Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract • Hacker News Board

Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract

#561

Post by bubblethink » Sun, Feb 06, 2022, 10:53 AM UTC

CrendKing wrote: post #495

jsf01 wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do that?

About 6-8 years ago, all major credit card companies in US has the virtual CC service: BoA, Citi, Chase, you name it. Passing one period, they all started to shut down the service, saving Citi. I don't know why Citi still has this service, and seems to keep developing it (it used to be a Flash page, and since Flash is out commissioned, they rewrote the whole service into HTML). So if you are in US, get a Citi CC or s…

Does citi let you create any no. of virtual numbers and can you set limits for them ? I sorely miss the BoA flash feature and haven't found a replacement. I would sign for citi if it's the same.

Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract

#562

Post by distances » Sun, Feb 06, 2022, 10:57 AM UTC

dheera wrote: post #337

arcticbull wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may get sent to collections and thats a whole pile of misfortune.

Most online services just terminate your service after a couple warnings and don't bother with collections. In any case just set it as your policy that you don't talk to collectors, you only engage with businesses directly. Send Adobe a written notice of termination of the agreement, stop payments, and I believe that's all you need to do, but IANAL.

> In any case just set it as your policy that you don't talk to collectors, you only engage with businesses directly.

Are collectors so toothless over there? Here a valid collection is an easy win in courts if it's not paid, and then it can be garnished from wages, pension, other income, or your property. Collections absolutely can not be ignored here.

Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract

#563

Post by unfocussed_mike » Sun, Feb 06, 2022, 11:03 AM UTC

patmcc wrote: post #521

chrisseaton wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does 'annual plan' mean to you? How can you misinterpret those words?

It could easily mean "we will bill you monthly 12 times, for one year, and then stop billing you". It's not immediately clear that it means "we will bill you monthly forever, if you cancel within a year you owe us big money".

Annual typically implies recurring. Annual in APR (Annual Percentage Rate) etc. An annual plant flowers once a year, not just once, etc.

If it said "one year", that would match the meaning you have.

Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract

#564

Post by nigerian1981 » Sun, Feb 06, 2022, 12:15 PM UTC

SomeBoolshit wrote: post #306

remus wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you can threaten to report them to the relevant consumer body in your country. I did this after arguing with one of their sales people about cancelling a subscription for half an hour and they immediately relented. Just speculating, but i suspect they know what they're doing is dodgy and want to avoid as much scrutiny as possible from any regulatory bodies so their support script says to cancel if the customer men…

Of course, you then report them, anyway.

and should

Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract

#565

Post by valdiorn » Sun, Feb 06, 2022, 12:30 PM UTC

Skillshare just pulled the same trick on me. I decided to go with the free trial. Was enjoying one tutorial and decided to get, what I assumed, was the first month of subscription. Nope, got slammed with 130 pound charge on PayPal for 12 months. I decided to keep it, but cancelled the recurring charge and just decided I will never renew it on principle.

Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract

#566

Post by parkersweb » Sun, Feb 06, 2022, 12:47 PM UTC

What’s worse is that you can’t say ‘end my subscription when the current billing period expires’ - you can only cancel when you’re in a magic 1 month window when your plan is about to renew.

I was 15 years + user of Illustrator and Photoshop - now I actively avoid embedding myself any further into their eco-system.

Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract

#567

Post by g-clef » Sun, Feb 06, 2022, 1:10 PM UTC

obmelvin wrote: post #510

kevincox wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure it is. I believe the technical term is "Misrepresentation". I don't think it would be an easy fight but it seems that you could try to make an argument that they represented the contract as monthly. There are also examples of ToS being declared invalid because no reasonable person read them, this sounds similar where no one is actually reading the fine print. While this case may be hard I'm pretty sur…

I get your point - and also that 'never' is not the right word - but I don't think the defense is that you didn't read the contract. There are plenty of cases where people get screwed over for not reading a contract. E.g. if ToS said I needed to give up my first born to Adobe, the judge isn't going to side with me because I didn't read the ToS. They will side with me because the clause isn't valid.

To build on that, allow me to offer a real-world example: a General Contractor I worked with set up as his standard contract as a triplicate form, so you'd sign once and you'd keep one of the triplicate copies as your copy of the contract. The trick was that the back of the triplicate form was where he put the penalties for breaking the contract, but the signature section was on the front, so there was no indication that there were more terms on the back. One of his customers got fed up with his misbehavior, and he lost the ensuing court case because the contract was deemed to be misleading (hiding more clauses after the signature).

I'm not sure if this would fall into the same boat, but if the dark patterns get misleading enough, there is a real-world risk that the contract would fall into the same situation: misleading enough that the hidden portions of the contract can't be applied.

Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract

#568

Post by hynco » Sun, Feb 06, 2022, 2:43 PM UTC

hey, just seeing this I don't want to hold back on what we are working, it might help some. It's an Adobe Illustrator alternative for the web. Still not launched officially but many designers use it in a beta mode. Feel free to check it out here. Happy about any feedback. Point is - it is free. Paid plans will come later with more expert features. https://home.heritagedesigner.com/share/ckzbdfl8y017j1ktw9ge...

Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract

#569

Post by tomjonesey » Sun, Feb 06, 2022, 3:01 PM UTC

No post body was provided.

Re: Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract

#570

Post by ClumsyPilot » Sun, Feb 06, 2022, 3:16 PM UTC

somat wrote: post #528

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not a good idea if you, in the future, may actually need Adobe's services again. #Monopoly Any advice, alternative PDF editor for Windows?

PDF editor? I have always regarded pdf as a terminal file format, the place data goes to die. Only half joking but pdf was always the final form from some other program, the internal editable data was never pdf. I have never seen a program works on the pdf directly, Probably because I have never had that much exposure to adobe software. the few times I have needed to do so I had to use a pdf programing library. If yo…

thank you for the link, never came across scribus before!

When I deal with government documents, visas, etc. I frequently need to produce 200-page PDFs that contains bank statements, utility bills, or other documents that arrived as PDF or were scanned into PDF. Some of those were scanned upside down, and then you might need to compress or split the resulting doc because of file size limit. So I need serious PDF editing software to deal with this - converting from PDF and back ruins all the official documents and leads to problems.