Ask HN: Adobe robbed me, what do I do?

I'm pretty salty, I've been paying for Adobe Stock for about $40/month and you get about 10 assets a month. I had 240 assets, so spent about $960 to get it. They failed to charge my credit card and now they removed all credits and said they cannot give it back.

My credit card is on file and is working fine for all other products. I basically feel robbed. It just seems silly that they cannot give the assets back. The manager told me the same thing and told me to look at the Terms of Service.

Is this my fault given they had the credit card on file and its working fine for everything else? It just seems like Adobe has zero accountability.

Also I guess a bit of a warning to anyone who has Adobe Stock, make sure your payments are being processed or they will remove years of credits... To buy the amount of credits I have on their site, it's like $3000.

Read about the arbitration rules you agreed to. Likely similar to: https://www.adobe.com/legal/terms.html

Arbitration costs money (usually split between both parties). If you feel like you have a case and are willing to put up an additional $500 to $1000 you might get your assets back.

I think the bigger thing for Adobe is that invoking arbitration might force them to engage their legal council and you might find them much more willing to give you your assets back pre-arbitration than to pay their legal team to represent them.

I was curious if this was true and looked it up. According to the American Arbitration Association rules section R-9:

Small Claims Option for the Parties If a party’s claim is within the jurisdiction of a small claims court, either party may choose to take the claim to that court instead of arbitration as follows: (a) The parties may take their claims to small claims court without first filing with the AAA.

I am very much not a lawyer and have zero experience with arbitration but that seems pretty strait forward unless I am missing something?

https://www.adr.org/sites/default/files/Consumer_Rules_Web_2...

It is bad customer service that they didn't restore the rollover credits.

If I am understanding you correctly, you're on the Adobe $49/month plan, which gives you 25 credits/month then rolled over 240 or nearly 10 months worth. If that is accurate may I suggest you re-evaluate Adobe Stock going forward and look at their pay per stock competitors? In particular if they're going to treat rollover credits as this poorly (e.g. expiration and or sudden loss)?

The whole rollover credit thing is just a manipulative way of establishing sunk cost (e.g. "I cannot cancel I have months of value in this account!"). If you're building up rollover credit consistently over months you're likely better off either with a lower tier of subscription or a competitor. Adobe's biggest sales pitch is their integration, but third parties also offer Adobe extensions.

Unfortunately I doubt blasting them on social media will help here, Adobe just doesn't care what people think of them.

[0] https://stock.adobe.com/plans

OP's description is super unclear. What are "credits" that Adobe removed? Access to the assets OP purchased or something else?

I read it as Adobe were _never_ able to charge the card, not just this one time. If my reading is correct, then I don't see an issue with taking back something that was never paid for.