> calculating and displaying that price isn’t easy since the fee is 50 percent of a customer’s remaining term
But I'm sure Adobe's servers have no issue calculating that fee afterwards.
I can't see how they can remotely argue in court against implementing such a simple requirement like "show the exact cancellation fee before the client accept".
SpaceX has a satellite launch calculator right on their website[1]. This is fun to point out to SaaS companies that claim their pricing is too complicated to put on their website.
You probably got this, but since others are replying to the extract out of context it's worth clarifying that that quote is about the difficulty of displaying the exact cancellation fee before the subscription is even begun. So the difficulty isn't that the math is complicated, it's that you can't display an exact fee when you don't know what the cancellation date will be.
That said, this continuation of the quote was funny to me:
> "We always have to balance the need to be clear and conspicuous with our terms — which is what we’re trying to do — with the number of things we need to be clear and conspicuous about."
This is a problem that Adobe created and it's a problem that Adobe can solve by just... simplifying the terms. If your terms are hard to explain concisely then that, in itself, is the problem!
Most consulting contracts (software, design, business, etc) have early cancellation clauses for customers that want to cancel for no good reason. Usually they specify how much they’d be refunded from the retainer at different stages of the project. This is actually harder on paper than on software. I’m sure Adobe has elite product owners and engineers that can figure this out.
I know it’s a fool’s errand to call out a company so obviously arguing in bad faith like Adobe is in this article.
But seriously, what an insulting statement to make — like it’s hard to put “Early cancelation fees up to $180” (a random number I picked) on the damn website. If they’re concerned that the number is shockingly high , well, that’s in their control too
Wouldn’t they just need to multiply the purchase price by whatever percentage of the term is left, then divide that in half?
Am I bad at math or is it actually easy and they’re just acting like idiots?
I don’t see how Adobe can have a product like CC with countless complex algorithms, and they’re arguing that no one at the company can figure out a rather trivial math problem that could be solved by a high school freshman.
The moment they are going predatory with subscriptions or online only stuff I am gone. Affinity really had to put out a statement they aren’t going to do that. Let’s hope.
This is the HN bubble speaking. "Tech companies" represent a very small fraction of the economy, and even a very small fraction of companies that have programmers who write code and need databases.
And that's before we get into the fact that Oracle is not just a database company. They have a bunch of other products targeted at many different industries and applications, such as project management, ERP, procurement, etc.
Oracle wants to be the one-stop shop for technology needed by any of the many, many legacy industries that aren't tech, and in many industries they succeed at that.
It's really amazing to watch, plus the delusion that it's ctos being tricked or something.
take Opera. You buy it to run eg an amusement park or a casino or chain of hotels. That's a relatively complex thing to do, and not something that amusement parks or hotels are capable of building out a team of devs to build themselves.
The list of things that are table stakes would run $10-$20m of devtime for a decade to build out. Bookings (both individual, block for events, and syncs w/ expedia or others) / payments / loyalty + customer relationship management / etc.
If you are a big bank, migrating away is a big risk, and anyway you make so much profit that it’s better to leave an extra 10M USD license fees in costs untouched, rather than risk destroying the 300M USD in profit.
(Add that to the risk that your CTO may get mad because he won’t get his kickback)
Every F500 company with historical Oracle installations built before the open source offerings were actually competitive. Even if every one of those decided today they were going to ditch Oracle, you are talking about multi-year initiatives.
Oracle has a ton of Line of Business software embedded into companies and migration is too massive to even consider so it remains. Peoplesoft, Siebel CRM and EBiz are huge.
There is also plenty of 3rd party LoB software that requires Oracle databases as well.
Also, yea, there is still plenty of companies onboarding Oracle Products, usually due to some new exec they hired who used it at last company and swears that it will revolutionize their business.
Lots of people hate Oracle with a passion and will not use it for anything new. However, their existing production databases already use it and migration could take years and there is a lot of risk in doing that. As a result, they'll be profitable for years to come.
My company has a bunch of Oracle databases. It's a large bank so I assume they are paying a lot. I don't know why Oracle was chosen in the first place, but it surely wasn't by people who were very passionate about databases or open source or even tech. It's something that works and as long as it works they are not going to ditch it. Whatever it costs, it's not very much in the big scale of things.
Oracle tracks over five billion individuals worldwide through its data aggregation and de-anonymization services. All that "anonymized" data your "free" (and not-free) services collects on you for resale: one of Oracle's businesses is correlating that data together from many sources and sell that correlation. So rest assured the anonymized data your pot shop and bank are selling to brokers is definitely getting worked backwards to update and maintain your shadow profile.
These companies are selling finished products to other companies. Think ERP. SAP sells one too, and so does Microsoft I think. Oracle’s I assume uses oracle db, which will require separate licenses and support. So by the time Oracle cranks up the price lever, the business is too deep to get out. When you see these ads about “how they enable businesses” or how “they empower dreams” this is because what they sell is so unspecialized that they can’t really explain what it is they sell. They sell mostly crud software with forms connected through custom workflow engines that are templated for different industries, all on top of their core technologies (for licenses) and with integrations to almost every system know to man. Because if they do not have one, they will bill the next customer to build it.
When they talk to actual tech companies, they probably laugh when we can’t figure out what they actually do. We’re children playing with Postgres and node apps while they’re owning entire markets every quarter.
Took me a while to realize this, but the need they serve is just that people want their businesses to work, including complying with all laws, do payroll, keep customer lists updated, send documents to the CEO for approval, order supplies from China and produce financial reports. Every business with a decent size will need that, so Salesforce, Oracle, IBM, SAP, Microsoft and friends, with help from McKinsey, Accenture & Co pick up the slack, with kickbacks all around.
Their finance/accounting products are sold to finance executives. They conveniently downplay the fact that you will have to use third-party application or build your own if you want to interact with that data in a way that is remotely intuitive, as all of the stock tools they provide are absolute trash.
What a disaster Lightroom has been. They launched new Lightroom and renamed old Lightroom to Lightroom Classic. New Lightroom was missing a lot of features but was generally faster and more stable so I switched over. Then somehow Adobe decided they would refocus back on Lightroom Classic so I up and made the re-switch. It was a waste of time and money for everyone involved.
And barely scratches the surface of the catastrophe. What with mobile integration and my own shifting needs, what I didn’t need was the workflow confusion that Adobe introduced.
Lightroom was the ultimate one-stop shop but I’ve now come to split my workflow up so much that the editing is now hot-swappable. C1 is looking vulnerable to RawTherapee, I gotta say. Lightroom is sadly a dot in the rear-view mirror.
if you pay $X per month for their software that allows you to earn 100x that amount, then $X is nothing.
$X per month when you make no money and just want to play around, have a fun hobby, or just try to learn so that maybe one day you too can have a job utilizing that software, then yeah, it can be expensive. I get it. Back in the days of installing Adobe software from floppies, I too was too broke to pay for it. Now, the use of Adobe software pays my bills. For people with hobbies, these other packages might be great alternatives. For working professionally, it's just easier to use the same tools as everyone else. It's just an expense of running a business.
My biggest gripe now is all of the generative AI bullshit, but I don't use it, and it's just one of those things. I also don't use their cloud offerings, so I'm not worried about my work used for training data.
You've maliciously manipulated what I said. I said if $X/month allows you to earn 100x $X, then it is worth it. Early terminations fees have absolutely nothing to do with that. At. All. Sometimes, people go on extended periods of not having work. Creative fields are very ebb&flow drought/flood type of work. If you're a solo person, sometimes you get bogged down in the current project to the point you don't have time to hunt for the next project. When the current project ends, you could hit a dry spell for an expended time. At that point, I could see wanting to stop paying for the software you are not currently using.
However, back in the day, Photoshop was ~$1000 (using nice easy round number) for the full package. I think it was closer to $1500 for full, and $999 for upgrades, but that's too in the weeds. Updates were pretty much annually. So, you've got $1000/12 months = $83/month (but it was a lump sum payment only). Now, it's ~$60/month with much more frequent updates. If you paid the lump sum and then went on hiatus, you were still out that money.
People complain about forced to not be able to use their 10 year old version because that's all the features you need. Okay, sounds legit. However, good luck installing any 10 year old software on modern OSes. There are times were software has to be kept up to date with the OS. The 32bit to 64bit was a big one even if it was more than 10 years ago.
Again, I get trying to learn while not getting paid but needing to know it so you can have a chance to get paid. That's what I always told myself, that my using the pirated versions was for learning only. I never made any money from its use. Now, I get paid to use it, and I have a legit license. Pirating was much easier before the SaaS offerings, so I can appreciate that. For once, it pays to be old.
My main feature is muscle memory. I've been using Adobe software since early/mid 90s. My brain just thinks Adobe. There are other things like using an AE project directly within Premiere without having to render the AE timeline. Switching back to AE, make tweaks, save, and flip back to Premiere to see those changes immediately. Same with PS and Illustrator assets.
At this point in time, for me to switch to a different system would hinder my performance in an edit bay drastically while trying to learn something new. I'm old now, so the time that I used to spend doing all of that extra stuff is now spent on adulting. I used to try to learn every new thing, but I never left my computer. Now, I just want to get the work done as quickly as possible so that I can go back to my non-work activities.
Photoshop hasnt added a feature I need in 10 years, yet I cant use the 10 year old single license I paid for, so now I pay yearly to subscribe. It's still the best on the market for me tho.
LOL just don't pay the cancellation fees. Make sure you had signed up with a privacy.com temporary card number. When it comes time to quit, delete the card and forget Adobe!
You don't even need to do that, as a loophole has existed for a long time. By switching to a cheaper subscription plan, you won't incur any charges, and it will trigger a new "30-day grace period for cancellations." This allows you to cancel immediately without any fees.
Do you really think a company as scummy as Adobe would hesitate to send your cancellation fee bill to collections? To put it on your credit report? To skiptrace your name, email address, social, etc?
Unless you created a fake alias from the getgo when you original signed up expressly for this purpose, simply not paying won't be the end of it.
Unless they are getting your SSN beforehand, how will they know they're not dinging the wrong credit report? How much does a law firm to handle someone suing them for false credit reporting cost? Names suffer from birthday paradox too.
I bought the Affinity suite for 50% off. It’s a bit like designing with one hand right now because things are different, but it’s on par with CS6 in terms of functionality, and without all the superfluous bs that gets crammed into CC.
> The early termination fees in the FTC case represent “less than half a percent of our annual revenue,” Rao told me. “It doesn’t drive our business, it doesn’t drive our business decisions.”
This feels extremely disingenuous.
Because how many people see the early termination fee and then decide to continue with Adobe for the remainder of the year rather than switch to a competitor, because of the sunk cost?
The point of the early termination fee isn't to get people to pay it. Measuring how many people pay it is to miss the point entirely.
The point of the early termination fee is to prevent people from cancelling entirely. It would be much more interesting to see how many people try to cancel, get to the point where it reveals how much they'll be charged to cancel, and then don't.
> The early termination fees in the FTC case represent “less than half a percent of our annual revenue,” Rao told me. “It doesn’t drive our business, it doesn’t drive our business decisions.
Great, so you should have no issue removing them altogether because it's not really a material source of revenue and it would result in meaningfully more satisfied users.
> “I look at a lot of cancellation flows that are out there. There’s people you can’t even cancel online, you have to call. That doesn’t seem simple at all. When you start talking about the the range of what a cancellation flow can and should be, we’ve always been in the category of good, and we want to be great.”
Who are you looking at that requires calling? Certainly not big names like Adobe. This is such a disingenuous argument that it almost counts as evidence that Adobe's culture is one of trying to mislead.
Startup idea: A teams/slack/email competitor that takes everything you write and translates it to an AI summary before sending it, so it is therefore exempt from discovery
I don't quite get what the problem is here. Has Adobe already updated their subscription offerings? I see both yearly and monthly subscription options. If anything, it's unusual that you can subscribe to an annual plan and get out prematurely, without having to pay for the entire period. Over here, annual contracts for service subscriptions usually do not have a no-questions-asked early termination option at all, with or without fees.
Agreed. Annual is usually paid upfront in exchange for the discount you receive.
I paid for a year of Ghost Pro and realised after only a few weeks that I’d really rather use something else. It’s my mistake and there’s no comeback.
I have an annual Adobe subscription that I’m keeping around until the renewal - just for the last few jobs I might need it for - rather than cancelling. Maybe I’m just a sucker for sunk cost fallacy?
I needed to temporarily subscribe to an Acrobat plan to work with a specific PDF file from a client for 1 day. They deliberately implement a dark pattern that doesn't allow you to cancel a subscription immediately after creation. It claims that your subscription is "processing" and you have to come back later to cancel it.
I think they can just remove the annual plan all together and add a discount that "you get monthly discount after you subscribe for 12 continuous month, and that discount is terminated after you stopped subscription". And then there will be no cancellation fee argument. Gyms use this type of discount all the time and don't really have any issues.
I think I will only torrent Adobe stuff until such time as I can pay once the present value to a 7% discount-rate perpetuity with equal cashflow schedule to their subscription, for a perpetual license.
It’s so disingenuous for them to say “early cancellation fees are less than one percent of revenue, they don’t affect our business.” Of course it’s a tiny chunk of revenue, because no one is canceling! That’s the whole point of the fee!
Not sure who Adobe is trying to convince with this press cycle. The FTC already has their sights set[0] on Adobe for precisely these fees and they aren’t going to be fooled by some half-assed bird-brained gish-galloping. These arguments from Adobe read like internal kool-aid shared in meetings between Directors and VP’s — not like any sincere attempt to actually address the FTC and their specific concerns.
Good, hopefully the FTC fine is high enough to collect all those cancellation fee dollars Adobe has collected since it started CC, with some compounded interest...
> disappointed in the way they’re continuing to take comments out of context from non-executive employees from years ago to make their case
Whenever someone complains that you've taken something "out of context" your response is "OK, so what's the 'context'? "
As for unexpected charges being placed on your credit card: you always use a temporary, amount-limited card, which a lot of institutions offer. I use privacy.com.
Someone always says here, "Oh, but they can still come after you." But they don't. You should make a best effort to follow their rules, stop using the service, and then close the card. "Cards becoming invalid" are an event handled in their normal course of business.
Oh what are they going to do, call me a bunch of times and make it harder for me to pay someone else interest for money I should have been saving? Big deal! An employer who cares isn't worth my effort to impress anyway. LOL to think credit reporting companies actually matter, it's a big con game and we're all the marks!
I am lawsuit-proof and actually suing me for a half-grand for an early cancellation to a license, and winning, is a great way to encourage me to find ways to cost you tens of times the judgment both in indirect lost revenue and direct damages (if I can find any way to). I hold grudges for a very long time, and I know how to use search engines and darknet forums. Simply, I am not someone to try and leg over using the legal system unless you are ready to wage extralegal war for your financial survival.
Again, I am lawsuit proof and my time counts at a million dollars a year in revenge if I am involuntarily committed (if you secure contempt of court).
unlike a regular monthly subscription, these “annual billed monthly” plans have a significant fee if you cancel early, and the specific fee is not disclosed anywhere on the order screen
Maybe the specific fee isn't disclosed, but looking at the screenshot it's quite clear that the monthly option says "cancel anytime" and the annual-billed-monthy option is a year commitment and "fee applies if you cancel after 14 days."
Anyone who was later surprised didn't read what they were buying. This didn't look confusing or deceptive to me at all.
Reading that, I would assume the fee would be like $10. Not the majority of the contract cost. I ran into this fee when canceling and absolutely hated Adobe for it. If there were even decent alternatives to their products, I’d never give them a red cent again.
I'd assume it's the balance remaining of the annual amount, since it's an "annual-billed-monthly" you bought a year so you pay for a year. I see no hints that it would be anything else.
I have to admit I don't understand why this is an upopular view. Do people think they should be able to buy a year subscription at a discount to the monthly rate, back out halfway through, and then be able to alter the terms of the deal they made?
Adobe can either (A) charge the full year up front, or (B) specify the full year cost and give customers the option to pay that monthly (like the buy now, pay later plans).
The issue is that their current wording is deceptive.
But I'm sure Adobe's servers have no issue calculating that fee afterwards.
I can't see how they can remotely argue in court against implementing such a simple requirement like "show the exact cancellation fee before the client accept".