There’s always someone in these threads who wants to put all the blame on the individual. The fact is Adobe is misleadingly making it look like just a monthly subscription. Proper consumer protection laws would not allow them to do this.

Adobe deserves all the badwill they are getting in this thread, it’s 100% on them.

Their website actively tries to trick you into falling for it.

Honestly, not so much. Perhaps it did before. It isn't great, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it a dark pattern.

It does list the "Best Value" plan, but when you go to "Buy", it presents a shopping cart with the following text (no fine print, no other tricks), and even uses the word "commitment":

"Commitment:

Annual plan, paid monthly: US$52.99/mo."

Even at that point, the above is in a drop-down, and you can change it to "Annual plan, pre-paid", or "Monthly plan".

How is it not a dark pattern? If they are confident in the value of the subscription, why not print out the whopping minimum total of $635.88 everywhere they mention the price? They do it this way because it is misleading in a way that benefits Adobe.

Just because they benefit from stupid people is not adobe's fault, when it is this clear, people should really be careful about just clicking things and signing up, it's the individuals fault, people or companies are not your friends, this is the case for everything, it's just the way the world works, getting mad at that and then blaming the individual is stupidity and lack of personal responsibility.

They want to charge you as much as possible and get as much money from you as they possibly can, you want the opposite, the end result is something between the two, it's on them to reach there goal, so it's on you to take care of your own money and what you do with it.