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A comment on FTC sues Adobe for hiding fees and inhibiting cancellations. Parent comment

Re:FTC sues Adobe for hiding fees and inhibiting cancellations by bradgessler on Monday June 17, 2024 @03:22PM (#40709924)
That was the best most companies could do before SaaS. Now that we live in a SaaS era, it's much easier and acceptable for corps like Adobe to minimize piracy and increase revenue with subscriptions.

This isn't unique to Adobe—most software companies have followed suit because it just makes sense. What is unique about Adobe is they're doing some really shady things with subscriptions that are abusive to customers, which this suit hopefully ends and serves as a warning for other abusive SaaS corps.

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Re:FTC sues Adobe for hiding fees and inhibiting cancellations by crazygringo on Monday June 17, 2024 @05:58PM (#40711559)
This is exactly right -- Adobe wanted people to pirate Photoshop at home because they knew it wasn't realistic for a lot of home users to pay for an entire Photoshop license upfront. Back in 2010, that was a whopping $700 [1].

SaaS changed that -- you can now get Photoshop for a month (no annual contract) for $10 [2, 3].

Which is truly just an amazing deal -- that $700 in 2010 would be $1015 today, so the subscription will be cheaper until you use it for eight and a half years, plus you get upgrades. It's a lot fairer for everyone. Except when Adobe pulls sh*t like the FTC is suing them over.

But yes -- SaaS absolutely ended the idea of companies wanting home users to pirate their stuff so companies would buy it.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/12/photoshop.first.look.wir...

[2] https://petapixel.com/how-much-is-photoshop/

[3] https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography.html

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