Adobe Subscription

False advertising

Adobe advertises their products on their website as if they were a monthly subscription. However, they sign you up for a yearly subscription without your knowledge.

Adobe has a 2 week free cancel policy and after that, you have to pay to cancel your Adobe subscription

They will then offer you deals to stay with Adobe longer, that way you go over their 2 week free cancel policy and have to pay to cancel.

Access to files

With the exception of Lightroom Classic, which offers a limited mode that can no longer edit, but still export images after cancelling a subscription, the file formats of Creative Cloud apps are completely proprietary and can only be opened, edited and exported without restrictions from Adobe Creative Cloud applications. This means that cancelling the subscription also leads to the user losing all access to the files created with their applications until they re-subscribe.

Moreover, when Adobe cancels a product (which they regularly do), the corresponding applications can in some cases no longer be installed. In this case, the user no longer has any way to access or edit their files. A prominent example of this is Adobe Encore, a DVD authoring program. If a customer needs to re-visit an old DVD project and re-export it with a minor adjustment, they now need to re-create it from scratch in another software at their own cost.

Disappearance of Fonts

Adobe offers access to a huge library of fonts as part of the Creative Cloud subscription.

However, those are not guaranteed to stay. For instance, on June 15th, 2020, a several fonts were removed, leaving users who had used these in their project to purchase expensive licenses if they needed to make edits to existing documents. In theory, if a foundry goes out of business, this would leave users without access to the font they used for past projects, which could be detrimental if it is something like a corporate design for a company which would then be dependent on that font. Designers who offer templates for sale are faced with their work becoming worthless over night.

The Venezuela Incident

In 2019, users in Venezuela were temporarily locked out of their Adobe software due to political disputes between Venezuela and the US. Users were unable to do their work and livelihoods were threatened. Unlike perpetually licensed software, which is usually guaranteed to work after purchase, users of an Adobe software can essentially be locked out of their software over night. Users were only eligible for a refund for their license fee, not the damages in reputation and loss of profit.

How to pay less to cancel

If you have to pay to cancel, there is a way to bypass having to pay as much money as they are offering.

On your adobe account, you can swap your plan with a much cheaper plan. You will have to pay for this new plan.

Then, using their 2 week free cancel policy, you can then cancel for free and both plans will be canceled.

However, you have avoided having to pay as much to cancel as you would have normally.