I understand that the odds of repercussions are small and that there are no damages on Adobe's side since you haven't physically taken their goods so it would probably have to be taken up by the public prosecutor rather than become a civil case... but still, I'd not be happy having my name on a "doesn't pay their bills" list, nor is it quite honest.
Or am I misunderstanding the situation and did they advertised with monthly cancelable? (False advertising) Nobody mentioned that in the thread though, and from this comment it sounds like it was very clear that you were agreeing into a year-long subscription: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24232282
All conversations could only be done in English, something my wife would already be pretty uncomfortable with.
Adobe is very unclear about what you’re actually agreeing to up until the point you’re cancelling.
I just blocked transactions and never heard from them again (except for some emails).
If they want to fight it, good luck winning it in Dutch courts when the conditions are unclear.
They wanted proof that I had been in contact with the company and tried to get a refund from them, and that I in fact didn't owe them money.
Ended up with months of paperwork, claims from the other party that I ordered it myself (no idea where as the website to order was gone) including printouts of Stripe with my IP address which was supposed to prove their point.
Five or six mail forms to fill out (yes _mail_ not email) over the period of months with very strict deadlines.
They must have gathered the IP address from an earlier transaction a year before that. It also did not raise any flags that the transaction was exactly one year later on the minute.
An incredible waste of my time and if I had to go through all of that again I will just let it go.
Depends on what it is. Any recurring SEPA payment I can get back up to 60 days. Separately I can block those payments. All from the app or their website, I don't need to talk to anyone.
I thought being able to get that money back, plus being able to block companies were SEPA rules. Meaning, applies to loads of countries (at least the countries with the Euro).
This depends on the credit card company but mine is very willing to charge back if I call. They find it pretty trivial.
I’ve never done anything like this with a debit card or bank though. I think the money that leaves through debit is actually gone and that’s a distinction. I know the EU is more debit focused.
The era where maestro cards were impossible to use abroad was already over ten years ago. The only thing you might need a creditcard for abroad is hotels and car rental, which you wouldn't be able to do with any kind of debit card (outside of a relatively small selection of hotels).
In the US & China, it had big maestro stickers everywhere, but it didn't work at all. Different cards, different banks; on calling the banks they said they did not even see a transaction coming in and they the cards are set for international travel (and work fine everywhere they are accepted in the EU).
And it's not for lack of trying; One time on a big slog from US -> China -> AUS, I (stupidly) brought 1 credit card and 3 maestros and my CC got cancelled (fraud); I tried literally every atm , shop in these countries and could not get $1. I had to borrow from my colleagues. This is a few years ago.
The problem is between me and the vendor, not the bank.
Usually they ask you to fill an online form and attach any evidence. After that it always felt like a call center employee decided whether to start the refund or not. If you write something smart, well researched, polite, and long, chances are that poor person will just skim through it and click “accept”.
Then on the other side the company has 30-45 days to object via their bank.
With big companies they probably think it’s not worth their time.
With small companies the bank notices about a new dispute probably go to an inbox nobody monitors.
It's hidden behind a click of course, but it isn't obscure.
Disclaimer: IANAL (But I helped as software developer at a factoring company: which buys unpaid invoices from freelancers for a fee or a percentage of the invoice-amount)
Getting way off-topic here, but I’ve never heard of this. Is it like a bill-collector for freelancers? Who do the non-payers tend to be - is it companies who think they can stiff a freelancer, but who will pay up when someone with teeth comes knocking? Also, can anyone sell an invoice on to someone else to collect it, or does that possibility have to be written into the initial contract between the freelancer and the employer?
It’s used by sportsclubs here as well, since hunting down people for small amounts of money is a pain.
ClubCollect is a large one working in parts of Europe
A normal business, say your bank or you energy supplier or your software supplier, will try and recover a debt with some basic attempts. But then they'll bundle together all their debts and sell them to debt collectors for pennies on the pound.
Don't know why they're called a factoring company in Holland.
“Factoring is a financial transaction and a type of debtor finance in which a business sells its accounts receivable (i.e., invoices) to a third party (called a factor) at a discount“
To me it sounds like a bad translation. "Invoice" in Dutch is "factuur". "Facturering" is the process of sending an invoice. I have often encountered the word "factoring" as a supposedly-English translation of it.
Free trial, etc. I give my phone number (something like "for legal reasons"). Then it asks for my CC. I already hate it because it's highly dubious they need my CC number for a free trial since it's not needed to deliver the product. Fine, I give it. Then the process is declined because they don't like my rechargeable CC.
I am a happy AWS freeloader and potential customer now (well, for one year at least).
1. Phone number is required to minimize fake/bot/fraudulent use accounts.
2. Credit card is required in case you want to immediately scale up, and also, used as anti fraud as depending on the card used, and address is used to judge you as a customer and whether or not you should be disabled immediately upon account creation.
Credit cards first six numbers are the BIN, or bank identification number, these are used to sort whom the issuing bank is, what type of credit card line, and whether or not it is a virtual or such.
These are compounded to give you an antifraud score. Address and connecting IP address help too.
So that's why it was denied, but for a company like Micrsoft, their billing practices are very much streamlined and not so hidden vs other companies nor do they introduce "tricky" language such as Adobe's yearly contract, payable monthly SAAS.
That's not what MS says the credit card is for (edit: which doesn't mean they aren't using it the way you explained they do):
> We ask for your credit card number to verify your identity and to keep out spam and bots. You won’t be charged unless you upgrade.
They don't want me because of my CC (I specifically want a pre-paid CC I can put money on as I need it and can never be overcharged) because my CC can't be easily charged in case I forget to cancel the service.
Amazon, PSN store, paypal, online clothing store, pro and non pro pc parts store, etc. are all fine with this card.
edit: I understand Azure is a recurring payment with potential upcost at some point or another and that the examples I gave are one time payment but then they really should find a way to let me try their stuff for free as they say they want or just stop giving me resources if the card is declined.
The type of credit card has high fraud activity.
Remember, it is to stop bad actors from using azure services for phishing, tricky things, etc (since a default instance w/ IIS, or any web service will literally be on windows.net.)
Anti-fraud == verify identity.
That card has my whole name on it and the bank has a trail of everything I do with it. MS also now have a verified phone number and can see they both come from the same country.
> Remember, it is to stop bad actors from using azure services for phishing, tricky things, etc (since a default instance w/ IIS, or any web service will literally be on windows.net.)
Nothing prevents me from doing that with a regular credit card.
Nothing prevents them from shutting down services/instances that break their ToS.
How convenient for them the only way to try out their free offer is to give them the ability to withdraw money from me.
Similarly if Adobe owed you money they may make you run through a customer service maze in order to get it. That's legal too. They don't have to provide you with a method to automatically take as much money as you assume you are owed.
In the USA, it would be civil issue not a criminal one anyway. They can sue me if they like.
As far as the morality portion of things is concerned, I don't consider what they are doing moral anyway and I sleep fine at night.
For anyone not doing professional video editing work I can definitely recommend DaVinci Resolve. The basic version is completely free and is extremely powerful.
Pro tip: Do go through the slight additional hassle of setting up a local postgresql server with their installer and use that instead of the "local database" (=SQLite). Saving projects with a lot of internal data (e.g. many clips using correctors with trackers) is much quicker (>10x) with pg.
I always thought DaVinci was extremely powerful and overkill. I need something which can handle HDR and is a bit better than iMovie, but, both FCPX and Premiere were too much work for me to learn.
Seriously, fuck that company.
edit: seems I have a fancy for run on sentences. sorry
You can also buy prepaid debit cards at supermarkets, post offices, etc (at least in Australia) which allow you to do the same thing.
Similarly, doing this to a Steam account or iTunes account cuts off your access to all your previously "purchased" content.
Yes, you can increase your value to the project thousandfold with more direct contributions like coding, bugfixes, donations, community work, etc, but already being part of the community is of help.
https://lwn.net/Articles/825602/
If you participate in the community, you can be a boon or you can also be a drag (if you just use the software in the privacy of your home, report problems and ask questions, without every giving back in any way, not even by answering other folks' questions).
If you want your open source developers to eat, they need cold hard cash.
From the lwn link above:
> Words fail me to express how beyond-utterly-broken the existing TDF / desktop model is for the ecosystem around selling Desktop LibreOffice.
> Collabora - despite C'bra still putting a lot of work into LibreOffice Desktop, having an outstanding support capability, doing lots of marketing, being the largest code contributor to LibreOffice, and having lots of existing happy customers / references for desktop LibreOffice, ... etc. etc.
> We have not had -one- -single- -new- Collabora Office customer since 2018 - zero.
(for context: the former LibreOffice development team of SUSE joined Collabora in 2013, so they're not a scrappy new startup completely disjointed from Libreoffice)
Whether problem reports are a help or hindrance depends strongly on the type of report. A low information "it broke" post is a hindrance. A high information post giving steps to reproduce, having looked for similar bug reports, giving system details needed to reproduce the report, should be a help.
200 million users means the community is huge. Not every project is in a situation like that. It means that Libreoffice creates tremendous value around the globe, and extracting just some of that value means the development efforts can be grown.
There are positive things in that e-mail as well: many large institutional users do contribute back.
Also note that well researched bug reports can be helpful for the community, especially if you post workarounds you found into the bug thread, and the thread is accessible by search.
As for Collabora, I'm not sure how much they engage in marketing? Maybe if they increase such efforts/change strategy they can grow their number of customers.
For example, in one of my last job (I'm a freelance), I could get paid full time to contribute to open source tools because the guy taking the decision heard about PostgreSQL and open source somewhere. If that guy has only heard about Oracle, the same work would have gone closed source.
If the person responsible for the office solution of a school heard of open office from you, you did help a lot. Because many times, big open source users will invest in open source, in form of support, custom development or just sponsoring.
In addition to gp's point: After settling my income I began buying software (games mostly) on steam/etc to support studios I like, but it is still much easier to torrent it afterwards and to not deal with bs that stores represent. I never realized before how much hassle it is to own a legal version of everything. You pay your money and they don't even bother of your convenience or digital rights, only theirs. Recently I bought starcrart remastered (without torrenting) and that battle.net downloads over 200mb over my adsl line every flipping time I try to run it. As a result, I just watch falcon pal match reviews at youtube and never run it. Blizzard deserved that money for sure, but man isn't that stupid.
Playing pirated game is putting trust into the hands of some anonymous hackers. And that begs the question, what do they gain from giving out the game for free?
They could be doing it just for fun, for coolness, or out of altruism. And that's true for probably many case. But to say none of them wanted to earn expedient money would not persuade me.
Malware and Spyware is pretty common with purchased games, of course they call it "DRM" but it has the same goal and purpose
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/06/crackers-say-denuvo-d...
That's the point. Companies have proved themselves not accountable to their customers.
A modder distributed a tool to bypass the anti-cheat and restore performance the same day the expansion released. It took over two weeks for Capcom to get the game playable again, and many more before they improved performance back to roughly pre-update levels.
For reference, I'd been using Steam Proton to play the base game on Linux and was getting 60fps at nearly max settings. After the update, I got 1. One frame per second. I saw a number of similar reports from native Windows players.
This is kind of expected for online gaming due to many folks fucked up mentality of using cheats and playing with rest of the crowd (some psychologists could probably go quite deep on breaking this down to mostly childhood issues). If you play on your own, its just a pain in the a.
Many people buy the game and then play pirated version, just to avoid this kind of punishment of the lawful citizens.
Probably over half the popular multiplayer products on Steam have rootkits in them that send a lot of data about you straight to the publisher. Companies are not accountable for the things you want them to be accountable for, so for normal people it just looks like they're not accountable at all.
If a company does something sketchy and you cancel or reverse the charges, you generally lose everything on the account - not just the thing you're disputing.
Adobe is similar to Steam in that a single account is likely to have a variety of different products associated with it. If you somehow end up in a dispute involving Steam and reverse a charge, Valve will (IIRC) close out your entire account.
The card industry imposes a lot of regulation on merchants in the name of security (e.g. PCI) and customer experience (e.g. not allowing merchants to demand secondary ID for in-person transactions). Retaliation fraud by subscription merchants is something the card industry could stop and the industry should not be let off the hook for allowing this practice.
Neither, for that matter, should governments be given a free pass. Consumer dispute resolution processes exist for a reason (in no small part to reduce the load on the legal system) and circumventing them should not be tolerated.
It would be good if cards had a white or black list option.
"With third parties, within the United States and in other countries, who may access data about you to perform functions on our behalf"
Here it would be nice to get a clear picture of what these functions are. If they are only for the processing of payments then this is fine (they actually mention this case in the second bullet point so my example does not hold). If these functions are to data mine my data for reselling to a third party advertisment network that would not be alright.
clearly they cannot. they are based in the US.
it's like VPNs. or DOH. it's not a matter of absolute privacy, it's a matter of privacy wrt a certain party.
if privacy.com really were private, you'd fund an account with bitcoin. which afaict you cannot. so you need another level of abstraction/privacy to keep your details from privacy.com.
I did this for the free month of linkedn gold or whatever its called.
Lately I have been using RawTheRapee [1] for most of my photo editing needs. It's simpler and less flexible than Darktable, but I get better results in less time unless I need some very specific editing. Also RawTheRapee's noise reduction and sharpening are better than Darktable's.
I then discovered that you can only cancel that 12 month subscription within a short window at the very end of the 12 months.
In the end Adobe retired one of the products from Creative Suite and I used consumer protection law to cancel the subscription on the basis that the service had been materially changed.
Is that legal?
When I was going to college I took advantage of the student discount for the full Creative Cloud suite. After a few years, the discount was no longer available and Adobe started charging me the full $60 a month. I didn't have the $720 needed to cancel my subscription and I just lost my job. I ended up downgrading to the Photoshop + Lightroom subscription since it was $20 a month instead of $60 and I didn't want to cancel my credit card. I found out after reading the subscription confirmation email that in their system it treats a subscription change the same as if I was signing up for a new subscription and I could cancel it and get my money back.
I really don’t like PayPal as a company but from a consumer standpoint they’re useful to me because I am able to terminate billing on the PayPal side of things. Also i have not been burned by PayPal in the few disputes I have had to go through.
I wish there was a less shitty option than PayPal with the same level of insulation and dispute resolution. Lots of small businesses/creators have gotten fucked over by PayPal freezing funds for months and not allowing appeals or really any communication is terrible and I hate supporting it.
wrt dispute resolution, paypal is pretty awful compared to the traditional credit card, at least the major (top tier) bank issuers. the lower tiers like Capital One I imagine are more difficult. I'm in a paypal dispute right now. I have to wait 2 weeks for something to happen (don't know what exactly) before i can progress to the next stage, whatever that is. really? my amex reverses the charge immediately when i call them, and as far as my side of things, i'm done with it at that point. my WF visa is similar, and they call me when a further action is required.
paypal is google-level horrible. nearly indispensable service, immensely useful in some ways, the worst anti-user behavior in other ways. even the website to manage your account is full of dark patterns.
if you hate supporting it, stop supporting it.
Nowadays I use Raw Therapee and I'm quite happy with it. Free software, has all the features I need. No corporate overlords.
A bridge too far? Learn to deal with the world as it is mate.
Monthly pricing is great, people can justify doing a small project with expensive software without breaking the bank and simply resume the subscription if relevant work picks up. Especially great for freelancers.
But intentionally making it appear that it's a monthly subscription when it's actually an annual subscription is beyond the pale.
Yeah it really sucks that Apple takes 30% of all revenue, but the developers have painted themselves into a corner with behavior like this.
I have been “trialing” many apps that I wouldn’t normally bother with because of the high start-up cost. I say “trialing” because usually the 7 day or whatever trial period isn’t enough for me to decide if I want to keep the app or not, so I just typically sign up for a month after that as well.
For example, I think OmniFocus is like $100+. I heard lots of great things about it and tried it out, but as it is a task manager the 7 or 14 day trial wasn’t enough. Without being able to pay for a single month, knowing that I can cancel it immediately after I sign up and not worry about the subscription again, I would have never given it another look. But I was able to pay $10 for a month. And that month gave me enough time to try out all the features. Unfortunately for them I decided this was not the right software for me, but that’s how it goes.
Someone else in this thread wrote that Lightroom doesn’t have monthly subscriptions. Again, via Apple, it seems like I can subscribe for a month at $2, $5, or $10 depending on my storage needs. Though after this story I wouldn’t trust them for storage and would just take the $2 plan of I needed to use the software.
For Adobe, could you not have issued a chargeback or in some other way dispute the cancellation?
SumatraPDF for Windows is terrific.
Yep! They have a thing called “yearly contract, billed monthly “. It took me a few minutes to understand what it meant. The first time I came across such a contract in the software world.
Then they went full Cloud and did me the "favour" of giving me a discount on this suite of $59.99 to $39.99 (IIRC). Every. Damn. Month.
The thing is I wasn't really using any of it much anymore, so I cancelled, but every now and then I need to whip up a logo/graphic or retouch some image and I don't have the little [Ps] or [Il] in my Dock anymore and I'm not gonna sign up again and pay monthly. That was the point of buying this software in the first, it's there for me when I need it, it's mine.
Nowadays Sketch gets me where I need to go most of the time, gonna have to get Affinity soon.
https://www.adobe.com/au/creativecloud/plans.html
(I'd definitely recommend going with Affinity Photo instead if it suits your needs.)
This is what Apple’s App Store tells me.
See: imgur.com/a/Gk2S01k
Darktable is awesome.
It's a bit more pricey (at least more pricey than the Photographer CC sub), but feels so much more polished.
It's even better at handling LR catalogues than LR. Last time I checked migrating my those files took minutes vs hours (CO vs. the new LR).
I've been using LR for years (10+?, and other products for almost 20) and the only reason I haven't completely switched yet is laziness.
Annual, Paid Monthly Annual, Paid Once Monthly, no Contract (which is priced higher than the other two)
This seems more like user error not understanding what they're signing up for.
Edit: I've only had to chargeback once, in a situation that I tried to work out with a vendor. Other times, I've had to threaten a chargeback to vendors who didn't deliver promised goods.
I think there’s something just sort of staggeringly impressive about the amount of detail and complexity in even one of the Creative Suite applications compared to the price of the whole collection.
Like paying $60 a month or so, which even if you get stuck is well under a thousand bucks a year, for all the development work that goes into dozens of specialized media editing solutions, which they keep super updated, seems kind of fair.
I’m comparing it, for example, to the misery of having to pay $10k+ a year for the steaming pile of garbage user experience of Salesforce, for example. Or $30 a month for like a hot new email client like Superhuman.
Adobe pricing has always struck me as profoundly fair in this context. That’s a seriously impressive software achievement.
I've heard earlier that such agencies work for Microsoft, Adobe in India but that was the first time I've heard in-person from someone working for them. Adobe has every right to stop piracy of its products, but I wonder the legality of harassing the pirate instead of making a legal complaint. I presume it doesn't happen in US?
One is the envelope distort mesh, allowing you to modify on a 3d grid (3d transform, things further away are smaller). Example here[0].
The other is blending between two shapes, as seen here[1]
I guess that is the good thing about not letting third party payments on the App Store…
I had exactly the same experience; adobe can burn in a fire after that and the iPad photoshop disaster as far as I’m concerned.
No, that's automatically selected for you. :) Try using the website yourself.
The billing page clearly says "Subtotal $XX/mo"; the only place it says 'annual plan' is in the top box, which says 'Annual plan, paid monthly'; and when you select, eg. the standard photoshop plan, and click 'Buy now'; it takes you to a page where there isn't even a monthly option, despite the main page saying "US$9.99/mo".
As no time do you 'opt in' to an annual plan, except by clicking on the button that says 'US$9.99/mo'.
It would be 'obvious' if it said: You minimum commitment over 24-months is $$$.
It does not.
I don't know what you get from stubbornly refusing to acknowledge this is a dark pattern; clearly other people find this surprising too, and... well, I don't know what to say. Sometimes you have to acknowledge that you're wrong.
This is bad behaviour on the part of adobe; it's not really a he said/she said/my opinion is kind of thing; in many places, having the minimum total commitment displayed on the billing page is a legal requirement. In others, a no-penalty cancel-subscription is a legal requirement.
Adobe just flat out does neither unless you fight with them and threaten legal action.
I honestly don't know how they get away with it.
It's fairly logical: the customer agreed on 12 months. An additional fixed term requires a new contract/agreement. In practice companies now try to keep customers. Plus need to actually be ok instead of relying on people not overcoming the fake effort that is required to leave.
When it comes to subscriptions I have mixed feelings. Like if you agree to pay for a year (for example) then (IMHO) you should do that.
On the flipside, much like the model for gym memberships, companies can make it incredibly difficult to cancel a subscription. They deserve to be punished for this. Newspapers and magazines do this too. I realize a certain percentage of people will keep paying and not use the service (which is the ideal customer for a gym) but, for me, it means there are many things I will never buy because I don't want to deal with this (eg subscriptions to The Atlantic or the New Yorker).
Other comments here allude to Adobe's bad behaviour beyond the initial year (eg not allowing you go to month-to-month). I have no sympathy for Adobe here, particularly when they seem to be in breach of local laws by doing so.
To me the gold standard for subscription services is Jetbrains. The cost per year goes down over time and when you cancel you retain a version forever.
I personally prefer the subscription model for software compared to the previous large sticker prices for Adobe Photoshop. Outright purchases create bad incentives for companies (eg shortening the lifecycle such that bugfixes and minor features are only available via a paid upgrade to the next version). Subscriptions have a cheaper initial outlay (making them much more accessible) and they mean your software gets continually updated without version fragmentation.
Unfortunately companies also decide that a "reasonable" price for a subscription is the retail price in one year. It's not.
So anyway in your case, you are technically in breach of your purchase agreement and Adobe would be well within its rights to chase you for the full amount via disputing a chargeback, through your bank or CC provider or even through small claims court.
While trying to cancel my subscription, I realize I can only do that after paying for the remaining 11 months (rough calculation).
With no other option, I paid my penalty and left Adobe for good. I have deleted my 15+ year old Adobe account.
Alternatives and to serve nostalgic attachments, I bought the whole suite of Affinity[1] Products. I've also bought Darkroom[2] for photo editing on iPad.
1. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/
2. https://darkroom.co
P.S. (edit/addition) I ended a 25+ year relationship with Adobe. I paid myself through my school and college with PageMaker, and other softwares (both open source, free, and paid).