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Ask HN: How to cancel Adobe CC subscription without paying a “cancellation fee”?

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21–30 of 64 posts

Re: Ask HN: How to cancel Adobe CC subscription without paying a “cancellation fee”?

#21

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.

This won't stop Adobe from sending collections after you

Re: Ask HN: How to cancel Adobe CC subscription without paying a “cancellation fee”?

#22
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.

Re: Ask HN: How to cancel Adobe CC subscription without paying a “cancellation fee”?

#25
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.

Re: Ask HN: How to cancel Adobe CC subscription without paying a “cancellation fee”?

#26
post #10
post #2

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 t…

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

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..

Re: Ask HN: How to cancel Adobe CC subscription without paying a “cancellation fee”?

#27
post #18

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.

Re: Ask HN: How to cancel Adobe CC subscription without paying a “cancellation fee”?

#28
post #2

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 t…

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.

Re: Ask HN: How to cancel Adobe CC subscription without paying a “cancellation fee”?

#29

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.

Re: Ask HN: How to cancel Adobe CC subscription without paying a “cancellation fee”?

#30
post #13

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.
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