Anyway a "free" trial that asks for your cc number is obviously not free. Better to stay away of those to be on the safe side.
I signed up, but their product kept crashing - it never worked.
I called to cancel, they asked for 50%. I said, I don't owe it because the product didn't work - contracts require consideration by both parties. CSR said I would pay. I got his contact info and told him that not only I wouldn't pay, but that Adobe would cancel my contract for free before a year.
Anyways, I blocked the transaction. Within 2 months, they cancelled my subscription. I sent a screenshot to the CSR email. Never heard back.
There is a legitimate reason to do that: to keep people from making a bunch of accounts and getting free trials with them forever.
An example.. a marketing mail app where the trial only allows you to mail 1 or 2 campaigns with a max of 5 email addresses (recipients) for each. In that scenario you’d see the full capability of the product but couldn’t use it for a full email campaign. Creating more accounts wouldn’t help you game the trial.
I think not taking people’s CC is important.
I'm moving web/email hosting providers at the moment and the range of trials available is interesting. Two examples to highlight the range: Linode offers a $100 USD value to use in a time-limited trial (one month IIRC); OVH wouldn't even give me a trial on request and have a minimum 12 month upfront charge (I can't believe they're serious, every provider has given a free trial in the past even if only for a week or two [which is not long enough for me to get a proper view of someone's service]).
One of the best discoveries I found on hn a few years ago
Btw their numbers don’t work with Adobe, but I used Privacy for a Microsoft Office trial about 6 months ago and I got an email every time Microsoft attempted to charge me, which was approximately once/week before I just deleted that card.
I haven’t been able to find a service like this that supports Australian users, so looking for suggestions!
I use this for signing up to watch HBO Max and some other subscriptions. It's pretty handy.
How are they able to keep this free?
> we make money from the interchange paid by merchants
I don't know why Citi still has this service, and seems to keep developing it (it used to be a Flash page, and since Flash is out commissioned, they rewrote the whole service into HTML).
So if you are in US, get a Citi CC or something like privacy.com.
You can set expiration time and daily spending limit for the numbers. Also optionally assign a name for each number.
Note that I have two Citi CC but only one card has this service. So some card may not. The one available to me is the double cash card.
I can block charges, but this would be a more valid reason if it really were just about limiting "freebies".
Actually for this reason I prefer to use a small account with limited liability e.g. Paypal or a low limit CC, precisely because there's less risk for me. Why should company XYZ have unlimited power to randomly charge me tens of thousands of dollars? They shouldnt.
1. There is an extremely low chance they would collect anything anyway, so it's not worth it to them.
2. If someone actually challenged their collection, there is a good chance, of it went that far, that the judicial system would find this type of agreement invalid given the dark patterns involved.
Basically, what Adobe and other companies are trying to do with these onerous auto-renewal and ridiculous early termination fees is just to make more money from people (a) forgetting to term their subscriptions and (b) not wanting to go through the hassle of fighting the early termination fee.
In any case just set it as your policy that you don't talk to collectors, you only engage with businesses directly.
Send Adobe a written notice of termination of the agreement, stop payments, and I believe that's all you need to do, but IANAL.
Also IANAL, but he whole point is that the user is still in the 14 days "free trial, just cancel", and Adobe is refusing to honor the "cancel" part, right? This approach can be handy, specially in countries where there is a way to send legally valid electronic notification letters.
Is it? You can't actually just write whatever you want in the fine print and then claim that that is what was agreed to.
According to them I won't be able to resubscribe with that email. Oh no! Anyways...
I'm also not a lawyer, but I don't think its ever a reasonable defense to say that you didn't know the terms of the contract if you've signed it (or agreed to the terms online - which I'm sure is provable by Adobe)?
While this case may be hard I'm pretty sure it isn't "never". For example if you are buying a subscription to a software suite and they sneak into the contract "You also give us your house" that isn't going to fly, even if you signed it.
E.g. if ToS said I needed to give up my first born to Adobe, the judge isn't going to side with me because I didn't read the ToS. They will side with me because the clause isn't valid.
I'm not sure if this would fall into the same boat, but if the dark patterns get misleading enough, there is a real-world risk that the contract would fall into the same situation: misleading enough that the hidden portions of the contract can't be applied.
Are collectors so toothless over there? Here a valid collection is an easy win in courts if it's not paid, and then it can be garnished from wages, pension, other income, or your property. Collections absolutely can not be ignored here.
I'm not going to engage a collector. They aren't part of the 2-party agreement, they have no rights to any information about me, and I'm not going to give more of my personal information to some 3rd party idiot just because they asked for it.
Pro tip: Never give private businesses your real address or phone number. Make sure they only have your e-mail address. They aren't the police, and don't need to know where you live. If there is a dispute they must engage with you directly by e-mail. If a business needs your credit card billing address, change the street address, as long as the city and zipcode are correct it will usually work.
I see Adobe as equivalent to a grocery store, they're just a business and don't have a legal right to any personal information, I could totally manifest to them as an avatar and pay for services with an anonymous Visa gift card.
The credit card company may elect to side with the merchant, or the merchant may decline to do business with you again in the future (not ideal if your income relies on access to these tools in the future), or the merchant may take legal action against you, or the credit card company may decide to close your card account.
You can't just do whatever you want and then claim 'chargeback!'
I don’t believe in using dark patterns as a retainment strategy, so I make it very easy to cancel from the same screen they signed up on. The domain is listed on their CC statement. I also send out reminders well before annual subscriptions renew with a link to update or cancel their plan.
I used to dispute chargebacks when the user was very clearly using the service actively and provide screenshots, logs, and written evidence, but what usually happens is the bank takes 30+ days to complete each interaction and almost always sides with the cardholder anyways. In the meantime, users get frustrated because their money is locked up in limbo and I can’t even refund them until their bank responds.
The only chargeback I recall “winning” was one where the user accidentally canceled but still wanted the service. They called their bank directly and the bank canceled the chargeback.
It’s just not worth the hassle, so immediately offloading the responsibility of chargebacks to the user is well worth the $15 chargeback fee. They’ll let you know if they want to come back.
Big companies, I’ve heard, may put you on a block list and if you’ve submitted any identifiable info (address, phone number, etc.) they’ll know when you create a new account.
Closing your card doesn't have any impact on legal obligations you had, or a merchant thinks you had, or any impact on whether a merchant will choose to do business with you in the future.
In terms of merchant choosing to do business with you in the future, they may or may not have a choice; depends what they use to identify you with. Certainly, if they don't make canceling easy, it's probably not the kind of business you want to deal with.
All that said, this is why anything that auto-renews, that I don't know if I want to keep renewing (i.e., will I still be using it at the end of the trial period, end of the month, end of the year), I immediately cancel. If it's a trial and that terminates access, I will take that as a sign not to use them. If it's paid and that terminates access, I will also take that as a sign not to use them, but I'll also email them and basically say "hey; I paid for X period, wish to use it for X period, but am unable to use the service for X period. I either need you to reinstate my account, sans auto-renewal, or I expect a refund". That tends to get a response, since otherwise -they- are legally on the hook.
Near it the price information carries the monthly price only, with no indication that you are signing up to 12 times that amount.
The only saving feature is that you don't need to read dozens of pages. If you open the contract, it is confusing from page 1. But it's also not clear at all what is going there.
This will invariably lead to a terminated account and a bunch of declined emails , but thats as far as it goes.
A few years ago I signed up for a "free" Audible trial and later forgot about it. They rolled it over into a paid subscription somehow and charged me money despite never giving them my card details in the signup process. I believe what happened is it got linked to my Amazon account and charged the card connected to that.
They refunded me after I contacted them but I didn't get the entire amount back.
I started using Krita instead, and it's a good replacement without being so utterly different.
I know Photoshop have some "content aware fill" and things but that's just their re-branded name for neural networks that are already open source, it's just a matter of time before it's available in Gimp. I might even consider writing those plugins too but my time is limited.
RGB color in Gimp is fine for me because I only use it for photo processing, and cameras shoot in RGB so you aren't losing any information by doing your photo processing in 16-bit or higher RGB.
You can do color space conversions to CMYK after that stage.
On an interesting side note, realistically though, I've found the vast majority of people I've had to work with don't understand the difference between RGB and CMYK and just want "PDFs" and don't necessarily let me choose or interact with the printing agency directly, or the printer is some friend's wife's father's friend's friends' friend's company on WeChat that is going to be doing the printing at 1/10 the cost of every other commercial printing agency out there and they've chosen to use that company and it would look silly of me to suggest to use a company that costs 10X more just so I can get proofs. In those cases, I've found that if I don't have access to proofs, these days, RGB PDFs often seem to get more consistently rendered than CMYK PDFs.
#Monopoly
Any advice, alternative PDF editor for Windows?
If you mean desktop publishing software that outputs a high quality pdf scribus works fairly well.
When I deal with government documents, visas, etc. I frequently need to produce 200-page PDFs that contains bank statements, utility bills, or other documents that arrived as PDF or were scanned into PDF. Some of those were scanned upside down, and then you might need to compress or split the resulting doc because of file size limit. So I need serious PDF editing software to deal with this - converting from PDF and back ruins all the official documents and leads to problems.
I now use it for everything, with a different "virtual" card for every business. I wish more credit cards offered this.
(not affiliated with x1)
Just speculating, but i suspect they know what they're doing is dodgy and want to avoid as much scrutiny as possible from any regulatory bodies so their support script says to cancel if the customer mentions reporting them.
At least in India I've met people on unrelated events working for companies claiming to be contracted by Adobe to target small-business, raid their office and make them pay huge sums of money on the pretext of suing them for piracy of their products.
One such person, told me that they got their previous employer into trouble with Adobe due to bad blood. It's definitely not legal for a private entity to raid a premise in India, But I guess these companies have 'what it takes' to make that happen.
So it's not worth it to pirate adobe products, Especially when there are better tools available[1].
[1] https://startuptoolchain.com/#design (I maintain this).
There’s money in confusion.
But for vendors like these, usually I use debit cards which I only load when I want to pay for the service. Send their payment failed emails right to spam.
They are not even good at software engineering and UX.
They are brutal in the enterprise space, looking for 10-15% price escalations. They also turn over sales leadership so if you are big enough you can pull stunts for concessions. Just do some recon and figure out what they get paid the most on. Last time, we hired a few interns specifically to do a public PoC of how we were getting rid a key product in the portfolio. Made sure they heard about it and got significant confessions. Basically 10x the intern and PoC investment. We ended up hiring the interns as well for an extra bonus.
As a consumer, you need to be really aware of the motivations of your suppliers business model and model your business accordingly. Understand your costs and use OSS strategically, or understand where you just need to take what they offer (ie AWS). Things in the middle, like Adobe in my case, you need to be ready to walk away or play chicken and make a deal at the 11th hour.
The term for that is "evil".
“There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’ ‘It’s a lot more complicated than that -’ ‘No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
― Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum
Even more. Every $1 in MRR is worth around $216 in company market cap. (assuming their current multiple)
You could easily make the argument of ISIS being less evil than Adobe, given that many of them have conviction that they're doing the right thing, but Adobe couldn't possibly believe that this is anything but duplicitous, misleading, and scummy. Killing for religious beliefs is much more complex than simple "evil". Scamming your paying customers by intentionally misleading them with dark patterns is a very simple and obvious evil.
It's a threshold, not a competition. Sometimes the threshold changes, but crossing it is enough. No matter that other people might be even worse.
Is black and white thinking considered a compliment now?
For an average income person
- A Porsche is expensive - A Ferrari is expensive
The fact that a Ferrari costs a lot more than a Porsche does not make a Porsche "not expensive", because there is a line (for the buyer) beyond which they consider a car expensive. There's problem a grey are below that line in which a car may cost more than they are comfortable spending, but have enough useful features that they will consider sacrificing for it. And there is a large area to the right of the expensive threshold where a lot of such cars lie.
The fact that lots of cars are past the "expensive" threshold for someone doesn't mean they're thinking in black and white.
Similarly, there are shades of evil. Inventing some new greater evil does not invalidate the regular kind.
I think the answer is clearly not. There is no reason why it should be invalid to criticise any act, just because it is not the worst act.
I love captain crunch cereal. It is so good— “NOW I HAVE NO WORDS TO DESCRIBE CHARITIES!”
Context, it matters.
As it is, they didn't. The best the rest of us can do is further develop our capacity for context.
Daesh's actions require a more drastic response, but I'm more confident that the average Adobe CSR, rather than the average drafted Sunni kid from Al Qaim, is going to hell.
Eh, not really. They are pretty much all a religious majority in the regions they controlled and moreover Syria is pretty predominately Sunni.
Good times. If only I could have witnessed the Spanish Inquisition.
How dare people make judgement calls on actions they feel are morally wrong! Why, that’s like burning people at the stake!
You may disagree with my moral standards, and that’s cool.
It's not just Adobe though, this is an industry wide problem.
Adobe won't let you cancel without paying the remainder of your subscription fee however you can switch to a different plan. As soon as you switch you'll have the ability to cancel your "new" plan within 14 days. If you cancel after 14 days they'll charge you the early termination fee.