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Adobe charges subscription cancellation fee

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Re: Adobe charges subscription cancellation fee

#561

Post by anigbrowl »

cbmuser wrote: post #227
paxys wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will have access to 100% of the service if you hold up your side of the contract you signed.

Exactly. It’s a contract. If you cancel it early, the other contract partner has the right to get a compensation fee. That’s perfectly normal and also practised by other companies.

You're equating contract terms with general reciprocity. Many, perhaps most other businesses pro-rate subscription services and understand that customers may need to cancel, if only because they don't want the sort of bad publicity Adobe is receiving right now. Tough contracts with significant breaching penalties are generally made between peers (two individuals or two businesses) rather than producers and consumers.

There is a doctrine of unconscionability in contract law that says just because you secure agreement to highly unfavorable terms doesn't mean the contract is beyond review of a court, if there is a significant asymmetry between the contract parties.

Re: Adobe charges subscription cancellation fee

#562

Post by anigbrowl »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #485
Dylan16807 wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying a multi-hundred-dollar cancellation fee or being unable to cancel is also really bad for people on a tight budget.

Yeppers. This is true. It sucks to be poor. But being bit in the ass later because something has changed and you want out will hurt a smaller percentage of people than a large upfront fee that makes it unattainable for many. That denies many people opportunity in the name of protecting some portion of those people from potential negative consequences.

I definitely prefer the decision of whether to sacrifice for an upfront cost than to be hit with an unexpected one.

Re: Adobe charges subscription cancellation fee

#563

Post by anigbrowl »

nicbou wrote: post #302
cbmuser wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "cancellation fee" is because you are breaking a contract which you agreed to in order to receive a discount. Exactly. And it’s perfectly legal and practiced by a lot of companies, even the public transport company in Berlin does that. There seem to be a lot of people in this discussion on HN who seem very inexperienced in signing business contracts.

It's also practised by almost every landlord. You can end your lease without the usual 3 month notice but expect to pay a fee or lose a month of rent.

Yes, that sort of thing is why people hate landlords, because they will often throw people out with much less notice than they demand. And there's a significant difference between the sort of landlord that owns a few buildings and can be negotiated with directly, and big corporate landlords that exploit their strategic advantage.

Re: Adobe charges subscription cancellation fee

#564

Post by angry_octet »

robomartin wrote: post #560
angry_octet wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you imagine the trauma of having to pay for MATLAB? Easily $50k/year/engineer for some places, plus many extra runtimes for batch simulation. Once you have a significant chunk of code in MATLAB (especially using their special toolboxes) you are screwed.

I don't mind mind paying for good tools/software when you are making good use of it. I guess my problem is with these subscription models where your software evaporates when you stop paying. That's rough. As a simple example, I couldn't imagine being on that kind of a model with Excel. We have tools built on Excel covering disciplines from electrical, mechanical, software, optical and acoustics engineering dating bac…

We'd be happy paying per project, but if course The Mathworks knows that would bring less revenue.

We've actually had a large effort to move towards python which has been successful in preventing unnecessary MATLAB. Holding the cancer at bay.

Re Excel, they are making offline installs increasingly difficult and expensive, and yet their online version can't do many things (like, Solver doesn't exist, you have to licence it separately, which is essentially impossible in a corporate setup).

Gmail at least has Takeout that works. The problem is that going back to Postfix + anti-spam would require using muscles that have atrophied, and I'm sure I'd have to outsource the problem of getting mail delivered anyway.

Re: Adobe charges subscription cancellation fee

#565

Post by DominikPeters »

dmingod666 wrote: post #229
DominikPeters wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you bother to read the small print, it appears to be written to be deliberately misleading. Instead of positively saying that one enters an annual commitment, it only says that there is "No annual commitment required after the first year". "Cancel anytime" suggests you can stop your contract, not that you have the option to pre-pay the remaining months and forfeit your access.

Correct, it's misleading if you chose to ignore the words "after the first year".

“No annual commitment required after the first year” does not logically imply that there is such a commitment for the first year.

Re: Adobe charges subscription cancellation fee

#566

Post by alias_neo »

pc86 wrote: post #417
alias_neo wrote: post #319

I got hit with this a few years back. I signed up for Ps CC for a month (I thought) to create an anniversary gift for my wife. I used it ONCE. Tried to cancel and they told me I had in fact signed up for a year, and that if I didn't cancel now, they'd give me two months free. I didn't want it at all! Anyway, I sucked it up, got on with the remainder of the year, because they wouldn't let me put the cancellation in ea…

This is why any time there is anything with a date associated with it more than a week or so out I go into my work calendar and add a reminder. Depending on what it is that may be on the date, or a week or even month prior. If it's super important I'll add it to my Google calendar which I don't use for anything except alerts like this that a year+ out where I may not be at the same job but still need to remember.

Honestly, this was a reasonably inexpensive way to learn a life long lesson to keep calendar reminders for distant future, with recurring alarms for several days or more if required. I accepted the defeat, learned from it and moved on.

My wife was/is happy with the anniversary present.

Re: Adobe charges subscription cancellation fee

#567

Post by yamakadi »

alisonkisk wrote: post #487
yamakadi wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this exact issue. I specially chose the more expensive monthly options and read all the fine print, but apparently the cancellation fee snuck by somehow. My solution was removing my credit card, adding a “you don’t deserve to get paid” prepaid VISA charged with ¥200, and canceling anyway. They tried to charge me on and off for about a month — and a random charge attempt 3 months later. Having to do this is a te…

Did it show up on your credit report?

I’m not sure how it works in the US, but in Japan, companies usually send a final notice by snail mail that outline the consequences of not paying.

Adobe hasn’t even sent an email saying yet charge failed and I have to update my payment method out anything else. It’s as if they are aware of how shady the cancellation fee is and won’t chase you down for it.

Re: Adobe charges subscription cancellation fee

#568

Post by yamakadi »

ramchip wrote: post #345
alias_neo wrote: post #319

I got hit with this a few years back. I signed up for Ps CC for a month (I thought) to create an anniversary gift for my wife. I used it ONCE. Tried to cancel and they told me I had in fact signed up for a year, and that if I didn't cancel now, they'd give me two months free. I didn't want it at all! Anyway, I sucked it up, got on with the remainder of the year, because they wouldn't let me put the cancellation in ea…

Japanese cell phone companies did something similar for many years, they all offered two-year contracts with a cancellation fee of around $100, and you could only cancel in the last month before it auto-renewed. The government finally passed new regulation to stop this a few years ago. The extra insult was they called it a "discount package" (50% off!), but it was already baked into all the advertised prices. In othe…

They still have very misleading text on their contracts and their sales people will try to imply canceling has a cost attached. You could usually get the fees waived if you wasted enough of their support staff’s time.

Re: Adobe charges subscription cancellation fee

#569

Post by tekknik »

daemin wrote: post #473
csunbird wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, showing the taxes separately is a very good idea in principle, so that you know how much tax you are paying. I usually hate the fact that I can not see how much tax I am paying, although, in Germany, the amount of tax is shown in the checkout pages.

There are a few details with that: Does the sticker have to show all taxes or just the sales tax/GST/VAT? I know that pretty much every country in the world has an alcohol tax that is applied to things like wine. So should the sticker also include that? In the USA they have a particular hatred of making tax easier to pay. There's a political affiliation whose goal is to make filing a tax return harder and more compli…

> In the USA they have a particular hatred of making tax easier to pay. There's a political affiliation whose goal is to make filing a tax return harder and more complicated to do so that people will complain more about it and hate the process. So that has created the tax return filing industry and associated lobby groups. So having sales tax need to be applied on top fits within this world view.

Which political affiliation and what gives you this idea?

Re: Adobe charges subscription cancellation fee

#570

Post by tekknik »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #372
csunbird wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, showing the taxes separately is a very good idea in principle, so that you know how much tax you are paying. I usually hate the fact that I can not see how much tax I am paying, although, in Germany, the amount of tax is shown in the checkout pages.

The question is, does the tax matter so much it's worth putting it on every price sticker? I'd argue no - it's not like you can opt to not pay it. I assume your sales tax works like ours (Poland), i.e. per product/service category, so it's also not like you can buy a substitute product with lower tax. I like the solution we have - price stickers have full price, and printed receipts carry tax breakdown.

I can think of at least one reason where tax calculated on the final total vs each price is better (for the consumer), rounding. With tax calculated on the final total, you pay at most $0.01 extra in rounding “errors”. However with tax calculated on each price you pay at most number of items times $0.01, which is more and could add up over time. I personally want to give the gov as little of my money as possible.
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