifications and an android push notification that notifies me of P0 events, but they aren't "consumed" until i decide. There are tons of places this can be useful: make progress on non-work related todos, systematic investment, writing year-end reviews.
None of this is rocket science.
**Local service webhooks are the key: Every web-hook has some kind of decision maker in it - an LLM + deterministic logic.
Look out for the "Digital Fairness Act", which will be tabled by the European Commission in November. It is expected to include the same "Click to Cancel" principle continent-wide.
Source: I'm an EU digital policy analyst in Brussels.
Yes tabled means the opposite on either side of the Atlantic. Has caused me a lot of confusion over the years. Personally as a Brit I just can’t see the logic in the US meaning
As an American, I can't see the logic in having the relationship between a proposal (which is an idea that may be embodied in documentation) and a table (which is a thing that we rest our beer upon) as having any importance at all -- regardless of which way it goes.
It seems like plain speech could be used, but this profoundly-irrational jargon was selected instead.
I think in the UK sense 'tabled' is borne out of a pretty literal meaning - based on the proposal literally being brought to the table where the committee are meeting to assess (and potentially vote) on its viability.
Yeah, perhaps. But the table also has all kinds of other things on and around it. Random papers of varying importance, microphones, Representative Smith's porn phone with the privacy filter, and maybe a ham sandwich.
A table (if there even is one present at all) seems like about the least important part of a group discussion of an idea.
it's the item of furniture that everyone is sitting round. the fact that people might put other things on it is about as relevant as asking why one particular person is called the Chair when everyone is seated, or why it's a conference room when the cleaners happen to also do hoovering in there.
I think it (The US version) means putting papers from my hands because I'm discussing them back down on the table surface where they will rest with my other notes.
In contrast to the UK meaning which seems to be to take the topic from a briefcase under the table and place it for discussion on the table in front of everyone.
The US sense came about from the sense of "I'm setting this on the table while we discuss other things". The meaning then evolved a bit of sarcasm with "while we do other things", starting to mean "forever". I do agree that the UK meaning makes more sense though.
Does "all but" always mean "nearly"? I've been conversing in English for 20 years now but this one eluded me.
I guess I am just unable to parse the words to piece together such a meaning. In my mind, there are two ways to interpret it: "this subject may be all kinds of things, but one thing it is not" (all but = everything except), or the opposite "this subject may be all kinds of things, but one thing it is for sure". And neither of these means "nearly" :(
Yes. I think the idea is that on the path of events or actions between the starting point and the target, you have already completed every single one, and all that remains now is the final step before you can call it done.
You've walked all but the last step of the journey.
Funny, I noted that one but in the opposite direction. In North America I've never heard it used in anything but a casual sense. An unserious activity.
This looks really great, thank you for your work! However, "Entry into force" really is expected only around 2030? I'm not even sure most people will be consuming the internet using a browser then. It's sad to see that a process like this, which is very much needed, starts at 2020 and ends 10 years later. Clearly not your fault, but I'm just a little shocked.
What's the justification for the phone or chat cancellation anyway? I get why they do it to make more money but it seems like it would be kind of nakedly extractive to explain the policy to anyone.
This is the solution to all the "oh no it's soooo hard to comply with all the protections" bullshit that MBA types bellyache about. The only reason complying is difficult is because you are trying to do just as much evil shit as you can get away with. If you just switch to the honest, upstanding approach, you won't need to work as hard to try and figure out where the line is.
It might seem this way because he is showing off his wins on different channels. In terms of passing policy its not different than other mayors. Maybe you think the policy is good and the other mayors policy was bad and thats the gap.
After 911, all he talked about was 911 and how he was in charge when that happened. Then, when Trump got into office, if you wanted a presidential pardon, you paid Giuliani $2,000,000 for one.
I get that people are excited about Mamdani, but the internet is really overselling his successes. New York state already has an automatic renewal law: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/GBS/527-A . The NYC version reuses much of that law's text!
This is a consistent pattern. I've seen people praise the use of snow melters (they use them most blizzards), praise him for switching to garbage bins (the decision to switch happened under Adams), praise him for putting his desk backwards to send a message (the desk was not backwards, it just has drawers on both sides), etc.
He seems like a decent mayor, but there are a lot of overeager boosters who have warped him into some miracle maker.
you're kinda cherry picking minor accomplishments here. There are things like the doordash settlement, public toilets, rent freeze, childcare funding that are unprecedented.
I agree on all points. His social media team is arguably the best of all previous mayors, and I think that's largely why we're seeing people praising him for things he didn't actually do. He is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and DSA members are *HEAVY* social media users, so they tend to give him a lot of praise because he's on their team.
To be fair, Bloomberg and De Blasio held a lot of press conferences which is fine for people over 40 years old. The secret sauce of Mamdani is creating viral content on social media that hits well with people under 40 years old. Did you see the YouTube video[1] where he was a phone operator for 311? It is so raw and funny. It hard not to be enthusiastic about a mayor (leader) like that.
The previous mayors were doing lots. Just ask any LLM for a list of their major accomplishments.
Michael Bloomberg launched NYC311 in 2003. 311 has fielded millions of calls in the last twenty years. A huge part of 311 is being able to report quality of life issues. Plus Bloomberg made it easier to build, which unleashed a massive development wave in Manhattan and Brooklyn. More homes to house people, and more offices to grow the economy.
Bill de Blasio started Universal Pre-Kindergarten and reduced Stop-and-Frisk by 90%.
Eric Adams was a doofus and will soon be forgotten.
This will have no impact on Adobe's shenanigans. They offer click-to-cancel, but then charge a cancellation fee equal to what you would have paid for the rest of the one-year term. Their clever justification is that you received a significant discount for committing to a year, so you still owe them for the remaining months if you cancel early. I didn't even realize I had signed up for a one-year commitment. I'm not sure where they buried that clause.
I expect more businesses will transition to this strategy to counter NYC's new rule. They won't necessarily lower the price, but you will have to sign up for a one-year term, then they will hit you with a massive cancellation fee if you "click to cancel".
Another way it would help is making it easier for users to analyse the T&Cs they are signing up for.
Most people aren't well versed in reading T&Cs and whilst LLMs won't do a perfect job, they would likely do a decent job at assessing and highlighting potentially unfriendly clauses such as this.
I've been using Claude in what I call iKaren mode. Basically, all the little complaints where I know I'm in the right against a large corporate other but don't want to get emotionally invested into a petty dispute go to it.
I recently had a room in Milan where they were rude at the rooftop–I was ignored after being seated for thirty minutes–and then refused to enable A/C (which they could do remotely) until I called twice, finally yielding at 1AM. I had a terrible night's rest and, resultantly, difficult day of travel the next day. It was a single night at an expensive hotel–I'd ordinarily ignore it.
This time, I passed my booking details and a short blurb to Claude. Between the flight and ferry to my next destination, it negotiated first, a night's free stay (which I rejected) and then a 25% reïmbursement.
(Granted, OP might be imagining that one can replicate everything one does with Adobe's software with an image-generating AI. Which one might be able to. But it's not going to be cost competitive with anything Adobe offers for at least half a decade given current power- and chip-buildout schedules.)
In addition to disrupting big software that’s now easy to clone, AI makes it easy to be very persistent as a dissatisfied customer.
I never used to bother with asking for discounts and refunds because of the hassle. Now when Instacart delivers crappy produce or the heat press controller tracks to a different temp than a thermometer shows, I just have Claude deal with opening, tracking, responding to support.
> Companies that are user-hostile have no place in the future.
All I can think of reading this is that bit from Futurama when Bender goes: AHAHAHHAAHAHAHAHA. Oh wait you're serious. Let me laugh even harder.
Yeah we've had near four decades of massive expansion of software, free and not, and AI is definitely what's going to finally make it so companies can't be user hostile. That was what we were missing. 100%.
Dreams are one thing. People here are tired of fantasies and wishful thinking. Looking at the problem here - Adobe treating customers like crap and exploiting them - most of us realize that the solution is simply regulation. Leveraging the power of society and government to force the company to behave properly.
Gesturing at LLMs and going “this and the free market will fix it” is laughably naive, especially in 2026. That is why people are reacting harshly. This is a problem that was created by the free market, it’s not magically going to be fixed by some new product.
You're being downvoted, perhaps, for throwing out a generic deus ex AI. I flagged for the "comment[ing] about the voting on comments" [1]. Happy to undo if fixed.
Btw its likely still possible to change subscription with Adobe to different one and then cancel it free of charge due to new 14-days window. Not sure if it works right now, but worked like charm before.
It's worth than that. They don't even offer a monthly subscription contract - it's purely annual, but they advertise and promote monthly with fine print.
Yes they do, but they hide it. On the plans page,[0] if you click "see all plans", a true monthly subscription option appears. But the prices are unreasonably large to force you into the "annual, billed monthly" trick. For example, the full creative suite (Creative Cloud Pro) is $35 "a month" with the annual contract, or... $105 on a monthly contract!
They've always billed monthly, but the thing they got in trouble for was that it was attached to a 1-year commit where customers were getting hit with early termination fees pro-rated to the rest of the contract. If they did offer this it was hidden deep in the sign-up flow enough that they lost a lawsuit over it.
If you actually ask them and push a little they’ll forgo that fee. Disclaimer: Adobe is the worst and can’t wait to see them crumble. If Intuit could also go…
Second this. FreeTaxUSA is great. Better interface, lower cost (truly free for federal, no catch). And coding harnesses are very good at handling taxes as well as a cross-check.
Freetaxusa still can’t import many and various investment account forms. Sadly It’s still worth paying a little to TurboTax so I folding have to manually input all my betterment , etfs, etc
> you received a significant discount for committing to a year, so you still owe them for the remaining months if you cancel early. I didn't even realize I had signed up for a one-year commitment
Does this law apply retroactively?
You wouldn't have a claim under the "straightforward cancellation process" part–same way this law doesn't enable one to walk away from a long-term lease for shits and giggles. But you may under the "clearly explain subscription terms to you" bit.
Rare to have these laws apply retroactively. The costs will probably be explained very clearly with the usual "take the 1 year discount". People look at the final price and ignore the implications.
I bet going forward everyone will prominently implement a fake massive discount or waive a fake one time fee when signing up just to have something to claw back if you ever want to cancel.
P.S. Just checked Adobe's site from the EU, prominently displays a "Save 50%" badge and a crossed out original price with the discounted price next to it. There's also a link to the cancellation policy which tells you exactly what to expect for a refund. The cancellation process itself looks 1-click. Hard to claim misinformation.
This reminds me of the ISPs where the technician would insist to plug in your internet cable and a "check" that took all of 5s but was billed heavily in a waived one time fee. When you wanted to cancel the contract they'd ask for that fee back.
They're building a free, open-source Adobe Creative Suite alternative entirely in Rust. It runs super fast with minimal overhead, works completely offline, and aims for near 1:1 feature parity with Adobe products like Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and After Effects. It also supports command-based actions, making it easy to integrate into AI agents and automated workflows. They have Microsoft Office alternatives too.
Canva now owns Affinity. So regardless of the answer to that question, more options are nice. I have 0 faith that Canva will be good stewards of Affinitys original mission, despite making all of the Affinity products free (for now)
They're already proving not to be good stewards, as Affinity now got compressed into one app, AFAIK it's still lacking 100% feature parity with the original ones, and it being free is just a vehicle to make you sign up for an account, and to continuously show you upsells for the cloud subscription, right there in the UI, with the growing amount of "pro" features only available on paid subscription tiers.
I have no doubt that they will eventually enshittify Affinity, but combining the three apps into one was, imo, a good move. The suite was clearly meant to be one app from the start, but was sold as three separate apps for commercial reasons.
All three original apps contained each other's functionality. As a result, the new combined app is barely larger than one of the three previous apps, and switching between the modes is now much more convenient and has a better UX.
That's terrible news. I only use photo-editing software to lay stuff out for print once in a while, so hopefully I can get away without upgrading indefinitely.
Fort all of Adobe's faults, Photoshop and other offerings are products, with support timelines, features added etc. [1] This so far is "let me vibe-code some thing with no intention of maintaining it further".
[1] And there are others competing as well. From opensource like Gimp to Affinity Design, Pixelmator etc.
Could not disagree more. Ask anyone art inclined, anyone at all, and they will lay upon you their passionate hatred for Adobe and all it stands for. That Adobe continues to exist is only thanks to the billions it accrued from past good will that they have long since burned.
Probably not, as projects like this have a tendency to die off once the initial excitement wears off and it becomes hard to find contributors who want to work on an all LLM generated codebase.
Linus Tech Tups tested this and determined that it's nowhere near ready for professional use. It's good enough, or even great, for amateur stuff though, so it has it's place. However, that won't even make a dent in Adobe's books, since the vase majority of their licenses go to professionals.
If you buy an annual subscription of course you have to pay for the whole year. They offer a monthly subscription for people who don't want to lock in for such a long time.
No, while they've been deceptive with how the "annual, billed monthly" plans were advertised — and previously without clear disclosure of the cancellation fee of 50% of the remaining annual commitment — they've always had monthly plans. It's just that the true monthly plans were 3x to 4x the price of the "annual, billed monthly" plans, which was ridiculous and intended to discourage people from going for those plans. I've been an Adobe CC subscriber for more than a decade. The only thing that keeps me with them is that Photoshop has no real alternative that's equally powerful. Hate the company but let's get our facts right.
But nobody wants to take personal responsibility for consciously choosing the cheaper monthly option. It comes with the annual commitment, as opposed to the more expensive monthly option that does not have the annual commitment.
I have zero love for Adobe, but at the same time in this particular case it really is people wanting to have their cake and eat it too. They want the cheapest monthly price, but also the ability to cancel.
If you think you might need to cancel, that's what the monthly option is for.
If they offer you two prices, one month to month and and other for 1 year, and the 1 year is discounted, I would think that the 1 year one is a commitment. Is this not the case? Why would they offer a discount compared to the month to month if there is no difference as to whether you can cancel?
As for why they would set things up like this? Who the frak knows? Pricing tiers is literally the primary means of legally scamming people. The only logic it follows is that people who believe it does follow obvious logic are easier to scam.
Adobe offers 3 payment options. A yearly payment upfront, a monthly payment, or a monthly payment with a year long commitment. OP was on the monthly plan with a year long commitment.
This is a very bad thing and very, very scary. Very anti-capitalist. My KPIs that go into my annual review are going to be thrashed, and without the raise I was expecting, I am unlikely to be able to continue to afford my second family. This is literally going to take food out of their mouths. I do not deserve this.
I think it's obnoxious that you can't send a cancellation request through your credit card company's website.
Just find the charge, click the "I want to cancel the service that caused this charge". The merchant has to either cancel or reply with a message clearly explaining why they can't do that (i.e. you agreed to a 12-month minimum).
Whoever is collecting the money has all the information needed to make the cancellation request. No website logins, passwords, self-addressed stamped envelope, etc.
Apple has done this for subscriptions that collect money through the iTunes store. It's awesome.
AmEx should do this because unlike all the other cards they control the whole stack.
Wait but you can right? I've definitely stop paying services in the past like that. They usually send you to collection, and then one day they just stop sending you mail.
You can open a chargeback dispute. But you have to send documentation. And your credit card company requires that you contact the merchant out-of-band first... which is the thing we shouldn't have to do.
Opening a dispute is like stopping payment on a check. It's refusing to pay, not asking to cancel.
I spent hours trying to cancel some services with legalzoom last month, they clearly go through every shady tactics in the book to prevent you from cancelling, these companies are horrendous and this needs to be enacted as a national law
California has had this for a while, and it's a pretty good feature. Until then it was a nightmare to unsubscribe from newspapers like the WSJ or the NYT. Now (well, for a few years now) it's trivial. Hopefully this will be federally available in the next few years.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 97.6 ms ] threadSo if a startup lets someone sign up using Stripe, for example, does this mean that they need to have a way to unsubscribe that is as easy as Stripe? Lots of companies have a way to unsubscribe electronically, but it requires logging in to your account, going into settings, saying you want to unsub, and possibly declining various offers to stay.
Surely at some point a company could cross the line of "a simple cancellation mechanism that is as easy to use as the mechanism the consumer used to provide consent". But where is the line exactly? Surely you don't have to have a big red cancel button on every page of your platform, but at the same time surely it can't be hidden 8 levels down in the settings.
Some examples would be helpful to let businesses and consumers know what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.
The only reason any company would have trouble complying with this rule is if they want to abuse customers to keep them from canceling when they want to cancel. The amount of sympathy I have towards such companies requires advanced scientific notation to quantify.
Unless there were several efforts to get you to think twice before subscribing, clearly trying to get you to think twice before unsubscribing is not as easy to use.
This is what courts are for. It's a case by case basis sort of thing.
Surely you don't have to have a big red cancel button on every page of your platform
Why not?
Some examples would be helpful
The text you quoted is clear enough to me, and it's probably clear to any reasonable person (most rules are written this way). If you're worried about gaming the system to find the exact process that just on the "legal" side of things, you probably aren't reasonable.
So now you’ve opened a bunch of businesses up to liability from an upset customer who files a complaint, even if they are making a good faith effort to follow this law.
That is why clear and specific details should be in the law, not vague hand wavy things that require lawyers and judges to interpret.
For example, finding a loophole to keep it difficult unsubscribe. Or making it easy to unsubscribe, but adding an egregious cancellation fee to all subscriptions.
Or when NYC passed minimum pay laws for delivery drivers, and the delivery companies hid the normal tip screen behind a bunch of submenus (until eventually forced to change it back).
What about the rule is ambiguous to you?
> - You were not clearly told the terms of the subscription.
- It was hard to cancel the subscription. For example, you signed up online, but were forced to cancel your subscription on the phone, in person, or another way.
- The business delayed canceling your subscription
...
[0] https://www.nyc.gov/main/click-to-cancel
No extra hoops at all.
To signup they just went to foo.com and there was list of plans with links to their sign up pages right there, so click one of those, fill out the one page form, click submit.
To cancel, they have to go to foo.com, click the login link, full in the login form, click to submit, then on their home page click on the profile icon to get the profile menu, click account in that menu, and then click the cancel button on the account page.
That's 2 clicks to sign up and 5 to cancel--6 if the cancel button asks if you are sure.
To cancel: enter your email and password, cancel.
What am I missing?
Plenty of sites have a sign up button on the front page. That's going to take you to a form where you create an account and put in payment info. It's inherently a multi-step process since it requires multiple pieces of info.
Adobe's call centers have a script where they offer some "bargain" deal if you don't cancel which converts your for-real-monthly-with-no-cancellation-penalty subscription into one that has an annual requirement and a "cancellation fee" that is in effect the rest of the year's subscription charge.
My local paper on the west coast is owned now by USA Today. They often have specials (digital edition for $8 for only 6 months) sales. Takes a CC, and a few clicks. If you go past that time, you get switched to the $15/month subscription.
But to cancel the digital version of the local paper, I have to call customer service, that is based out of the east coast, that seems to be open from 9-4 east coast time. And then of course, they try to get me to change my mind, bargain with me, etc.
its bad enough, last time I used privacy.com, and set a max limit, and just ignored their emails about my card declining. and they are ALMOST as bad a cirrusXM was when our free trial with a new car was expiring.
New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48863464
So close yet so far
We will see a patchwork regime, where companies make it easy to cancel if you’re in NYC or another jurisdiction with similar rules, but difficult otherwise. When you see this, you must remember that the easiest thing would have been to make it easy for everyone to cancel regardless of location. That would be perfectly legal and it would be the cheapest option to build. If a company didn’t do that it’s because they made a deliberate choice to spend more money just so they could continue screwing some people over.
Then again, the lobbying and resistance from Chrome must be unreal because it would be pretty huge blow for them to enable such setting.
Lina Khan's FTC passed a rule to make click-to-cancel nationwide in 2024.
It was killed on procedural grounds by the highly conservative Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The take-away from how it was killed boils down to "we (companies) know that we'd lose more than $100 million dollars if people could reasonably unsubscribe rather than deal with our dark patterns".
The old FTC would have been able to fix the procedural problem, but then Trump took office and gutted the FTC and destroyed all the good work it was doing.
Since the federal government is failing us, I support local governments doing the right thing. If enough do, companies will eventually be forced into compliance nationally because it won't be worth the complexity to have regional carve-outs.
So I provided a fake address in California, and it was done.
Unfortunately that's how things work these days sometimes.
(Compare the city’s historic problems around preventing illegal de-stabilization of rental units, inability to prevent the NYPD from parking on sidewalks, and so forth.)
This is why the sidewalks next to city parks take forever to get shoveled after a big snow storm.
If you open up the floodgates of anyone v anyone that generic parking enforcement entails I give it about a week before some "super reporter" gets curb stomped by an uber driver who's having a bad day. And then you'll have public scrutiny, the tough question that come with that and the entire program is likely to be walked back as a result.
Failing to provide salary transparency in job postings is another common one with zero enforcement.
What needs to happen for rules like this is: 1. the complaint should be easy/automatic to validate and rule on, 2. hard for the company to appeal and stonewall, and 3. the fine money should go to the person who filed the complaint as a bounty to motivate people to look for violators.
Assuming that you pay with a credit card, I would assume you could dispute the charge on the basis that they're violating the law and win any faceoff immediately on that basis.
The example of a yearly subscription paid monthly should make this obvious. You can't exit this arrangement after 6 months and expect to simply not pay the remaining 6 months, as the contract was for a whole year. All this law does is force the business to make it easy for you to cancel any auto-renew for a second year. But if the business doesn't do that and you dispute a payment, how hard do you expect your bank to work to figure out if this payment was for a part of the original contract, or for an auto-renewal you should have been able to easily canceled, but haven't?
My point would be that the argument would be clear. It stands to reason that a business cannot consider an unlawfully collected payment to be legitimate. If you can demonstrate that you attempted to give them notice of cancellation and they ignored it unlawfully, then that's your justification that the payment wasn't authorized. You can, of course, revoke authorization to collect payment anytime you want.
This is a really common kind of dispute that businesses have with credit card users. Typically, their response is that the user did, in fact, authorize it because they agreed to a variety of terms that mandated this and that for cancellation, and so on and so forth. In essence, if they can get the user to admit that they gave the original authorization, their argument would be that it was never withdrawn because the user previously agreed to some T&C buried definition of how cancellation would be defined.
The counter to that, of course, now, is new, which is to say that those terms are unlawful and thus negated. It seems completely sound to me as a strategy.
However, if a business fails to do so, and the only way they have to cancel your subscription is via, say, a notarized letter, I don't see how you can convince your bank that you tried to unsubscribe unless you have sent such a notarized letter.
Typically, the way it would work is that they would say, "You authorized it," and you would say, "Actually, I didn't authorize that payment. I only authorized the prior payments. I never authorized the subsequent ones because I logged in to their site and attempted to cancel, but they did not provide me with a means to do so."
To which they could say no your initial authorization should also apply to these subsequent charges because that cancellation method is not one we accept. In the past, that defense could work. Your NEW counterargument would be: Sorry, but they cannot rely on and profit from unlawful behavior.
The contract as you signed it might well contain a clause that explicitly says you have to perform arcane rituals to stop the subscription: now you have to have the bank analyze the law in your place of residence on whether the contract itself might be illegal. I do not live in the USA and don't have experience with the credit card dispute system, but I personally doubt that this level of legal analysis would be performed by the bank for your, free of charge even.
I have no doubt that you would win this in court, by the way.
Obviously.
For consumer-corporate disputes, learning to leverage New York's regulatory state is a bit of a superpower. Basically, sending in a written complaint with the regulator copied and then having them open a regulatory-investigatory file is real leverage because even if you're full of shit, it's going to burn legal dollars on the other side. That, in turn, makes a letter to the company threatening regulatory escalation as the next step land seriously.
1. If non-money sub, categorize its content and create a P1 watch event and a set of follow up actions.
2. If its a money/trial sub, create a P0 watch event and its own set of followup actions.
All watch events are queued for me by priority where i ask on the weekend: "Tell me P0 events", it then asks me what action. The ergonomic factor here is I the human can tune this valve on the information hose. There is also a dashboard for P0 notifications and an android push notification that notifies me of P0 events, but they aren't "consumed" until i decide. There are tons of places this can be useful: make progress on non-work related todos, systematic investment, writing year-end reviews.
None of this is rocket science.
**Local service webhooks are the key: Every web-hook has some kind of decision maker in it - an LLM + deterministic logic.
IL has had click-to-cancel since 2022. (Actually 2000, but updated in 2022, with continuous amendments being put forward all the time.)
Source: I'm an EU digital policy analyst in Brussels.
It seems like plain speech could be used, but this profoundly-irrational jargon was selected instead.
A table (if there even is one present at all) seems like about the least important part of a group discussion of an idea.
In contrast to the UK meaning which seems to be to take the topic from a briefcase under the table and place it for discussion on the table in front of everyone.
Continue the story. (keep reading); Continue the trial. (suspend)
Drop the album. (release); Drop the charges. (abandon)
Sanction an event. (approve); Sanction a country. (penalize)
Cleave to principles. (stick); Cleave wood. (split)
Clip keys to belt. (attach); Clip the hedges. (cut off)
Dust shelves. (remove); Dust pastries with sugar. (add)
Hold fast. (fixed in place); Walk fast. (moving quickly)
Make oversight. (omission); Provide oversight. (scrutiny)
Peruse the ancient manuscript. (read in detail); Peruse the magazine. (look through casually)
The alarm went off. (activated); Turn the alarm off. (deactivated)
It's yet to be found. (not found); Yet it's found. (found)
They're all but forgotten. (nearly); They're known but to God. (only)
I guess I am just unable to parse the words to piece together such a meaning. In my mind, there are two ways to interpret it: "this subject may be all kinds of things, but one thing it is not" (all but = everything except), or the opposite "this subject may be all kinds of things, but one thing it is for sure". And neither of these means "nearly" :(
You've walked all but the last step of the journey.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/10/...
So many other similar examples, like Bank Overdraft Fee Caps, Credit card late fees, personal data safeguards, and so much more.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/giuliani-accu...
Then there's the defamation lawsuits that he lost:
$148,000,000 for Georgian election workers:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trial-over-rudy-giulia...
And $1,300,000,000 for Dominion Voting Systems:
https://archive.ph/eRkG5
This is a consistent pattern. I've seen people praise the use of snow melters (they use them most blizzards), praise him for switching to garbage bins (the decision to switch happened under Adams), praise him for putting his desk backwards to send a message (the desk was not backwards, it just has drawers on both sides), etc.
He seems like a decent mayor, but there are a lot of overeager boosters who have warped him into some miracle maker.
Don't communicate what you do -> "what did they even do?"
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1vbAdFkVvA
This type of thing should never have been up to the mayor of any city to legislate.
Michael Bloomberg launched NYC311 in 2003. 311 has fielded millions of calls in the last twenty years. A huge part of 311 is being able to report quality of life issues. Plus Bloomberg made it easier to build, which unleashed a massive development wave in Manhattan and Brooklyn. More homes to house people, and more offices to grow the economy.
Bill de Blasio started Universal Pre-Kindergarten and reduced Stop-and-Frisk by 90%.
Eric Adams was a doofus and will soon be forgotten.
I expect more businesses will transition to this strategy to counter NYC's new rule. They won't necessarily lower the price, but you will have to sign up for a one-year term, then they will hit you with a massive cancellation fee if you "click to cancel".
Which is where AI comes in.
Companies that are user-hostile have no place in the future.
Most people aren't well versed in reading T&Cs and whilst LLMs won't do a perfect job, they would likely do a decent job at assessing and highlighting potentially unfriendly clauses such as this.
I've been using Claude in what I call iKaren mode. Basically, all the little complaints where I know I'm in the right against a large corporate other but don't want to get emotionally invested into a petty dispute go to it.
I recently had a room in Milan where they were rude at the rooftop–I was ignored after being seated for thirty minutes–and then refused to enable A/C (which they could do remotely) until I called twice, finally yielding at 1AM. I had a terrible night's rest and, resultantly, difficult day of travel the next day. It was a single night at an expensive hotel–I'd ordinarily ignore it.
This time, I passed my booking details and a short blurb to Claude. Between the flight and ferry to my next destination, it negotiated first, a night's free stay (which I rejected) and then a 25% reïmbursement.
(Granted, OP might be imagining that one can replicate everything one does with Adobe's software with an image-generating AI. Which one might be able to. But it's not going to be cost competitive with anything Adobe offers for at least half a decade given current power- and chip-buildout schedules.)
That every robot out of Figure or Unitree gets its Verilog popped on day one.
A world where Instagram and YouTube and Reddit -- everything -- have no moat anymore. Where these become protocols.
And eventually Anthropic and OpenAI are caught up with and abundant open weights models are everywhere.
This future is not only possible, it's close.
This should be an option. I should also have the choice to buy my parents something other than a malware trap.
The only way that friction disappears is if we abstract away human preference.
I never used to bother with asking for discounts and refunds because of the hassle. Now when Instacart delivers crappy produce or the heat press controller tracks to a different temp than a thermometer shows, I just have Claude deal with opening, tracking, responding to support.
All I can think of reading this is that bit from Futurama when Bender goes: AHAHAHHAAHAHAHAHA. Oh wait you're serious. Let me laugh even harder.
Yeah we've had near four decades of massive expansion of software, free and not, and AI is definitely what's going to finally make it so companies can't be user hostile. That was what we were missing. 100%.
We can do so much good by just looking up instead of down. We can make the world better.
Gesturing at LLMs and going “this and the free market will fix it” is laughably naive, especially in 2026. That is why people are reacting harshly. This is a problem that was created by the free market, it’s not magically going to be fixed by some new product.
You're being downvoted, perhaps, for throwing out a generic deus ex AI. I flagged for the "comment[ing] about the voting on comments" [1]. Happy to undo if fixed.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's worth than that. They don't even offer a monthly subscription contract - it's purely annual, but they advertise and promote monthly with fine print.
[0]: https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html
https://www.theverge.com/tech/894555/adobe-75-million-doj-se...
Does this law apply retroactively?
You wouldn't have a claim under the "straightforward cancellation process" part–same way this law doesn't enable one to walk away from a long-term lease for shits and giggles. But you may under the "clearly explain subscription terms to you" bit.
I bet going forward everyone will prominently implement a fake massive discount or waive a fake one time fee when signing up just to have something to claw back if you ever want to cancel.
P.S. Just checked Adobe's site from the EU, prominently displays a "Save 50%" badge and a crossed out original price with the discounted price next to it. There's also a link to the cancellation policy which tells you exactly what to expect for a refund. The cancellation process itself looks 1-click. Hard to claim misinformation.
This reminds me of the ISPs where the technician would insist to plug in your internet cable and a "check" that took all of 5s but was billed heavily in a waived one time fee. When you wanted to cancel the contract they'd ask for that fee back.
They're building a free, open-source Adobe Creative Suite alternative entirely in Rust. It runs super fast with minimal overhead, works completely offline, and aims for near 1:1 feature parity with Adobe products like Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and After Effects. It also supports command-based actions, making it easy to integrate into AI agents and automated workflows. They have Microsoft Office alternatives too.
Their Photoshop clone, PhotoCraft (https://github.com/storytold/photocraft), has around 47k GitHub stars right now.
All three original apps contained each other's functionality. As a result, the new combined app is barely larger than one of the three previous apps, and switching between the modes is now much more convenient and has a better UX.
Insert Michael Scott "God no" meme
That's terrible news. I only use photo-editing software to lay stuff out for print once in a while, so hopefully I can get away without upgrading indefinitely.
No. No it's not.
Fort all of Adobe's faults, Photoshop and other offerings are products, with support timelines, features added etc. [1] This so far is "let me vibe-code some thing with no intention of maintaining it further".
[1] And there are others competing as well. From opensource like Gimp to Affinity Design, Pixelmator etc.
Opus 6 or Opus 7 probably would be fine with working on an LLM generated codebase.
not these llm vibe coded shit.
Most gyms, ISPs, mobile carriers, any sort of services with continuous subscription have this scheme:
- they sell you subscription with some ridiculous (and perpetual) discount (often with “first three months - it’s free”);
- there’s minimum commitment clauses/fines (so you won’t leave too early);
- there’s clause to “pay up all given discounts on canceling the contract”;
- they “balance” two rules above in such a way that it is never “good time” to leave.
Because if i try signing up on their website today, the difference seems pretty clear to me.
See: https://imgur.com/a/G8o8Viw
But nobody wants to take personal responsibility for consciously choosing the cheaper monthly option. It comes with the annual commitment, as opposed to the more expensive monthly option that does not have the annual commitment.
I have zero love for Adobe, but at the same time in this particular case it really is people wanting to have their cake and eat it too. They want the cheapest monthly price, but also the ability to cancel.
If you think you might need to cancel, that's what the monthly option is for.
As for why they would set things up like this? Who the frak knows? Pricing tiers is literally the primary means of legally scamming people. The only logic it follows is that people who believe it does follow obvious logic are easier to scam.
I think that's handled by the rule. From their webpage:
> Companies must clearly explain subscription terms to you
It’s cleverly hidden on the checkout page, right under the no-commitment plan…
https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html#miniplans-buy...
Pretty sure the other businesses that can afford to openly despise their customers to a comical degree already do stuff like that
Just find the charge, click the "I want to cancel the service that caused this charge". The merchant has to either cancel or reply with a message clearly explaining why they can't do that (i.e. you agreed to a 12-month minimum).
Whoever is collecting the money has all the information needed to make the cancellation request. No website logins, passwords, self-addressed stamped envelope, etc.
Apple has done this for subscriptions that collect money through the iTunes store. It's awesome.
AmEx should do this because unlike all the other cards they control the whole stack.
Opening a dispute is like stopping payment on a check. It's refusing to pay, not asking to cancel.