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

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1737 points pseudolus | 3 comments | 16 Oct 24 13:09 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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TheAceOfHearts ◴[16 Oct 24 15:10 UTC] No.41859989[source]▶
It would be great to see the FTC go against predatory subscription services like Adobe. I'm fuzzy on the exact details, but I think they promoted a yearly subscription that was meant to look like a monthly subscription, where if you cancelled early they would charge you an exorbitant cancellation fee. I'm not sure how these new rules affect them.

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.

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1. gspencley ◴[16 Oct 24 19:07 UTC] No.41862650[source]▶
> where if you cancelled early they would charge you an exorbitant cancellation fee.

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.

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2. wildzzz ◴[17 Oct 24 15:24 UTC] No.41870525[source]▶
Companies are less shy about paying for recurring licenses because it's easier for them. No need to worry about keeping track of a perpetual license that a former employee purchased or having too many unused seats for a network license. Once a year, the license admin pays the bill (and potentially updates the network licenses) and it's all good until next year. License payments can be billed to individual departments. Perpetual licenses could be considered capital assets that depreciate where as a recurring license is an expense. This could make a huge difference on the company books. Additionally you can't sell a perpetual license when you don't need it anymore but you can just stop paying for a recurring license.
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3. gspencley ◴[18 Oct 24 13:28 UTC] No.41879272[source]▶
> Additionally you can't sell a perpetual license when you don't need it anymore

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).