No, that's correct. If you cancel within 7 days you pay nothing. If you cancel after 14 days you have to pay for half the year. I'm not sure what happens between those two points— I'd guess it's a grace period but I'm not sure— but personally I'd be surprised to have any reduction in cost if I went beyond a clearly stated free trial I agreed to.
Folks have legitimate bones to pick with Adobe— including the cost alone— and I think that’s why folks want to pig-pile on them for something like this. That said, I don't think this is a dark pattern. I don't even really think it's critique— more like conspiracy theory.
Dark pattern: Buttons confirming difficult-to-undo actions not in a user's best interest hiding in buttons styled and positioned like cancel buttons.
Dark pattern: Ad modals with undersized X closing symbols in low-contrast colors with transparent backgrounds over complex graphics making it hard to find and harder to not click on the ad.
Dark pattern: Cookie consent boxes w/an “accept all” option but only line-item rejection of dozens of entries requiring 2 or 3 clicks each.
Dark pattern: Cookie consent boxes with “reject all” options which don’t reject cookies selected in other tabs/cards not visible unless you click on them.
Dark pattern: Inconspicuous opt-out adware in Windows installers that rarely require user interaction beyond clicking next.
Dark pattern: One-click sign-up requiring in-person, written, or phone cancellation via a ‘retention specialist.’
... this pattern: Bait link that doesn’t tell the whole story leads to a screen with a prominent order form. It has only one line item near the top that’s labelled commitment which says "annual plan, paid monthly £49.94/mo" with the monthly price. It clearly states the length of the free trial, twice, including the explicit date you need to cancel by to not get charged. The terms modal, which could be more clearly styled, explicitly states the penalties for not cancelling before twice the length of your free trial passes.
So if a user signs up for an annual subscription and doesn't cancel until more than double the time their free trial passes then they get charged a penalty. Ok.
Adobe has room to improve here, but sorry— this is just not a dark pattern by any good faith measure.
The first page is obviously a bait link, It should prominently state a 12 month commitment and save non-interested users the click. While it's overly salesy, it's a standard advertising tactic and incredibly mild compared to what you see at your average car dealership. Newer SAAS companies (e.g. Slack) do a much better job, here, and Adobe should follow suit. I would absolutely levy a dark pattern accusation if users only saw that before committing more than a click, but it's not.
I don't understand how anyone viewing an order form occupying ~ 1/3 of the screen with a prominent box labelled "commitment" saying "annual plan, paid monthly £49.94/mo" would not understand that you're making an annual commitment to pay £49.94/mo, and that the total cost will be £49.94/mo * 12. Never has any phone plan or car lease or gym membership or anything else I paid for monthly with some multi-month commitment prominently displayed the explicit total price. The free trial end dates are prominently mentioned twice.
The cancellation terms box styling should more clearly convey the document structure, but even someone quickly skimming the first 8 paragraphs would see the content didn't end with the headline “Cancellation Terms:”. Hanlon’s Razor shreds the assertion of deliberate malfeasance over a site-wide design system flubbing form follows function.
Normally love a pig pile on Adobe’s pricing practices, but this looks a lot more like histrionics intended to drive twitter traffic than a useful analysis of Adobe’s sign-up process.