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.
Couldn’t you make the free trial useful enough to show off the product, yet _incomplete_ in such a way that continually making new accounts is not viable?
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.
But you'd want to test that the mail campaign manager handles large campaigns efficiently, etc.. I guess there's a suggestion here that two trial options should be available a "trial with CC" where you get access to the whole product and a "trial without CC" where you get access to a simulcrum of the product, like you can use Netflix but it only shows the first 5 minutes of all shows or something.
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]).
If you don't have a card that allows that, you can also buy a prepaid card, though I believe such cards may have distinctive numbers and it's possible a vendor may disallow.
They are the best. They're big issue used to be that they gave out _debit_ numbers, which a lot of things would not accept. But, this year they transitioned to credit, so even that problem has gone away.
Thank you. Never knew about this service, was looking, obviously not hard enough, for exactly this. But really do think they should advertise better. This would help with managing expenses too.
I had to sit on a waiting list for a few weeks to get invited to it about 1 year ago. I don’t know what that was all about but it seems they aren’t in a rush for more users.
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.
The “personal” plan is free. I’m always cautious with free things that use my personal data - if you're not paying for the product, you are the product.
About 6-8 years ago, all major credit card companies in US has the virtual CC service: BoA, Citi, Chase, you name it. Passing one period, they all started to shut down the service, saving Citi.
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.
Does citi let you create any no. of virtual numbers and can you set limits for them ? I sorely miss the BoA flash feature and haven't found a replacement. I would sign for citi if it's the same.
Not sure about the US but in Europe there is Revolut that allows you to create virtual credit card numbers tied to your main account. They can be deleted/disposed of at any time in the app.
My engineering manager at my old job made double my salary and yet bragged about how every month he was on a new Netflix and Amazon Prime 30 day trial.
Bots are an annoying adversary to have, I'll tell you that much. If there is any way to make money out of it - including those you couldn't have imagined - someone on the internet is going to figure it out and it will be worth their while
You don't need to create a bunch of emails, just unique enough addresses. I've got a catch-all on my domain, that's unlimited address. Gmail will let you alias with anything using +, and ignores periods last I checked.
Part of the problem it could be argued is the CC card here - you want my CC number? Fine. I should have to initiate the transaction, hit "Go", not the other way around.
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.
Virtual credit card numbers where you can set a low limit + early expiration date can be useful for avoiding the dark pattern of "free" trials that you can't cancel.
They didn't "come at me" when I've done this a few times in the past, but thankfully I haven't been in a position to put their akin-to-malware on my system in a few years.
I haven't worked at Adobe, but I have worked at other places with somewhat similar subscription policies, and I highly, highly doubt they would send it to collections:
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.
IANAL but if you agreed to a fixed term contract you can't just inform the other party that you are leaving early. You need to use an exit clause within the contract or somehow invalidate it. (For example by saying that you didn't knowingly enter into a 1 year contract.)
> IANAL but if you agreed to a fixed term contract you can't just inform the other party that you are leaving early.
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.
No, during the first 14 days you can actually cancel for free. This is talking about months later when you discover the "annual commitment" part for the first time. It's a perfectly legal contract, just deceptive.
IANAL but I've successfully done exactly this. Told them I wouldn't be paying any longer and denying the charges on my card. Support sent me a grumpy email that I violated my contract and that's it.
According to them I won't be able to resubscribe with that email. Oh no! Anyways...
> (For example by saying that you didn't knowingly enter into a 1 year contract.)
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)?
I'm pretty sure it is. I believe the technical term is "Misrepresentation". I don't think it would be an easy fight but it seems that you could try to make an argument that they represented the contract as monthly. There are also examples of ToS being declared invalid because no reasonable person read them, this sounds similar where no one is actually reading the fine print.
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.
I get your point - and also that 'never' is not the right word - but I don't think the defense is that you didn't read the contract. There are plenty of cases where people get screwed over for not reading a contract.
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.
To build on that, allow me to offer a real-world example: a General Contractor I worked with set up as his standard contract as a triplicate form, so you'd sign once and you'd keep one of the triplicate copies as your copy of the contract. The trick was that the back of the triplicate form was where he put the penalties for breaking the contract, but the signature section was on the front, so there was no indication that there were more terms on the back. One of his customers got fed up with his misbehavior, and he lost the ensuing court case because the contract was deemed to be misleading (hiding more clauses after the signature).
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.
> In any case just set it as your policy that you don't talk to collectors, you only engage with businesses directly.
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.
Um, if a business wants to charge me and I disagree with the charge, they need to duke it out with me directly. Over e-mail, which is my official means of contact. Or in court, if it comes to that.
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.
Sure, I'm not going to tell you otherwise. Just that "ignore debt collectors" might be very bad advice with real-world consequences following people for years. Around here a mark in your negative credit report from courts means you're last in line for rental apartments, can't get a new mobile subscription, and a plethora of other nuisances.
Couldn't you just freeze all your credit reports and never give Adobe your real name, address, phone number, and they wouldn't be able to affect your credit.
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.
Sure, I don't think Adobe would pursue this and you could just try and stay anonymous to most contracts. But you can't do that to all your payment obligations, so I thought "don't talk to collections" might be a dangerous advice to give out for others. Strictly following that could lead to real negative consequences in some situations.
Chargebacks aren't the magic spell people think they are.
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!'
As a [small] SaaS owner, I immediately refund, cancel, and block the user from reactivating their account until they reach out to me. In more than 10 years, I’ve seen less than a dozen “accidental” chargebacks. Most are from users who are too lazy to login and hit the cancel button.
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 legal obligations, sure - however, for SaaS, it's almost never worth it. If it's "we charge you at the start of the period", then you received no goods, they received no payment, there is no legal obligation. If it's "we provide the service and charge you at the end of the period", then there is a legal obligation, but the cost to them to collect is probably too large; they could always send it to a debt collector, but good luck proving that debt ("the issuer of the debt provided access to a service" "...that I was unaware of and never used? Sounds fraudulent").
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.
Yeah, and a software provider hiding a non-cancel clause somewhere in a dozens of pages after the deal "contrat" doesn't impact on your legal obligations either.
Hum... Annual plan is not stated on any of the large text. It is stated on the "review order before you buy" as part of the name of the product, what makes it nothing any similar to "clear". "Completely confusing" is more apt.
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.
>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.
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.
At this point I intend to avoid Adobe's services for the rest of my life. If I ever feel like I need Photoshop or Illustrator I'll find an alternative. There are a lot alternatives to these, both open source and proprietary from small businesses.
As a multi-decade Photoshop user, I find Affinity unusable. I know it comes very highly rated, but my muscle memory is so ingrained that I don't think I can make the switch. Not a single thing worked the way I'd expect, and trying to adapt to it was hours of constant digging through forums to do the most basic things, like move the canvas.
I started using Krita instead, and it's a good replacement without being so utterly different.
I use Linux but I'm mostly content with Gimp and Inkscape.
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.
There has been a GIMP plugin for this for a long time - no idea how the quality compares to Photoshop's content aware fill though:
https://github.com/bootchk/resynthesizer
I thought the big problem is that gimp uses only rgb color encoding, which is fine for non-print, but if you want to print something professionally you need at least cmyk.
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.
Yeah if you need to work in CMYK you're kind of stuck. Personally, if I needed to do a lot of print work then I'd pick up an old Mac and an old license for Photoshop CS6.
PDF editor? I have always regarded pdf as a terminal file format, the place data goes to die. Only half joking but pdf was always the final form from some other program, the internal editable data was never pdf. I have never seen a program works on the pdf directly, Probably because I have never had that much exposure to adobe software. the few times I have needed to do so I had to use a pdf programing library.
If you mean desktop publishing software that outputs a high quality pdf scribus works fairly well.
thank you for the link, never came across scribus before!
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.
If you don't need to edit the actual text or content of the document there's a lot of tools like pdftk and ghostscript that can flip, resize, compress and split PDFs.
If you're on a Mac then the built-in Preview app works pretty well for this type of thing. The only problem I've had with it are accessing signed PDFs from AWS SOC2 attestations.
A person meeds to have a cc where transactions are disabled. ( My bank via its online customizer accounts - allows a person to turn this on / off for security )
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.