Never giving any money to Adobe again….

Seriously. I already knew Adobe were greedy bastards.

I knew it when I was a little junior artist and Photoshop was just a buy-once-type of deal and was like the Golden Standard of Image Editors, despite it being priced so high that nobody could afford it, and, well, the biggest competitor to Photoshop was pirated and cracked versions of Photoshop… and nobody even cared because everyone knew nobody could afford the damn program.

I DEFINITELY knew it when I was a student, they moved over to a subscription basis for all their product and charged an ungodly monthly price, but lured poor students in with their “student discounts”. They had long since managed to weasel their way into being the “industry standard” by giving heavy discounts to students and corporations, making people dependent on it so they could jack up the price when you were no longer a student or a member of the corporation.

I knew it for SURE when I, after years of managing to use other, cheaper or even free programs (Clip Studio Paint FOR THE WIN!) finally had to get an Adobe subscription for some graphic design courses I took and managed to get a student subscription… and when the course was over and I went to cancel the subscription before I had to start paying full price (not that I actually used the Adobe products for much to begin with, other than some brochures and pamphlets and presentations I had to do in InDesign), and I had to click through four or five “hold on, are you sure you want to cancel? Are you sure you are sure? Are you sure you are sure you are sure?” pages with more and more “generous offers” to keep me around.

And yet… I was stupid. After I had cancelled the subscription, Adobe e-mailed me with a “so sorry to see you go, how about we give you a year’s subscription for half the price of your student discount?” And I was STUPID enough to fall for it. I went “you know what, I can afford that much per month and I do have one final InDesign project… okay.” 

I really shouldn’t have. Because when I was done with that final InDesign project, and a few months had gone with me never using any of the Adobe pack, I cancelled again. Went through all the “are you sure you are sure you are sure you are sure?!” begging on the Adobe site, and cancelled it for good. 

Little did I know that I had yet to see Adobe’s true evil and the depth they were willing to sink to just to get more money out of unsuspecting customers who can’t afford paying for their services.

Because a few months later, when my year of half-student-discount year would have ended I suddenly and with no warning whatsoever got an e-mail from Adobe that “we just received payment for your monthly subscription”. And it was the FULL PRICE subscription at that. More than fifty dollars that I DEFINITELY couldn’t afford to pay that month.

I was stunned. I’d cancelled that crap! Why the fuck was Adobe suddenly starting up my subscription again now, after several months?

So I went to the Adobe website and found that I was listed as having an active full-price subscription, with the next payment (of more than fifty dolllars) due next month. I let out a string of curse words then… Why the hell did this happen? Was Adobe trying to sneak more money out of me? 

Well, I decided, if Adobe thought they were going to sneak their way into having me pay for services I didn’t need, couldn’t afford and hadn’t used for months, they had another thing coming. I went through another round of “but are you SURE you are sure you are sure you are sure you want to cancel?” crap on the website…

…and then I saw it. 

On that VERY LAST PAGE before I could definitely, DEFINITELY cancel my subscription, they informed me that I then had to pay an “early cancellation fee.” Which was FIVE TIMES AS MUCH as a monthly payment. More than TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS. For cancelling a subscription I didn’t want and hadn’t signed up for.  

They had never even ONCE mentioned this fee before… only at the VERY LAST MOMENT, they hit me with “okay, fine, quit, but you have to pay us more than two hundred bucks for the privilege! Are you SURE you are sure you are sure you are sure you are sure you want to cancel?”

That was when I burst into tears. I couldn’t believe it. This was just MEAN. I mean, corporations like Spotify and Amazon are certainly bad, but at the very least if you want to cancel their subscriptions they let you do it without this kind of manipulation and trickery.

But after I’d cried for a bit, I began thinking. And reaching out for help. And reading up on whether other people had been in this situation and what they’d done about it. And turned out there was. And there was a recipe for how to deal with it. 

Turns out that Adobe, like the evil bastards they are, use guile and verbal trickery to make you think you’re signing up for a MONTHLY subscription… but you are actually signing up for a YEARLY subscription, just one that you pay month by month. And if you cancel what you think is a monthly subscription, they just treat that as you putting your yearly subscription on pause for the rest of the year. When the year is up, they un-pause and start billing you again, and then when you try to cancel again they hit you with the “early cancellation fee”. 

Anything to squeeze more money out of people who can’t pay.

But, since I live in Europe, I have a few rights as a costumer. Among other things I have the right to withdraw from an automatic renewal I did not explicitly consent to.

So I went to the Adobe Customer support webpage and started a chat. The chatbot asked if it could help, but I insisted on speaking to a human. And after a while I did get a human on the other end of the chat, asking what they could do for me. So I said, quoting the script that I’d been given, that I had previously canceled my plan and was not clearly informed that the annual commitment would still be billed, and that I needed the cancellation fee waived and the last payment refunded. I ended with “Please process that, or escalate to a supervisor if needed.”

The human on the other end probably had a script too because they answered with some very formal-sounding lines that basically boiled down to “we sent you an e-mail when you started the subscription, you should have known, you should have read the e-mail, this is your fault.”

But I was prepared. I’d been told they’d try that, and that they wouldn’t actually have a leg to stand on. So I still followed my own script and said I understood that, but this was not a question of policy but about consumer rights. And repeated: “I need the cancellation fee waived and the last payment refunded. Please escalate to a supervisor.”

They never escalated to a supervisor. It only took one more line from me before they told me that of course they would be happy to help me with my request. “It will done within next 24 hours and also, the refund which will reflect into your original payment mode within next 5-7 business days.”

I think they slightly panicked because the grammar took a hit there.

I thanked them and closed the chat (but not before taking screenshots of it and saving them). And then proceeded to break down. I’d won… but I still had the angst. What if something went wrong? What if I ended up being dragged back into this subscription that I couldn’t afford and ended up owing tons of money I couldn’t pay? It took me a long while to recover and stop feeling the stress.

The next day I got another e-mail confirming that my subscription was ending.  A few days later thre money was back in my bank account. But I’ll be checking this up VERY carefully in the future. I don’t trust those people to NOT try anything more. 

And for all of you out there, here is the moral of the story: AVOID ADOBE. If you haven’t already ended up in their clutches, do your UTMOST to stay away from them. Acrobat Reader, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Animate… Use ANY OTHER PROGRAM. There are plenty of them out there that can do the job and that are much cheaper (or even free) and are produced by people that DON’T act like cartoon villains.

Thank you.