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Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract

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Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract

#71

Post by iso1631 »

lelandfe wrote: post #48
iso1631 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems pretty obvious to me, it's an annual contract you pay for monthly, I have many such contracts

Sure, me too. Annual plans are great. The issues here are: 1. All of the marketing language shown in the tweets present this as a monthly cost, rather than an annual commitment. This is deceptive. The other, truly monthly plans are default hidden on the plan selection page. 2. The enormous contract cancellation fee is buried inside the fine print. Contrast this to the USA version: https://i.imgur.com/TDptfcI.png

Annual plan to me that you're agreeing to pay for the year. Disney did something similar, it was cheaper to sign up for a year. Typically you get 12 months for the price of 10.

The screenshot says you can have a full refund if you cancel before Feb 26th, assuming that holds, that's plenty of time to work out what's going on.

The US is clear, I've seen that setup several times. The UK one has several red flags

1) Free trial

2) "From" £x a month

3) It's Adobe

Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract

#72

Post by ljoshua »

DethNinja wrote: post #61

I think customers are a bit to blame for such shady companies. So many good alternatives to Adobe ecosystem exists but customers are mostly unwilling to switch to them and as result Adobe doesn’t have to worry about keeping customers satisfied.

Eh, this one's a little tough. Both my wife and I extensively use Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign on a frequent basis, and we're not even designers, we just like to make stuff. I've tried alternatives like Gimp and Inkscape, but they really don't even come close. I've never found an alternative to InDesign at all. There are some applications (especially photo editing apps on Mac) that are nice, but still don't really give you everything the CS suite gives.

Do I hate that I used to pay a (large) one time fee for a version and now I've given them thousands of dollars more than I'd have preferred? Yes. Do I think this 12-month contract dark pattern is scummy? Yes. But I also can't find suitable alternatives either, so in a sense they've earned their money in that regard.

Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract

#73

Post by lelandfe »

azangru wrote: post #55
matsemann wrote: post #4

OT rant: > Ooh, I can scroll. That was not obvious at all. It is if you use a proper browser+OS combo. Why some designers thought it was a good idea to hide the scroll bar in their OS (which some browsers adopt to) is beyond me. It's also an annoyance as a user with a browser that display scrollbars. The amount of random scrollbars appearing because the devs never tested anything but Mac+Chrome is staggering.

There's a setting on MacOS: System preferences > General > Show scroll bars > Always; but neither developers nor end users seem to enable it. Plus — and this is a pet peeve of mine — there's a growing number of developers who would use the Tailwind CSS library and apply its "w-screen" class to their elements. The w-screen class sets element width to 100vw, which does not take into account the width of the vertical sc…

At my last company, we enabled this by default for new company macOS laptops. Helped a lot.

Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract

#74

Post by filmgirlcw »

They’ve done this for close to ten years (or however long Creative Cloud has been around) and you have to be careful to cancel before they renew you into another yearly contract.

I swore I would never have a personal subscription again (and just use the one I have at work for personal projects, which is against TOS but prove it), but then they had a 50% off special and I caved. I also set a calendar entry to remind me to cancel before I get renewed for a second year.

Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract

#75

Post by unfocussed_mike »

civilized wrote: post #66
unfocussed_mike wrote: post #56

I am not quite sure why people don't grasp that it's an annual plan for really expensive software. "Annual plan, billed monthly" is about as easy as it's going to be in four words on a button or by a button. If you could rent it for just a month now and then, wouldn't you only rent it in the months you need it? They make it so you can't. There's a solution: DON'T USE IT. Ask yourself seriously: what is it you want to…

You're just defending the right of a giant corporation to communicate poorly in a way that enriches them at the expense of customers, who are often struggling artists. > "Annual plan, billed monthly" is about as easy as it's going to be in four words on a button or by a button. It's absolutely insane that you think Adobe has fulfilled their obligations to communicate to the customer what they're getting into by putti…

> You're just defending the right of a giant corporation to communicate poorly in a way that enriches them.

Thanks for the downvote (I guess) but no, I'm doing no such thing. I'm explaining that the giant monopoly is going to do what the giant monopoly does.

Really almost all subscriptions are like this -- they depend on you forgetting to cancel. And this one is a bit more up-front than most.

> It's absolutely insane that you think Adobe has fulfilled their obligations to communicate to the customer what they're getting into by putting "annual plan paid monthly" in a drop-down next to a button.

Sorry, this is a straw man. I didn't at all say that I thought those four words fulfilled their obligations.

What I said is, they have a maximally clear four word way of summarising the plan right at the beginning of the payment flow.

I'm quite sure they need to do a bit more to explain what the early cancellation options are at some point in the payment flow. But right before you even try to buy, they do explain you're buying an annual plan, don't they?

FWIW, if you do not grasp that "annual plan" means an annual plan and then think about what your early cancellation options might be, perhaps you shouldn't be using the company credit card.

Complaining loudly that you can't use something clearly marked as an annual plan for just one month is a bit of a stretch.

Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract

#76

Post by bryans »

johnwheeler wrote: post #3

Speaking of dark patterns, has anyone noticed the DoorDash app sets the tip for you automatically and places the “place order” button above the tip form, which you must scroll to to make visible? there is no way to adjust a tip without calling customer support. This is such an obviously blatant deception. Off screen form fields _below_ a submit button? It’s insulting. I’m surprised I haven’t heard more complaining ab…

I haven't experienced that on the website version -- they give you three suggestions or let you choose any amount -- but noticed my order yesterday was $4 more than it should have been after choosing a custom tip amount. I normally don't double check email receipts for that kind of thing, but maybe it's time to start.

I'm still able to reproduce it on the website today. Trying to add a custom amount magically adds $4 to the order in a way that's not just superficially in the UI. It actually gets added to the order.

Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract

#78

Post by londons_explore »

mrtksn wrote: post #64

Just yesterday, on a local streaming platform that has a series that I want to watch I was offered "7 days free". Great, I can watch the accumulated episodes and if I still feel like watching the new ones that come weekly I can keep the subscription, right? Nope, the "7 days free" wasn't a a trail but 7 extra days when you purchase a full year subscription. I was considering to get a monthly subscription to try it ou…

> we en up getting a standardised interface like the one we have currently

Of course you won't. Apple will do everything in their power to make third party payments as painful as possible for both the consumer and the merchant. They'll do things like preventing those apps from auto-filling credit card numbers, and denying them camera permission to scan cards. They'll insist credit card data is sent to an in-country server owned by the same company as the app (for privacy reasons obviously, but knowing that for a small app developer hosting certified credit card processing servers in every country their app sells in is very hard).

Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract

#80

Post by danaris »

cpach wrote: post #68

If you’re on macOS and just want a good and convenient image editor, I warmly recommend Acorn. The Muellers (owners of Flying Meat Software) have put a lot of effort to make it feel like a really solid Mac application. The price is good and from time to time they offer discounts. The whole experience reminds me of using good old Paintshop Pro back in the late 90s (^_^) Other options are Affinity Photo from Serif Ltd…

I can strongly second the recommendation for Acorn. I'm not a graphics professional, but it is very often useful in my job to have access to an editor on par with Photoshop—which, aside from some of the more advanced stuff, Acorn definitely is. It's extremely polished and well-put-together—and can also both read and write Photoshop PSD files.
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