Automobile leases, apartments, and the like are listed with monthly rates, but your commitment to pay is longer than one month. What's the difference?

Here in Australia you need to list the minimum contract term too. So if you're listing for $x/mo but require 1 year lease - the listing will say 1 year lease (unless it's been data-scraped by a Real Estate website and relisted for referral fees, but they end up in trouble all the time for this).

Phone plans for instance will have monthly with "minimum amount owed" underneath so even phone plans advertised for $20/mo will say something like "minimum owed $720" because people kept advertising shady 3-year contract plans with steep cancellation fees.

An apartment (at least in the US) is well understood to be a yearly lease. Software purchasing not. Similar software may be priced monthly, annually, everything upfront, or even free. If you put a price and list it as monthly and neglect to mention anywhere that it requires a year agreement, then it's an obvious dark pattern. You know it is because they easily could add "annual contract required" underneath, like most others do when they show annual pricing as a monthly rate (IME).

In other countries you don't need the "well understood" part, it's all up front info.

When you lease an apartment or a car, the monthly rate stated is usually the actual month-to-month cost. They don't demand a full year in advance to get the stated cost, or increase the monthly cost because you didn't pay for a year upfront.

That's why this pricing feels dishonest, even if it's technically true. Other companies handle it much more fairly. If you want to subscribe to World of Warcraft, Blizzard makes it clear that it's $15 per month. With discounts offered if you pay for 6 months at a time. That type of pricing feels honest, with a reward for paying for multiple months. Makes the customer feel better than Adobe's presentation, even though it's essentially the same type of pricing scheme as Adobe.

> They don't demand a full year in advance to get the stated cost, or increase the monthly cost because you didn't pay for a year upfront.

In my experience, typical apartment leases are offered on a 12 month basis. Month to month is usually substantially more expensive.

If you break a 12 month lease early, you're legally on the hook for whatever the contract specifies (typically the entire year in my experience). Most landlords will "generously" agree to let you out of the lease for the equivalent of a couple monthly installments though (again, just my personal experience).

I've personally never heard of a case where you'd pay out the year's lease. Usually you just forfeit a portion of your deposit, which half a month's rent or so, in Canada at least.

I had that once, in an apartment I rented in the US (TX). If you broke the lease early, you were on the hook for the remainder of the lease, UNTIL the apartment was rented again. This was called "rent acceleration" as I remember it. This was also ~25 years ago so maybe it is different now, but it definitely existed and I was subject to it.

At the time I bought a house so I broke the lease to move in. Fortunately, the apartment rented within the month so I didn't owe additional fees.

Out of curiosity I googled "rent acceleration" and see it is a hot topic now - mostly with commercial real estate and businesses break their leases due to the impact of covid on them. See https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/what-landlords-need-to-kno... for a summary. Also interesting is some US states make residential leases exempt from rent acceleration.

I think that's the typical outcome in the end. I've never actually heard of anyone being charged the full amount (not that I would have any way of knowing though). Also sometimes local law will place an upper limit on the size of the fee.

Several of my past leases specified that if broken I would be responsible for monthly rent on a prorated basis until a new tenant moved in.

In my current province, it's regulated that after the first year's lease is up, it defaults on an ongoing basis to a month-to-month agreement, whereby only a month's notice is required and that's it, unless you explicitly agree to another term lease. That's what I'm on now. Our deposit is the regulated max of half a month's rent.

In Poland if you signed a contract for a set period of time and there is no clause about breaking the contract early, you are on the hook for the entire duration of the contract.

For rent specifically, you can arrange to have a mutual agreement with the landlord if you for example find a new tenant, but by law the landlord does not have to accept anything.

Some contract also have punitive clauses in it, saying that you can break the contract at any point with 1 months notice, but you have to pay 3 months' worth of rent.

Wow, I'm glad this isn't how it works where I live.

Ummm, leases definitely have variable terms depending on length and also have fees for exiting the contract early.

And even more so, I bet if you asked, they would give you a further discount for upfront payment (since it removes non-payment and early cancellation risk that’s priced in)

I guess I’m just unclear what you’re on about?

>And even more so, I bet if you asked, they would give you a further discount for upfront payment (since it removes non-payment and early cancellation risk that’s priced in)

Not a lawyer, but come from a family of bankruptcy lawyers. If your landlord went bankrupt after you pre-paid, it could get dicey. It's a risk, and probably a low probability of downside, but I encourage people to do more research if interested.

Mobile phone plans and car payments all display the total price here in Australia as well as the monthly payments.

I’ve never been in a lease where it would cost a whole year worth of rent to quit early. It just cost the deposit, which is usually 1 or 2 months worth of rent.

And this is understandable for renting an apartment. The landlord might not be able to find a suitable replacement immediately. The same logic doesn’t apply to Adobe.

> Automobile leases, apartments, and the like are listed with monthly rates

Where I live it it is illegal to display this without also including the total amount over the entire contract period.

It's not about the commitment, but the installments. Advertising "$52.99/mo" implies your will be paying exactly that amount, each month. But in reality, there is no option to pay $52.99 each month, you only have to option to pay $635.88 in one lump sum, or pay $79.49 each month.

That's scummy, and trying to apologize for such behaviour is scummy too.

Yeah, the US has become quite comfortable with disgusting advertising problems. It's normal to be a shady disingenuous company here, so what's the difference if Adobe is being shady and disingenuous too?