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?