To cancel a yearly plan, you must a) talk to their support staff (not available as an option in the portal) and b) pay the remainder of the period anyway.

The only time you can freely modify your subscription is one month before your renewal date.

It's borderline illegal!

Just playing devil's advocate, why would someone pay the standard monthly price if they could get the annual price discount and cancel after a month?

Adobe could eliminate this loophole by simply charging the difference (between what they actually paid and what they would have paid on a monthly play) when they opt out.

Presumably the current arrangement is some kind of creative accounting exercise though, and such a pro-customer policy might blow it up.

That doesn't sound right to me either though. You enter a contract for 12 months at a reduced price. The company knows it will get 12reduced price. Now the customer wants to drop out after 7 months and you pay 7delta.

What you just have done is eliminate the monthly price. There can never be an annual contract anymore. That seems beyond silly. Is it really Adobe's fault for you trying to either be sneaky or simply malicious?

I do this because I specifically assumed using Adobe there would be some maniacal dark pattern they wouldn’t really let me cancel sooner than a year despite what the main text stated. Seems like I was correct, reading this thread.

I've definitely cancelled a yearly plan without talking to anyone before. But I did have to pay the early fee

You can disable auto-renew any time.

By paying an early termination fee, which is 50% of the subscription cost of the remaining months[0].

0. https://helpx.adobe.com/manage-account/using/creative-cloud-...