Competition watchdog cracks knuckles, probes legality of Adobe cancellation fee Britain’s competition watchdog is opening an investigation into Adobe’s early cancellation fees on membership plans to ascertain if it breaks consumer law. Under its terms, Adobe says customers that cancelled its "annual billed monthly" subscription after more than two weeks are subject to a cancellation fee equating to 50 …
IF it is clearly in the contract that's one thing
But also IF I am going to be charged 50% of the remaining subscription then I better well GET 50% of the remaining subscription. Otherwise this smells strongly of fraud - pay for a service you don't actually get...
However, as an aside, this is why avoiding subscription-based software is the best approach where possible.
It's driven purely by greed.
I fully agree with you about the commercial greed aspect plus it generates customer ill will. You used to be able to get perpetual licences for the cut down Photoshop Elements but now it's only a three year licence and then the software stops working.
The free Canva Affinity range can be combined with, for example, a Lightroom equivalent that offers a perpetual licence, eg Exposure 7.
FOSS, with its low quality desktop GUI software, it's the way to ensure companies like Adobe can laugh all the way to the bank. Nor GIMP nor Darktable are real alternatives to Photoshop and Lightroom. DaVinci Resolve can be an alternative to Premiere, but only because it has BlackMagic behind. Inkscape can't read Adobe files...
Unluckily, desktop software, especially complex ones like those, require a lot of very skilled people to be written - and those skilled people don't like to work for free.
Google once bough t Nik Collection and made it available for free - but then resold it because it had no interest in spending money to keep it updated...
It's the lack of real competition that allows Adobe to act that way.
The problem with subscriptio is if you don't have termination fees people witll start to use them in an on/off way as they like (and one may deserve it for the idea of selling subscriptions...) but Adobe fees are excessive anyway. But it's not the only problem with them:
- Cancelling a subscription after it expires requires to renew it first - I had to use a free trial subscription to cancel another (and cancelling uses dark patterns...)
- Adobe forces users to buy options they do not need. For example now it forces users to pay for 1TB of cloud storage space, even if they have no use for it.
- Adobe, just like Broadcom, killed resellers and no longer allows discounts.
Unluckily properly anti-trust enforcement looks so last century.... Adobe has an evident dominant market position, should be treated accordingly.
Moreover moving thousand of images with non-destructive editings to a different tool is usually impossible - some tools may try to import them, but the results are not guaranteed.
Adobe is somehow equating a physical thing like a phone to software. Problem is a phone did cost the cellco company real money and you got the phone. So makes sense if you cancel the cellco svc agreement, you still owe for the phone. But software. Be real adobe. Thankfully I'm not a customer of the vulture co. The pity is how they dominate with pdf format. I'm glad pdf is reverse engineered enough that I can use open source tools to read the files.
We just stop using them in perpetuity. Well, we smarter ones anyway. I for example was ripped off by Ford in 1993. Bought a new car with a bad trans and they refused to fix under warranty. I've bought several new cars since, and not one came from a Ford lot. I've also successfully talked half a dozen other people out of buying Fords. Icing on the cake - back when Ford was paying dividends I invested money, took dividends and got the money I paid them for the car back from their profits.
That seems to be something too many business people seem to have forgotten - it can take years to build a positive reputation, and these days just minutes to destroy it. Pee off a customer, and they tell their friends about it, and your reputation can be trashed at the speed of social media.
Of course, the only reason some of them don't actually care is that they have sufficient market power that they really don't care how peed off their victims are - if you are in the creative business, then in practical terms you have to be able to handle the files clients bring you, and in practice that means running the same software, and that means you are stuck paying whatever Adobe decides you can be fleeced for this month. Going back "a few years", Quark had an "annoying feature" in XPress - when a new version came out, they also updated the file format, and didn't offer a "save in older version" option. So if you had v3.3, it would automatically update any file you opened to v3.3 format - and there was no way to save in (say) v3.2. So that forced people to upgrade whether they wanted to or not - if you don't update, you can't open files your clients send you; if you do upgrade, any clients who don't can't open any files you work on for them.
And MS don't care what customers think, thanks to some shrewd moves, and many illegal ones*, they've engineered a situation where it's "very difficult" to not use the full MS stack in a business of any size**.
* A proved in court
** Yes, a small business can use alternatives, but for large businesses, it's really hard to put together the full stack without using 365, and 365 is deliberately designed to make swapping out any components more or less impossible.
Thanks, but that's all I would need to know in order to walk away. I come from a time when you bought a bit of software, it came on a tangible spinny thing, and it was "yours" in that you could dump it onto your machine and it would do its job and that was about as complicated as it usually got (though some companies did mess around with dongles and weird copy protection).
Now? Subscription up front costs are much cheaper than the product ever cost, but they are recurring so it'll add up to more. And, of course, the more you use the software, the more your data and creations will be held hostage to the necessity to keep on subscribing.
So, now, it seems that Adobe don't only want to take away your use of the software, and potentially the ability to access your data maintained with it, they also want to charge you a ransom while having no obligation to provide the service that such money would have paid for.
As my mother would have said: they can go and sit on a bayonet and rotate.
It looks you complain about something you don't know anything about.
The main applications - Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere, etc. - do process everything locally as usual - there's not "cloud" involved, just they "phone home" to check for the license.
Of course, marketing needed to put "cloud" somewhere.
Some newer application, like the "new" Lightroom, tried to shift storage online - although I wonder how many actual users it got, since there are no longer plans without the "classic" version - and there are some web version of them, and mobile versions as well.
GenAI can be performed onliine - to use large external models - and you need additional credits for it.
The greed way Adobe manages subscriptions is a different issue.
This sort of thing was a problem in France with recurring subscriptions, often things like magazines or medical top up etc.
Now (and since around 2019ish), after one calendar year you can cancel with a simple demand (no jumping through hoops), at any time (and not within a tiny window around the annual renewal time), and without penalty or charges. The only thing you will have to pay is "until the end of the calendar month" (though some magazine subscriptions push this by saying it'll take 28 days to deal with the request). At any rate, it's much better now than all the weird ways companies tried to take advantage of customers.
It used to be a massive problem in the UK, back in the day with things like wine, magazine or music (tape/CD etc) "clubs".
It's classic dark patterns - make it as difficult to cancel as possible - you have a limited window, have to write in to a specific address using specific words, have to send back what was previously sent to you but would cost an arm and a leg. etc etc.
I don't know if gyms are still guilty of it, but they used to use tactics such as having to visit a specific gym on a specific day and time to speak to the only person who could approve the cancellation that you had to also bring in writing. Not their problem if said person wasn't there when you tried etc.
For online subscriptions where there is nothing tangible exchanging hands, this sort of thing should be illegal.
My own other pet hate is booking sites that charge a "booking fee" despite it being done online and no physical tickets changing hands. Also should be utterly illegal.
With some gym subscriptions it was even worse. Ashbourne Management runs membership services on behalf of some gyms and used to have contracts that tied you in for possibly several years. They would report you to a credit reference agency if you tried to cancel in a way that they didn't like. In 2011 the old OFT investigated and took them to court where it was found some of the contract terms were illegal. There's a Q&A at https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20140402175100/http://oft.gov.uk/OFTwork/consumer-enforcement/consumer-enforcement-completed/ashbourne/ams-qanda.
Another niggle is with "recommended" trialware apps where you pay £1/$1 via your credit card on the assumption that you have 14 days to use the app, but if you don't cancel before then they will go onto charge you full price. But this is often buried in very small print and a pre-ticked box that suggests you agree they can take 50 quid out of your account every month.
UltraPDF, is a software house well known for doing this trick and its almost impossible to get in contact with them to cancel
This is the big problem with SaaS, especially media creation where you don't own the work you create because the host will have it buried in their T&Cs that such work is copyright to them rather than that of the creator. And if you want to bail out you still have the battle on your hands to take your work with you
"Own nothing: be happy, sucker!" - seems to the ongoing trope from the big corps these days
is that the (alleged) creative types that use Adobe really won't work with anything else as it isn't cv-friendly.
My last place had 3 people in marketing who accounted for nearly all the paid for software budget because they had to "have Adobe". Despite better FOSS versions for their tasks.
Apparently it then get's harder to recruit people who don't want to work with Adobe.
Now when I heard that, I thought it would mean that makes Adobe skills less expensive than non-Adobe skills. Because more people "have Adobe".
but apparently "it doesn't work like that".
Now I am 59. The second I hear "It doesn't work like that" I am much more inclined to believed there is a fiddle going on somewhere that question my take on things.
Which FOSS versions? I've never seen one.
Other commercial software, yes - FOSS - nothing.
Anyway "marketing" is not creative pepole - if we talk about graphic designers, illustrators, photogrpahers, and the like, yes, marketing, no.
Still they may have the need to open files made by the people above, who won't waste their time fighting with FOSS software not up the tasks - they have better and more lucrative ways to spend their time, and for them, Adobe is just one of their business costs.
