FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

One recent idea I've had is that many online subscription services should automatically pause if you stop using it. For example: if I go a full monthly billing cycle without watching Netflix then my subscription should automatically pause and allow me to resume it next time I log-in. There's a ton of money that gets siphoned off to parasitic companies just because people forget to cancel their subscriptions or because they're too busy dealing with life. It might not be viable for all companies, but there's definitely a lot of services where such a thing would be possible, given the huge number of customer analytics they collect. Maybe give people the option to disable such a pause feature if they're really determined to keep paying for a service. But a default where subscriptions automatically pause if you're not using them makes a lot of sense from a user perspective. Of course businesses would probably hate such a ruling because it means they can't scam as much easy money.

Cool idea, but probably tough to enforce what “using it” means. I could see companies start sending newsletters to customers and calling that engagement

I don't think it's the same situation. What Adobe was doing was offering a yearly subscription, charged monthly. If you tried to cancel, it would ask for payment to either cover the rest of the sub or to cover the "savings" that the user had obtained by selecting an annual sub rather than a true monthly (can't remember what exactly it tried to charge). It was deceptive as hell, but it's probably not covered by this rule.

It was such a wonderful feeling that clearly impacted me so much I remember it some 20 years later. I gained SO MUCH loyalty to Amazon after that, and sure enough, I restarted my prime subscription a bit later when I got a better job and started ordering more stuff. They made so much more money off me because they sacrificed those few dollars for one month of my subscription fee to show me they weren’t just trying to make me forget to cancel.

Amazon today would never do that, of course, but man I think more companies should if they want long term, loyal, customers.

I had been considering learning Illustrator and to align myself, I decided to get a little skin the game. I signed up for the "monthly" subscription. I downloaded Illustrator, and this screenshot was my entire experience:

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...

Suffice it to say, this didn't meet my expectations. I thus decided to cancel and was presented with a $108 cancellation fee.

Boo.

I hit up customer service and explained my frustration. I was told that I was going to pay that $108 since I agreed to it. I countered that contracts required consideration and since Adobe had provided no consideration for my valuable cash, no contract had been perfected betwixt us. He was unwilling to see my point. I asked for his contact information for follow-up, which he provided. I then explained to him that after I hung up, I was not only NOT going to pay, but that within 60 days Adobe would cancel the subscription voluntarily on their side and not collect a single further dime from me.

His response basically amounted to "good luck with that."

So, I got a temporary prepaid credit card number with $5 on it and swapped out the CC on file with Adobe.

I then went over to Amazon and spent that $5. Who knows on what.

A month goes by, turns out $0 is insufficient for a monthly subscription payment. I get a notice that the balance isn't good. I get several more notices.

Then I get a notice that if I don't pay, I'll lose access. At about 60 days, they cancelled the subscription. I took a screen shot and emailed it to the CSR's contact with my "I told you so" scrawled on it.

I never heard back, but in my mind it was a great victory. Tickertape and swooning ladies.

That seems a bit fuzzy to implement, depending on what the service actually does. It's not always clear-cut, like watching a show on a streaming service; for example, what if the service does things in the background for the user too even if they're not actively 'using' it.

My compromise would be something like: if the user hasn't actively engaged with your service for X month(s), email/text them a reminder asking if they still want to be subscribed.

I think you could also dispute the charges via your credit card company. The credit card company should reverse the charges.

But the "its yearly with a cancellation fee" was not qualified in the sales information on the sign-up page. Maybe it was in the fine print.

Given that customers are quite used to a monthly fee is a monthly subscription model, it was disingenuous at best. Putting significant terms in the fine print doesn't exactly engender trust.

Their return rate is still pretty terrible, IIRC. I bet they are trying to cut that down. I still see a lot (and I mean a LOT) of obvious Amazon returns in the line at the UPS store, and some of them are quite egregious (I stood behind a lady for 5 solid minutes a couple weeks ago and she was pulling return after return out of a big bag). Maybe Amazon will start firing those customers.

Maybe they closed that loophole, but it did used to work not that long ago.

When you subscribe there are three prices given-

Monthly, Annual paid monthly, and Annual prepaid. The Annual paid monthly very clearly indicates that there is a fee if you cancel after 14 days. The annual paid monthly is some 33% less expensive than monthly, with the downside that you're committing for a year, or to pay a termination fee if you cancel early.

https://imgur.com/a/ldhiEtf

This has been extremely clear for years. Like you have to be blind to not see a "Monthly" that costs much more at the top, then one called "Annual billed monthly" and not have paused to do some diligence.

Adobe does a lot of shady stuff, but on this topic we seem to hear the most from careless, thoughtless, or selfish people who think they figured out how to game the system. Kind of like the "my laptop got stolen out of my car and it had the only copy of all of my important documents and the doctoral thesis I've been working on for seven years" stories, at some point we have to not be so naive with people's foolishness.

There is no fine print. It is extremely clear and obvious. If you see a term called "Annual paid monthly", 33% less expensive than a monthly option right above, what possible other interpretation can someone have?

What the screenshot makes clear is that you'd have to be a single-celled organism to not understand what you're signing up for...

The screen is extremely clear, upfront and even the supposed "fine print" is in huge font with any easy link to learn more.

https://natlawreview.com/article/ftc-targets-adobe-hidden-fe...

Amazon got me on this multiple times for prime, now I always pay for delivery directly, because in the long run it's cheaper.

The most recent incarnation of their cancel subscription page had such intentionally shitty UX that I thought I had cancelled, but there were more pages to click through. So I ended up paying 2 months for zero usage. I'm fed up with the never ending changing landscape of tricks. Fuck subscriptions.

But it is the way it is now for at least three+ years. People are still thinking they're beating the system.

Does it try to ensnare users trying to save some money now? Sure, it does. It offers some revenue planning for Adobe in return for a discount. The FTC is basically arguing that there shouldn't be such a discount.

I'm currently in the process of de-Adboe'ing my life because of the subscription model.

It's not htat you get charged an exorbitant cancellation fee, per se. It's that, from Adobe's point of view, you entered into a year-long contract. And so if you want to cancel after 3 months, the only option they give you is to pay for the rest of the entire year upfront.

This has a lot of artists really pissed off and many are saying they're finally done with Adobe.

Fortunately, I think we're finally in an era where Adobe doesn't actually offer the best products anyway.

For Photoshop I'm playing with Affinity Photo. It has a six month free trial and after playing with it for a couple of months I think I'm going to pay for it when the trial is up. And it's a flat fee / perpetual license.

I've been playing around with Inkscape as a FOSS alternative to Illustrator and it's OK. I might give the Affinity Designer trial a go since I'm enjoying Affinity Photo.

For video editing Davinci Resolve is so far ahead of Premiere that it makes me wonder why Premiere is still used by anyone regardless of other considerations. What's bonkers is that BlackMagic gives the standard version of Resolve away for free... and I have yet to find myself needing features that are in the paid Studio version.

It has its own FX tool called Fusion built-in, so After Effects also gets replaced by Resolve.

I never used Adobe Animate but am starting to get into 2D animation and really like Moho Pro. It's not free but it has a perpetual license and apparently the first version of this software was created for BeOS 30 years ago, and then got ported to Windows and Mac as AnimeStudio... so it's been around forever, has a cool history and is starting to get used by a lot of pro studios since it gives you 3D style rigging for 2D / "cutout" animation which was its killer feature for me.

Anyway Adobe is one of the largest companies in the world but I suspect big changes are coming in a few years because I can't think of any reason to buy into Creative Cloud in current year ... like not a single reason. Maybe if you've got some PSD files laying around that can't be opened in alternatives like Affinity Photo because they take advantage of very specialized features or something then you might be screwed but I haven't ran into any issues opening my old PSD files in Affinity.

I think this is why I'm still such a loyal customer, and use Amazon for so many purchases. Intellectually I know that Amazon does super crappy things, both to their workers and around their website and sales. But I've been a Prime member since it was first offered, nearly 20 years now, and I still fondly remember when Amazon's customer service was pretty much better than anyone else's out there. It was actually delightful to interact with their customer service, which was (and is) so rare.

Yup. This is the playbook of the Enshittification[1] process as coined by Cory Doctorow.

> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

But does this actually hurt Amazon in any significant way, or do they simply externalize this cost by penalizing the original seller?

- Some websites won't accept prepaid cards (largely because they can be used to get around things like this).

- Who knows if a platform's going to save your previous card info to use as a fallback?

- As another reply stated, the company can send you to collections if they think you owe them money. They can also do that if you do a chargeback, theoretically. However, with a chargeback, your card company did some basic checking of the situation and agreed with you that something was wrong about the payment, so assuming you win the chargeback, you've at least had a second pair of eyes on the case, and you have that tiny bit of metaphorical "precedent" to use if you take the collections order to court-- both of which also mean they're less likely to take you to collections. If you just swap out your card number for one that doesn't work, that shifts some of the shadiness to your end, and it legally appears less like you have any grounds to stand on.

Neither the Devil nor Adobe need an advocate, but maybe you could help Adobe out with the Justice Department law suit around subscription dark patterns[1]? That signup page you took a screen shot of is the current version, older ones had more dark patterns and definitely were not as clear, hence the Justice Department law suit.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91142929/us-justice-department-s...

Civilization needs advocates against users being intentionally, misleadingly dense.

>That signup page you took a screen shot of is the current version

It is the version of the page that the FTC sued Adobe about. Adobe hasn't changed it.

Feel free to cite the complaint - https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/032-RedactedCom...

I'll help by posting a screenshot of the FTC's screenshot-

https://imgur.com/a/DQXYAN8

Page 8 from the complaint. Precisely the same disclaimers and selections.

Adobe has used this same format for three+ years. And no, the FTC filing a complaint -- responding to people doing the "woe am I...I am the victim for my carelessness" doesn't mean it has merit. Something got some congresspeople's to complaint to the FTC so they did something. And Adobe will probably just abolish discounting to make them go away.

> or need to pay more attention.

This is such a common and pointless argument. Here's the thing -- people don't pay attention to everything because who's got the energy for that. Companies know and capitalize.

Why don't you start by telling drivers and pedestrians to start paying attention when they drive on roads. When you've slashed car accident and casualty numbers in half, you can come back and tell us how asking people to pay more attention solves everything :)

That allowed an amazing customer service experience, and immense trust: if there was an issue with your order that couldn’t be easily fixed, then we’re very sorry, and here’s your money back.

Both that program and the incentive for it are long gone.

Reddit is following the same pattern. Entice everyone over from digg, make users happy and grow base, appeal to businesses, then squeeze the business (API changes). Chrome used to be the faster, cleaner, more 'techie' option, and they too have departed from Day1 and moved into the squeeze.

The service degradation is in terms of search no longer being useful, promoted/ad brands everywhere, popup 'businesses' with co-mingled inventory, fake reviews, just general lack of trust earning. Amazon used to be THE place to get the cheapest option too, but that is rarely the case these days.

My argument was that while I may have agreed to the cancellation fee in the fine print, they contract was not perfected because they never provided consideration.

The software would not work on my computer.

My grounds for cancelling the software wasn't that I wanted to cancel early, I was satisfied with a year-long subscription. My grounds for cancelling was that the software simply didn't work. It crashed when opening AI files are creating new files.

My grounds for cancelling is that the software didn't work. And I don't mean in some qualitative sense. The software would just crash when opening files or creating new files.

Adobe never held up their end of the bargain - providing functioning software.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...

Can confirm that was the strategy from day minus-three.

You make some good points but I'm not sure that this generalization really holds. It will depend on the terms of the license but I have heard of buying, selling & trading software licenses (at least on an individual basis, it might be harder for companies to do that).