AFAIK you only pay a cancellation fee if you want to cancel a subscription early (E.g. you booked a yearly plan and then cancel it a few months before renewal), which of course is legal.

At some point there was the hack that you could switch your subscription to a offer they throw at you when you try to cancel, and then that counted as a new subscription, which you could cancel within the first 14 days. Not sure if that still works.

It is of course legal, but it's possible OP got deceived into an annual subscription when they thought it was monthly, as discussed 7 months back on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30222165

It’s not as a consumer in the Netherlands. This is what gyms used to do. Now you can have a 1 year contract, after that, you’re able to cancel anytime

That is not the case with adobe, the contract autorenews.

also been tricked by them. if some services did not lock pdfs to only be opened in adobe reader, there is no way I’d touch anything adobe. Hate these practices and their updater and installer is extremely intrusive! Someone should run a poll for most hated software providers..

fwiw there are tools to remove the copy protection / "unlock" the pdfavailable on github, like this one[1] for windows and a number of them[2] for *nix based on qfed[3] or ghostscript

1: https://github.com/abatsakidis/PDFDeSecure

2: https://www.google.com/search?q=remove%20pdf%20copy%20protec...

3: https://github.com/wilfredwee/wilfred-TILs/blob/master/comma...

Exactly

Still worked for me yesterday. Temporarily "switched" to a yearly (paid monthly) InCopy subscription, and was able to cancel that about 5min later.

If you don't get the "do you want to switch instead of cancelling?" retainer dialog, you may have already declined it. Clearing cookies and local storage did the trick for me in that case.

A few months ago it worked for me. I am in EU so IIRC they are legally required to let you cancel your contract for 14 days if you entered into it remotely (phone, internet etc). It seems like changing subscription plan counts as getting a new contract with Adobe.

It seems to me that this is likely not legally required in this case as they could claim that the release of the old contract was part of the new contract and if you cancel that you are still responsible for the old one. However I'm not surprised that they haven't bothered to implement this in code.

I'm in the eu. What would not count as remote, where you are (added for all the USAians that think it's actually one [socialistic] country)?

*where i am at the moment, if i buy something in a shop i have 7 days to return it as i could have 'examined' the item there. Online, delivered, i get 30 days.

Empty shops, retailers, empty shops...I 'remote' purchase. But i do go looking first in your store...

My gym has a cancellation fee like this. I came to accept it because it is equivalent to them giving me a discount if I stay a certain amount of time, which is fair. Fortunately, they made it all clear when signing up; hidden fees always suck.

Use privacy.com and give them a temporary credit card. Close the card when you want to cancel.

Is this ethical? You're not using the software anymore, so you're not getting something for nothing. Rather, you're avoiding paying something for nothing.

He's breaking his agreement with Adobe but it wasn't ethical for Adobe to obscure the fact he was agreeing to a cancellation fee in the first place.

I would say it's unethical as long as the seller doesn't consent to it. But legal. I see it as similar to pirating it, though piracy is illegal as well.

Are the seller's terms unethical? Perhaps. I don't think that justifies being unethical in response, though.

Arguably the PayPal trick is more ethical because they decide it's not worth chasing the cancellation fee.

Ethical is not a word you can use to describe any aspect when having an interaction with a company. A company is not a living person following common social morals.

Trying to generalized actions are unethical or ethical or more or less ethical is completely subjective based on your understand and acceptance of the society rules you have been exposed to.

Company work with objective laws with judges deciding disputes.

I guess we'll have to disagree on the equivalency of this and pirating.

With pirating, you're continuing to use it without paying.

This won't stop Adobe from sending collections after you

For small amounts (hundreds of dollars), it's often not economical to do this. And if they do end up doing it then its even less economical for an agency to do anything other than automated collections activities (emails, robo-calls etc) which can safely be ignored.

Has that ever happened?

But he received a discount on his monthly rate when he agreed to subscribe for a year at a time.

There is a power imbalance between him & a giant multinational corporation, and he's just rectified it.

I don't remember subscribing for a year at a time. I almost always subscribe to things on a monthly basis, and the money certainly comes out of my account on a monthly basis

Oh that's what this is about?

I did exactly that around 4 months ago.

Luckily I subscribed using PayPal, so when Adobe charged me the cancellation fee I immediately contested it. My guess was that Adobe won’t bother to deal with a contested fee of around $100.

They didn’t, so PayPal refunded me the fee.

Edit: I replaced Photoshop with Pixelmator Pro, which is an excellent piece of software. Most other needs are covered by Sketch/Figma. Haven’t found a good Illustrator alternative yet, but didn’t look much.

> Most other needs are covered by Sketch/Figma.

Hoo boy, do I have some bad news for you!

> Haven’t found a good Illustrator alternative yet, but didn’t look much.

I’m very happy with Affinity Designer

Fingers crossed FTC will block the acquisition.

Maybe CorelDraw could be a good replacement for Illustrator. Disclaimer: I did use CorelDraw but not Illustrator (at least not significantly), so maybe I'm missing something.

+1 to Pixelmator Pro, the price is super reasonable

I recently switched to Corel because they still sell perpetual licenses.

On physical media.

I won’t say it is as good or better than Adobe.

Only that it is good enough for me at this time.

Depending on your needs, there is also Pixelmator Pro and (I just found it, haven’t used) Affinity Designer. Pixelmator Pro has all the features I missed from Photoshop and more. Both apps are not subscription based.

Thanks. I understand why people might not choose Corel.

I first bought a copy of Corel in 1998. The version I bought this year — prefixed “2021” — is not all that different from how I remember the oldest one which I stopped using around 2010.

For me, that’s a feature. The hammer has a familiar handle, and my nails haven’t changed much.

Benign neglect provides stability. Particularly in regards to user interface.

When it comes to my creative tools, I am the slow part of the loop now that computers are so well resourced.

I mean I’ve gone from a PIII with 128mb of RAM and 320 mb of spinning rust to four cores hypertheadeed, 8GB RAM + 4GB on the GPU with a two TB SSD.

But 300dpi and 32 bits are still the same. Basically what required a wait twenty-five years ago doesn’t because the new resources haven’t been consumed with new features.

Or slowed to the speed of the internet to ensure speed is an argument for upgrading.

Thanks for the heads up. I just checked, and apparently I got scammed into an annual plan by a customer support agent without realizing it. Even better, they don't appear to have a way for you to delete your old credit card information, even after adding a new one. Time to finally look for Adobe alternatives.

As a dev touching so design things every few weeks, I can only say good things about Affinity Designer.

Thanks, I’ll take a look. The other big one for me is audition, believe it or not. I find myself really liking the spectrum analyzer and noise reduction features.

This doesn’t answer your question, but it may help folks who haven’t ended in this situation.

Amazon sells (at least in EU) CC annual prepaid subscription. Buy that instead and redeem it on Adobe to activate subscription. No direct purchase from adobe, no credit card on file. End of one year, your subscription will just expire out.

Fuck Adobe. It triggered the auto-renew while on vacation for a year, I cancelled within a week later, and was forced to pay a massive cancellation fee. One of the worst companies I've interacted with, will never use their products again.

If you update / change your subscription to another one, you go back into the 14 days free cancellation policy.

Then just cancel.

Piracy is once again the better choice.

Sure. You can get rid off telemetry and tons of unvanted processes. Well if you know, where to pirate.

Tell them your employer is now paying for your subscription

Worked for me plus two others that I know of

I'm currently testing what happens when I sign up for a free trial with a card from privacy.com that has a $1 spending limit.

Now that the free trial is over, Adobe keeps trying to charge my card for the monthly fee every 2-3 days or so. I'm not sure if my Acrobat license will get disabled and everything will be dropped, or if my account will get sent to collections, or what.

Eager to find out.

Talk to their representatives on the chat and they will help. That is how I avoided paying the cancellation fee.

I would also like to know, how to debloat CC. There are tons of unvanted processes and verifying subscription every day. It is not even possible to use legally CC offline.

If you're in Europe you could do a subject access request, request phone calls or whatever way you entered into the contract and see if they messed up.

> to read the terms and conditions before you buy

No need to go that far, you just have to read the very obvious part that says it's an annual subscription. This thread is baffling.

Pay it. Then tweet @ them how disgruntled you are that you have to pay it. Worked for a buddy of mine.

I pay via PayPal then cancel the billing subscription. Privacy.com is how my partner got out of it.

They can, in theory, send you to collections and ding your credit for that.

When using PayPal it’s easier and safer to contest the cancellation fee. In my experience Adobe just didn’t bother to respond, so PayPal refunded me the fee.

And in theory you can bill them and send them to collections by changing your personal terms and conditions.

I meant to add that Luma Fusion also runs on the M1/M2 Mac as well as iPad.

Cancel and open a dispute on your credit card.

Privacy.com and freeze the card

You switch plans and quit the new one…

I can't work out how to change my plan. The "manage plan" page only has the option to cancel my plan. There doesn't seem anywhere on the website where I can change my plan, only to buy new ones

Go on the side and click cancel on your current plan after that press "It's to expensive" and you get offered another plan.

It doesn't for me :/ I think it's possible that I've gone through this flow before and accepted a slightly cheaper offer to keep me as a customer. I wonder if that permanently removes such offers from appearing again?

This worked for me a year ago. You can cancel the new one within x days. Couldn't believe it worked, but was happy with it.