Adobe offers annual pricing that is cheaper than the monthly pricing. How do you suggest they avoid the cancellation fee for annual plans while still offering a discount? Would that not effectively turn their annual price into the de facto monthly price, if people could cancel at will with no repercussions?

Pay for the year up front like Dropbox and App Store subscriptions

That would de facto exclude a lot of people with a tight budget.

Just sayin.

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.

Presumably one could outlaw discounts (defacto by guaranteeing cancelations at any point without any fee) like that and only permit annual rebates. So Adobe would charge you the same both ways but you get $x back if you fulfil a full year.

Canceling at will sounds great. Why should they be able to charge you for things you don't use?

Because they gave you a discount on that basis! How is it ethical to receive a discount from someone and then go back on your word?! They also offer a full price monthly option (ie no cancellation fee) if that's what you want.

The "cancellation fee" is because you are breaking a contract which you agreed to in order to receive a discount. If you are actually given a meaningful choice (which I feel quite strongly that you are in this case) and you can't be bothered to understand such a basic aspect of the choice being made, then I have absolutely no sympathy for you.

They gave a discount from a made-up price to another made-up price. The "contract" is a pure marketing fiction here. You can condescendingly explain what a contract is all you like, but the point of contracts is to reflect some underlying reality of the parties that needs mitigation so that they can have a mutually beneficial relationship.

For example, apartments are rented with an annual price and a monthly payment because a) both landlords and tenants have a lot of switchover costs, and b) tenants want to avoid landlords exploiting the pain of moving by jacking their rent up after a month.

But this is just exploitative marketing BS. When you sign up, Adobe is not buying a physical server that they have to depreciate and would sit empty when you quit. They did not buy extra buckets of pixels that will now sit unused in a warehouse. If a person stops using Photoshop, both the the provider expenses and the renter benefits cease immediately. There's no legitimate reason to charge people a cancellation fee here; it's pure exploitation of purchaser optimism and cognitive bias.

> 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.

> There seem to be a lot of people in this discussion on HN who seem very inexperienced in signing business contracts.

But that would also be the case for most of the general public, no? Are you suggesting that people should have experience in signing business contracts (and contracts with a predatory company, at that) before it's considered safe for them to buy software?

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.

That's because you're putting the landlord to a lot of unexpected effort and expense which he was expecting to amortize over the full term of the lease. Are you saying something similar applies here?