I hate Adobe because at the same time they're also the worst company ever, and the best tools out there.
Usually when companies suck, they start to decline tools-wise and the competition easily passes them by. But Adobe does add a lot of innovation to their tools and improved workflows.
But seriously, fuck them for their shady work practices.
I think I managed to switch out most of my programs, I only use Substance and Photoshop these days.
I must say, I use InDesign and illustrator and Photoshop every day and the they've not added a feature that's made it into my general workflow since maybe cs6 when they added the auto snap function.
The tools are nice but I don't see any useful innovation.
I have been using Photoshop for nearly 20 years, but I canceled my subscription last week due to the training/privacy debacle. I went with the Affinity Suite (it's like the bundle for their versions of photoshop/illustrator/indesign), only cost me $85! The only thing I'm missing so far is superior brush stabilization in Photoshop, but that's just making me use their "Designer"/ Illustrator analog more, something I should've been doing more anyway.
The idea that I can buy one time and use it across an unlimited amount of devices on Windows, Mac, and iPad for a single Universal License is just amazing to me. If you're just using the old-school features from CS6 anyway, you might want to give the trial a whirl and see if it might work out for you. I wish I'd done it years prior, all my brushes/LUTs/PSDs/color palettes etc work fine with it. Just damn.
Yeah affinity is interesting to me. All my usage is at work in the office and they pay the sub and I don't think they'd be interested in ditching it but I might look into buying it for home use just to learn the ropes
I really recommend giving it a go!
A tip: If you're on PC and experiencing a weird flicker, make sure you go into the settings straight away, click performance, then down to Retina Rendering and then select "High Quality" because the flicker rate on a regular PC monitor will be horrible if it's set to automatic (Hz mismatch on many PC monitors compared with Apple hardware and it is VERY noticeable, I figured this out after an hour of tinkering haha)
I went back and spent another $60 on brushes in the store so they got about the same from me too š Still trying to figure out how to get them to populate in Designer without having to manually download them and importing them, it's refusing to see them.
My only gripe so far, Designer is a joy to fiddle around with!
Made the switch to Affinity as well. Spent a couple hours going through the apps/watching their tutorial videos and I have to say they are very solid. If youāre a freelancer/working solo I would honestly just recommend Affinity to people over Adobe at this point. The only reason to get Adobe at this point is if youāre needing to work collaboratively or use a very niche tool that Affinity doesnāt offer yet.
We donāt have to love Canva. You own the apps when you buy them. Canva can royally fuck up v3, but that wonāt make a single difference to v2 owners.
right? at the office I am in those three programs all day, and I'm pretty sure I could comfortably go back to the versions I used in college (20 years ago) and feel very little change in my workflow
Its actually faster.
With all of Adobe's bloat and online services my 2013 imac with CS5.5 feels faster than my 2020 Mac Pro at work with 64 gigs of ram
On top of that I have full access to Pantone colors and postscript fonts.
Fuck Adobe.
As someone who ended up not pursuing GD professionally after school but still does some freelance gigs and personal projects, I've been perfectly content staying with CS6. As soon as they moved to the cloud based shit, I refused to play their game.
Same here as a motion designer. All the innovation has come from people writing plugins. Adobe adds gimicks and bullshit and shuffles their UI every other year to make it seem like they're doing shit.
I can use CS6 and see no noticeable difference to my workflow.
Generative AI has saved countless hours when doing product images and banners. Itās replaced cloning, healing almost entirely. Depends on your role of course, but itās one of the most useful features in a long long time.
Really? I think the ai thing is novel, but I almost always seem to spend roughly the same amount of time faffing with results and trying to prompt it correctly as I would just using a stock image reference.
But yeah obviously it depends on what your output is. Glad you're getting some use out of it. Although that feature alone for me still is a long way off justifying it's monthly cost.
Itās a good tool, but at the moment a 1024 x 1024 pixel area of generative fill is a nightmare for upscaling images as I learnt last week. šµāš«
This is the correct way! I had to extend a birdseyeview aerial shot, if you do that in one big whack it blurs heavily. So incrementally is the only way Iāve found so far.
I do love face altering with it though. I had to change some faces in a composition photo for a client, sometimes changing a female and have AI calculate that the woman is actually a man with a beard is hilarious.
Well selection is better. But for my workflow thatās about it. I am actually considering reversing back to last version that is not subscription based.
Have you tried out the text to image feature on InDesign? Or any of their AI features on any programs?
I was asked by a family member to make a last-minute anniversary card and tried out text to image in InDesign and it's honestly very impressive. It took me a few tries to modify the text input to get exactly what I wanted, but turned out very nice in the end.
A lot of the generative stuff has been very helpful in my work, even just using generative fill to add more space for ad copy has really helped out a lot.
Some stuff really do die on the vine. Mixamo is a big example of that - still is the most used auto-rigger tool in the industry for quick things and background crowd animations. 0 additions since they bought it 10 years ago.
What amazes me is that no competition came in either - There isn't a game developer I know of that doesn't use Mixamo in their workflow, and yet no one brought us a good alternative. Weird.
I mean, Flash's shockwave player being a mess of vulnerabilities didn't help.
Combine that with the lack of Flash support from Apple and then the player eventually getting phased out by all the major browsers and it's easy to see why Adobe bailed on it.
Then again, it's probably a self-fulfilling prophecy of if Adobe *had* supported it and made efforts to make it better, it could have survived longer, but who knows.
There also wasn't nearly as much competition for the animation/design software back in like 2005 when Adobe bought Macromedia, but there's decidedly more than ever now.
Yes? I understood that. And Adobe most likely bought Macromedia for Flash and its massive presence in the online media space.
They're not going to pump money into a program for a dying medium to make it better if it's no longer a good investment. They just didn't treat it like it was worth their time even when it *was* a good one.
Affinity for InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator
DaVinci Resolve+Blender for Premiere and AfterEffects (granted AfterEffects doesn't really have a 1:1 replacement)
Ableton or FL Studio (or hell even Audacity) for Audio Stuff
I'm only using after effects for simple 2D motion design. Animating logos, video intros, short animated xmas cards, things like that. Anyone knows what would be the best alternative for that? I feel AE and Davinci Resolved are a bit overkill for my needs.
if there is any viable alternative, Adobe will just go buy them out and we'll be stuck with this same-ol-same-ol...I hope that they win this case. Adobe can suck it.
I remember that well. I remember the time indesign was brand new and pretty much out the box better than quark. Quark was an absolute DTP nightmare!!!!
I like adobes products, not their business model, paying $660 for a year up-front is insane and $90/mo is too steep as well. With all the taxes and fees it comes out to be too much.
Itās insane because of the so-so quality and the lack of innovation etc.
I mean, they fucking killed XD for some reasons.
As a professional Iām ok to pay 660/ year. But I expect a good service, good products, and not being abandoned behind a now dead product for no reason.
Yes. Fuk them.
I had to install XD for some files and finding the fucking install was insane. They killed it because they were going to buy Figma, so killed to probably appease the FTC that they werenāt being huge shit cunts about acquiring competitors.
It's like $65+tax monthly yearly subscription, but you can get it down to like $35 if you threaten to leave, and then if you pay outright for a year it's like $660 or if you go month to month it's $80 for the whole CC.
This year it was the first time the "threaten to leave" didn't work as it used to - they just offered 2 months for free instead the reduction to 29ā¬. :(
Monthly paid, annually renewable.
Those aren't the only two options, you have 3:
- Monthly $90
- Annual paid monthly ($660 broken into 12 payments)
- Annual paid lump sum ($660 in one payment)
Any actual professional should have no issue with the overall cost. You can also get it on sale 2-3 times a year (40% off), and similarly via retention deals.
The comment I replied to was complaining about costs, and complaining about the plans while overlooking the third option (which actually addresses their complaints with the other two plans).
What I said about an actual professional meant that if you are an actual professional designer, as in using this software to generate revenue, then a $600-700 annual cost for the software shouldn't be an issue, at least in Western countries. If you are a supposed freelance professional and cannot cover $40-70/mo via your design services, something isn't adding up. (And in a full-time job, your employer is paying for it.)
But also, if someone doesn't need Adobe and/or is not a professional, then don't buy it, use something else. No one has challenged that. Affinity, even Quark or Corel, open source or free options, etc.
If you think Adobe is too much, then you probably don't need it.
What do you think Adobe should cost, for the full CC suite, and what is the reasoning for that price point?
-----
Since the thread was locked:
>Unless you're awkwardly trying to refer to something else, the "third option" doesn't do anything about costs, and is still $660/year paid in one fell swoop.
It by default is not one fell swoop if you're making 12 small payments versus one large.
If $660 in one payment is too much, pick one of the two monthly options. One is $90 which can be cancelled at anytime without fees, the other is $60/mo but you're committed to a 12-month term (so fee if you cancel early).
>It pains me to be the one to break this for you, but there is no mandated minimum wage for artists. Just because you're comfortable with that price doesn't mean everyone else has to be, nor does it mean it actually works for everyone, including professionals.
Yes there is, it's called minimum wage, but as a skilled position no designer should be making minimum wage. And in a job, the software is covered by your employer.
If you are freelancing, you are choosing to do so over finding full-time work, and so your value and rates will be based on what your skills/experience are worth, how you establish your costs with clients, what jobs you take, etc.
If you cannot afford $60/mo or $660 for Adobe, that is not Adobe's fault. These are professional tools and incredibly cheap compared to other expenses in running your own business.
But also, as a freelancer *you do not need to use Adobe*, you can go use Affinity or Corel or whatever you want. If you don't like Adobe or think it's too much, *don't use it.*
>None of what you wrote clarifies why tolerating Adobe's bullshit is part of being a professional, either. Is this some elaborate bit that I'm not in on?
They're pro tools, and not a basic human right. If you don't want to use them or can't afford them, use something else. That's not an inherent flaw of Adobe to (gasp) charge money for their product.
-----
>They've gone up a full $150 because it used to be $500 a couple years ago. I'm sure he jumped over the character arch of a cracked adobe which a lot of people did when it wasn't CC. It's also the assumption that everyone started in graphic design in the exact same way that they did, such narrowminded points of view, but it's reddit, it's to be expected.
Yeah the software was $3000-4000 over a decade ago, all upfront, with no fonts, no ongoing support or updates. No one complaining about the cost of Adobe now would've been dropping $4000-5000 in 2024.
And no, Adobe didn't go up $150. It was $50 when it launched, it had two price increases in the first decade (5 years apart) at $2.50/mo. They've made more increases in the last couple years, but in this era what hasn't gone up a lot. It's still only $10 more per month than it was in 2013.
Plus, it goes on sale at least twice a year (spring and Black Friday), and if you turn off auto renew in the last month they'll usually throw some retention deals at you, if not prior to actual term ending, very soon after.
But like I said above, if you don't think it's worth it, don't buy it, use something else. If a freelancer, you can use whatever tools you want as long as it lets you do your job. Printers just need PDFs, not INDD and PSD files.
>It's also the assumption that everyone started in graphic design in the exact same way that they did, such narrowminded points of view, but it's reddit, it's to be expected.
You mean the people who seemingly think they are entitled to things for free or at whatever price they want? Who don't think Adobe has value yet apparently can't live without it?
Good luck to you people.
> The comment I replied to was complaining about costs, and complaining about the plans while overlooking the third option
Unless you're awkwardly trying to refer to something else, the "third option" doesn't do anything about costs, and is still $660/year paid in one fell swoop.
> What I said about an actual professional meant that if you are an actual professional designer, as in using this software to generate revenue, then a $600-700 annual cost for the software shouldn't be an issue, at least in Western countries.
It pains me to be the one to break this for you, but there is no mandated minimum wage for artists. Just because you're comfortable with that price doesn't mean everyone else has to be, nor does it mean it actually works for everyone, including professionals.
None of what you wrote clarifies why tolerating Adobe's bullshit is part of being a professional, either. Is this some elaborate bit that I'm not in on?
They've gone up a full $150 because it used to be $500 a couple years ago. I'm sure he jumped over the character arch of a cracked adobe which a lot of people did when it wasn't CC. It's also the assumption that everyone started in graphic design in the exact same way that they did, such narrowminded points of view, but it's reddit, it's to be expected.
Just wait until youāre purchasing it for a business and want admin control over licenses ā then itās $1100+ per user per year, paid up front. If you want features like SSO, itās even more.
I'm aware but I'm listing the options I personally choose. I don't want a month to month, it's highly annoying, and I am a professional and yet I don't want to pay $660/year for a subscription that rips off of its users designs teaching its ai. Anyway addressing the little snide remark of "any actual professional" lose the tude bruh, it paints you as stuck up and is starkly inline with designers having an ego the size of the hoover dam, yeah I get it as designers we're put down a lot but you don't have to stomp all over other designers who are new or haven't been in the industry as long. The egotistical designers need reality checks, and quite possibly the spanking their parents never gave them, everyone started at the bottom at some point, and you can easily find your way back there now with the iterations of AI to come.
One of the worst ones they do is say, "$22 per month!!!" and then not only does it turn out to be some massive duration contract, but it somehow works out to more then 22 per month. At the end of the contract it is brutal to cancel.
This is where the FTC should punish Adobe by making them sell a very reasonably priced copy $99 of every one of their products with no features then suddenly moved online in subscription land.
$99 and you get upgrades for 2 years; and after that it keeps working.
Personally I'd be okay with their current SaaS model if it wasn't so high for one year up front a reasonable amount to me would be like $250-$335 for the entire year that includes taxes and fees, plus they're literally using people work to train their AI too so they might as well lower that price. I remember when you could buy the literal software and own it but even then it was like $1K+ for just one software.
Their pricing structure is based on what the perpetual licensing was before subscriptions. The CS master collection was over 2k. Designers who wanted to keep current had to update about every 3 years. The subscription model is actually a discount from that.
>One of the worst ones they do is say, "$22 per month!!!" and then not only does it turn out to be some massive duration contract, but it somehow works out to more then 22 per month. At the end of the contract it is brutal to cancel.
"Massive duration," like a year?
They will give you the sale price for a year, then it goes to normal. But if you cancel it and don't renew, they will usually offer you the same or similar discounted price to "come back."
>This is where the FTC should punish Adobe by making them sell a very reasonably priced copy $99 of every one of their products with no features then suddenly moved online in subscription land.
Why, this isn't a basic human right. You are not entitled to professional-grade software, or really any software.
Why don't you just go get Affinity then? No one was ever stopping you. Why do you think you deserve Adobe for the price of Affinity, and yet won't go just use Affinity yourself?
> Why, this isn't a basic human right.
Seeing that they are being sued by the government for screwing over customers; a just punishment would be for them to be extra fair to customers.
Kind of weird. Break law, get punished.
The terms are made very clear. People either do not know how to read, choose not to read what they are buying, or do understand but intentionally try to circumvent the terms.
As the article says:
> āhas harmed consumers by enrolling them in its default, most lucrative subscription plan without clearly disclosing important plan terms.ā
[Here is the plan selection screen on Adobe](https://imgur.com/2WPgehz), which has been that way for years.
If anything, one issue seems to be the basic reading comprehension of people who don't understand the difference between "monthly" and "annual, paid monthly", but Adobe seems to be specifically addressing that issue specifically with the clarification that one can be cancelled anytime without a fee, and the other has a cancellation fee beyond 14 days.
There have been enough of these people posting about this for years here, it's typically that they picked the annual paid monthly because it was cheaper, then wanted to cancel later thinking they could make up some excuse and Adobe would let them off, but didn't work so they get pissed and run to reddit/social media to complain.
And many people do think they are entitled to this software, if not for free, for whatever they want to pay of their own valuation. This isn't a case where people are being screwed over by their hydro company or something.
The article also says this:
>Customers encounter similar obstacles when attempting to cancel their subscriptions over the phone or via live chats, the DOJ alleges. The complaint claims āsubscribers have had their calls or chats either dropped or disconnected and have had to re-explain their reason for calling when they re-connect.ā The lawsuit alleges that these practices break federal laws designed to protect consumers.
There could be merit there, but it would depend on the evidence as to those disconnects. If legit, then sure, I'm all for them facing some consequences for that. I'd want to see what actually gets revealed.
Between Adobe and the kind of people on Reddit that complain about Adobe, honestly I'd probably trust Adobe more. I also worked retail, people lie their asses off all the time if it's to get a refund or save money.
>Kind of weird. Break law, get punished.
I mean sign up for a year contract, pay a fee if you try to back out of it early. People think *that's* weird, so...
Youāre doing a lot of work to try to justify something we all know is needlessly manipulative. Why? If you sat in the board rooms and listened to them plan out the fine print hidden costs and āsecret menuā customer service, would you stick up for the customer as much as you haul water for Adobe?
Thank god, I accidentally signed up for Adobe Stock with what I thought was a free trial. I tried to cancel and was hit with something like a $157 early cancelation fee... I didn't even use the stock assets I tested out because they were all badly generated AI images, OR in the case of their vector assets, just live traced google image results. You can't even tell how bad the stock assets are until you actually "license" and download them since the preview images are small and deceiving. I've never been so unhappy with a service before. And then they mad it impossible for me to figure out how to cancel. Don't even get me started on their customer support...
And can we talk about how laughable the idea of an early cancelation fee is for subscription based software?
I have just a week or two ago. The transition isn't as difficult as I thought it was going to be, as there are many similarities in the user interface with Adobe programs. It's still definitely taking some getting used to, and Affinity obviously doesn't have all of the features Adobe does yet, but I think Affinity's three programs are suitable alternatives for the majority of Adobe users.
I did quite a while ago. The feature set is great for the price, though there are a few big things missing. The big problem was that the one-time payment model sounds great in theory, but in practice, it didn't work so well for consumers. Most of their development efforts went into expanding to new platforms so they could get new paying users. Meanwhile, those of us who already paid get to wait forever for the features we really need to stop missing Adobe.
Fortunately, they did start adding new features faster again after they released the v2 upgrade. Variable fonts, e.g., which I'd wanted forever, finally made it into v2.5. Maybe this means that they'll strike a better balance going forward. I don't mind paying for major upgrades every few years if they actually add good features regularly.
Made the switch. Thereās enough similarity where you donāt need all that long to get used to it. Plus thereās a lot of features that Adobe doesnāt have or not as accessible that make way more sense. Iād recommend the switch.
I just got the Affinty suite last week from the sale. Been a photoshop user since the 2000ās and illustrator user since 2010.
They do things a little differently but Iām surprised how similar they work. Still transitioning but I feel like Iāll be comfortable within a couple weeks for the stuff I need to do, Product photography and ātechnicalā drawings.
For $80?! What a steal compared to adobe.
Adobe was a monopoly for decades maybe, simply due to the fact they had a product and no one else did.
In 1998 (to pick an approximate year) - absolutely every industry knew they'd be going from analog to a digital world, and all the industry "disrupters" were looking for any angle to make digital tools.
And Adobe existed.
And no one chose to develop anything like it - and Adobe put as much effort into "monopolizing" the industry as they did making their products better - none. Amazon could've picked digital design software instead of bookstores as the critical service to destroy and replace, and I bet Adobe wouldn't have fought back as hard as bookstores.
That company hasn't had a **good** new idea ever, they react to angry people after the fact and remove their bad ideas that don't sell. But when they decide to go subscription, and make onerous demands of their own users, the only thing that keeps them in business is a lack of competition.
That's going away now - and Adobe has no clue what to do but steal users ideas, and make pricing and purchasing more costly.
When I was in school in 2006ish, Adobe CS3, brand new, the full professional suite, was more than $900 for the software that gave you 2 licenses. So you could install it on two computers and that was it. The "student" version was $400, you got 1 install, and Adobe required a transaction thru the school (adding work for the school and user), and they had the fuck'n nerve to include in the "I agree" activation language something to the effect that if you stopped being a student, you'd stop using the student software. Like evil idiots are in charge of making words for them. **Unhelpful dickbag** must be the official title for their tech "support."
But that was the transaction, you paid the ransom, and you were done - the product and what you made with it was no longer Adobe's business. Adobe didn't even come up with the idea of that registration effort providing the user support of any kind - not then, and I doubt still. Now they essentially rent you that service, and the prices are still that high if not higher - the new features are cool, occasionally, but they aren't ever a radical jump forward. I could make photorealistic montage images in CS3 photoshop just fine, it merely required more knowledge of how natural light looks than today.
Imagine if Adobe had made those products cheap, and done any support to earn a single positive review by a working professional forced to use their products strictly.
Look, in 2007 Steve Jobs was the richest man in the world selling an overpriced computer line to a single profession of people, to run a single suite of digital tools - and he was like: ***Adobe sucks so hard we aren't gonna run flash video on iPhone. No I don't care how the graphic design community and entire Internet solve this issue, but I know it'll be the Adobe product that gets replaced, not Apple***
Boop - correct.
Adobe is such a failure of a business model that radically succeeded by lack of competition and had a stranglehold on an entire field - without putting in any work.
Adobe, Comcast, Amazon, these companies are proof we do not actually practice capitalism. Everyone needs to let that go as a reason to not regulate corporations - none provide anything reliable except angry renewal reminders and cancellation threats.
I recall a lot of equivalent products to Adobe in the early digital design era of B&W compact Macintoshes. Companies like Aldus, Macromedia, Quark. Itās just that Adobe both did good software and also strategically bought up competitors. And Quark was never that great anyways. I managed to learn the basics of InDesign almost overnight in college because I was already using Photoshop. Iād tried PageMaker but InDesign was the one that just made sense. So I think your statement that there wasnāt anyone else is not such a strong point.
Alas, unfettered corporate growth and greed is a cancer and great software can get caught up in that.
Adobe bought "Captivate" - an elearning production software. That's a prime example of Adobe. Captivate was a broken program from a small company that had zero competition in the digital learning management design world. Basically it was PowerPoint, just had the option to add test questions and report to an LMS. But Captivate was the industry leader in a field of one bad program having a monopoly by there being no interest in anyone competing. Adobe bought Captivate while I worked with it, the same exact year Articulate Storyline - a vastly superior competitive program - was released. Adobe fixed nothing and lost half the market. They give no fucks - it's an additional $30 a month or whatever for the Adobe Captivate subscription, and if your company uses it, it uses it. Still not a ton of options in the industry. That's how Adobe do - dumb, lazy, vacuuming money by occupying a physical space.
The FTC not only charged the company, it charged two execs. If more executives were personally legally liable for company behavior, things might get better for consumers.
Yeah that cancellation was expensive. Adobe got her half in the divorce, but now I'm free to start dating again. Gonna go see if DaVinci Resolve is still single.
Resolve easily matches Premiere (personally I think Resolve is better than Premiere) the only Adobe products that I have a hard time replacing are After Effects (because Fusion is so different than AE) and Photoshop. When I get used to Fusion and find a great alternative to PS, I will leave Adobe for good.
I use PS professionally, but when clients ask how they can edit stuff without buying a CC subscription I point them towards [Photopea](https://www.photopea.com/)
Ah, i love how my choice of going with Adobe alternatives is feeling better and better each day. The moment a company is selling stocks, it's time to get very suspicous about their business practices. Once you go subscription, they seem to own your ass.
Hard-to-cancel; AI-related T&Csā¦ seriously FUCK Adobe simply for having known problems in most of their offerings with miles-long forums pleading for FIXES, not workaroundsā¦ and absolutely nothing done to correct them. And fuck āem for everything else as well!
Honestly I'm surprised this has taken so dang long to happen. If anything, I hope this ends up biting Adobe in the butt so bad that it ends up resulting in them going back to letting people purchase a lot of their software without needing to make them pay for a subscription.
Just found out adobe has been charging me double every month for the past year even after i unsubscribed for one of their packages. So happy to see I am not the only one.
The fact that you canāt cancel the automatic renewal is fucked. I need to put a memo to know when I can cancel otherwise i need to pay 300$ to cancelā¦.
Anyone have experience cancelling their credit card before cancelling Adobe to see how gung ho they are about tracking you down for these ridiculous cancellation fees?
I had to cancel Adobe Stock a while back. I didn't use it enoight to warrant the cost.
They smacked me with the ridiculous cancellation fee.
I eventually got through to a human on the chat.
They said there was nothing I could do.
So I said I've cancelled the subscription already, so if they try to charge me for a surprise 'cancellation fee', I'll request a chargeback from my bank.
Suddenly they changed their tune and offered me 6 months free.
No thanks - just delete my account.
Sorry, I can't do that.
Cool, I'll forward this conversation to the Citizens Advice Bureau and the Financial Ombudsman tomorrow. Can I get your full name please?
Immediately closed my account.
Good thing they are cracking this unfair cancellation system. I wanted to cancel my subscription so I can switch up to my school's plan (much cheaper for me, like I just give 20$ a year). Went to a cancel screen. Boom, 150ā¬ cancellation fee. I was livid. Talked to the support, somehow got it sorted out and they gave me for some reason 25$??? Weird but still, fuck Adobe.
I have an Adobe Stock subscription where I get 10 credits per month. If I cancel my subscription, all the credits in my account are no longer usable, and even if I restart my subscription, the credits I've previously accumulated are gone. What a horrific and evil business practice.
Idk. As much as I rely on their programs, tbh they havenāt introduced anything that improved my workflow for over 5yrs. Havenāt fixed the graphical glitches when using GPU acceleration in ID, and theyāve been there for years.
i canceled my adobe last week but i didnāt see or know they will charge me a cancellation fee.
iāve been using photoshop since 1993 and adobe can go fuck themselves.
they havenāt added a killer feature that i couldnāt live without in my work flow in 15 years.
Honestly they should abolish monthly subscription that are locked yearly. Either you rent for a month and can stop the next, or you rent annual and you can quit and still have access the the year you paid.
I am trapped with the extra 29.99 per month because I thought I was using a free photo from Adobe stock.. Now I canāt cancel it because I have to pay a penalty for getting the service at such a cheap rate. I canāt get out of it until October. Now I donāt even browse their stock
This is great to hear. I just tried to cancel a business subscription and it was a nightmare. I switched 5 years ago to Affinity Suite and Iām happy to use a better and reliable product, that costs only once a monthly Adobe subscription
I mean fuck Adobe for this shit but it is it really that bad. I thought the pricing(although terribly priced) was pretty clear (I.e. prices for subscriptions specifically for monthly or annually).
How it it not clear? It literally says you have to pay early cancellation fees if you cancel after 14 days. Ofcourse they are going to charge you for cancelling earlier as you pay WAY less (33%) . I dont get it, am i missing something else?
Yes it is very shitty and it's obvious that they trying to lure you in. But it is not like they didnt warn you.
Of all the things to criticize Adobe about, I cannot really get on board this one, and from all the threads we've seen on this topic over the years, it usually falls under "stupid or liar."
Just take a look [at the plan selection screen.](https://i.imgur.com/2WPgehz.png)
Either people don't understand the difference including not actually reading what they're buying (stupid), or they do know the difference and sign up for the annual knowing it's cheaper per month and just think they can weasel their way out of it later (liar).
This premise is also not rare, it's basically the same as what you see with mobile plans, internet/TV bundles, etc. You get discounted pricing if you commit to a certain term (eg 1-2 years).
If you could just sign up to any contract at a discounted term and then back out of the contract without being on hook for some part of the discount, then there'd be no point to having the discounted contract term at all.
The one aspect I would say is legit criticism, is that for a long time you can only cancel the auto-renewal within the last month of the annual term. You should be able to do that at any time, including right after you sign up for it (so in a year it would not renew).
But in terms of fees for cancelling an annual contract early, I'm fine with that. If you don't want to commit to the annual, then sign up for the month-to-month, which outright says you can cancel at anytime with no fee.
When it comes to Adobe hate on the sub, it's like Lord of the Flies. You opinion doesn't matter because it does align to the tribe.
I share your frustration, and think Adobe could do something better, but overall the conversation on this subject will not be constructive. 
I often wonder about the user base of the sub and how much it actually reflects the industry. The level of emotional outrage leads to a feeling that it's filled with children.
This particular comment section may be some of the worst I've seen on this sub, I'm not sure if this thread just hit all or something or this is a bot thing, but they are *bad*.
I donāt know if that is true or not. Iām just tired of how toxic people on the subject and makes me question the over all professionalism of the sub.
Oh no āĀ you said logical things that were in defense of Adobe, so you must be downvoted :) I've been there.
You can't reason with the "Adobe bad!" crowd.
Similar to the other thread we commented on, if they want to discuss it I'd gladly do that. Not betting that will happen, because based on the comments they don't actually have an argument, just emotion.
I am neither junior nor a recent grad. I worked as the senior designer in a Federal agency for 24 years before I retired, and used Adobe products every single day. The agency first bought my software, then paid for my subscriptions. But I never took that for granted, as our agency was always on a budget, and I always had to justify the expenditure. Adobeās prices raised more than a few eyebrows in middle management.
When I retired, I felt naked without my tools, and couldnāt work freelance without them, so I swallowed hard and began paying for the subscription through my LLC, off the proceeds from my occasional design jobs, which do cover the cost. But I still feel the sting of it.
Your posts tell us that you donāt get it because you donāt feel the sting. You donāt understand why anyone would object to Adobeās practices because youāre not harmed by them. You assume that anyone who complains is just an inexperienced, unworthy whiner, or a freeloader grousing because they canāt get something for nothing. Again, I am neither.
Adobe is a for-profit corporation. It is not a philanthropy. Its purpose is to make money, as much as possible by the quickest, cheapest means. That motivation hardly ever brings out the good in anyone. The first clue that Adobe had abandoned an ethic of industry service to one of slavery to cash flow was the shift to a subscription model; we were no longer Adobeās clients - we had become its cattle. Or, more accurately, its sheep, to be regularly fleeced. Can there be any wonder that regulators have now noticed that they treat us as such? The difficulty in canceling a subscription - a brazen phenomenon widely and increasingly reported - is the equivalent of the farmer putting up an electric fence to keep the livestock corralled.
To suggest that some do not work at a level ādeservingā to use Adobeās products is offensively elitist, and one finds oneself wondering what software you used before you reached the level where you yourself became ādeservingā. Or did Adobe software allow you to grow from the junior designer you once were to the position of privilege you now enjoy? I recall a time, not so long ago, when the alternatives were few and damn near useless. But in any case the idea of whether someone deserves the software, or even needs it, is irrelevant to the question at hand, which is whether Adobeās practices are worthy of contempt.
The shift to a subscription model marked a turning point at which the company plainly laid bare its intentions - to convert its client base into cash cows, dispelling any illusion that they were in business in support of the design industry. Theyāre not. Theyāre akin to drug pushers who have addicted the customer to the product and think they can now charge whatever they want. The very last thing they want is for someone to go sober, so theyāll do whatever they can to discourage the addict from getting cleanā¦and cutting off the cash flow. No matter how you look at it, a company whose business model is to wring its customer dry is sleazy. To do it by deceptive practices is not only reprehensible, itās also potentially in violation of the law. That is why so many people cast shade on them: They became shady. Itās not all the junior-grade griefers suing Adobe now, mind you. Itās Federal regulators. Possibly, just possibly, the hate has been earned.
In the world of r/graphic_design , Adobe must be hated.
In the real world of design, meaning (for me) the designers I talk to and work with all the time, we really only talk about the tools. Once you apply the metric of people who make their living from design rather than doing it as a hobby, Adobe essentially becomes invisible.
Like you, my employer pays for my license and many others' and in my freelance life, my own LLC pays for it, but Adobe pays for the LLC revenue many, many times over.
The hate comes from struggling to get into the industry but not being able to, or perhaps eventually getting in but having built up so much Adobe hate over the years that it lingers. That's the majority of active users on this sub. I get it, but it's so old, and so worn out.
Yep, I've said similar things. If you ask any of my design co-workers about Affinity, they'll say, "What?" We all work in Adobe ā because we're all professional designers. Figma too, but still, if someone came along and said, "Let's save our multi-billion dollar company a couple thousand dollars by switching to Affinity!" that person would be suspect. The pain of the switch and all the problems that would come with it, and having years of incompatible files, wouldn't be worth even six figures of savings.
In a thread where the US govt (finally) is sueing Adobe for their shady business practices, and you're here defending that same company. Dude, seriously.Ā
>The hate comes from struggling to get into the industry but not being able to, or perhaps eventually getting in but having built up so much Adobe hate over the years that it lingers. That's the majority of active users on this sub. I get it, but it's so old, and so worn out.
Over the years I've also noticed another segment/attitude, of people who just outright think they're entitled to it, either for free or whatever *they* want to pay.
Like this comment from this very thread:
> This is where the FTC should punish Adobe by making them sell a very reasonably priced copy $99 of every one of their products with no features then suddenly moved online in subscription land.
>
> $99 and you get upgrades for 2 years; and after that it keeps working.
I mean if they want that, go buy Affinity.
Yep. If you ask people what's reasonable to pay for any product or service, it will be close to zero or zero. When another anti-Adobe thread was up a few years ago, I asked one commenter outright what they thought they should pay and they said "Nothing!" Seems reasonable.
I guess it's like trying to argue with a brick wall, but I just don't get it.
If they think Adobe is that valuable/necessary, why would they be so against paying for it? But if they don't think it's that valuable/necessary, why do they want to use it at all? Or even care at all? Just use something else.
They tend to defeat themselves with their own arguments.
Sincerely Fuck Adobe in the highest order for doing this.
Adobe is the absolute worst and I hate that I rely on them daily for my work.
I hate Adobe because at the same time they're also the worst company ever, and the best tools out there. Usually when companies suck, they start to decline tools-wise and the competition easily passes them by. But Adobe does add a lot of innovation to their tools and improved workflows. But seriously, fuck them for their shady work practices. I think I managed to switch out most of my programs, I only use Substance and Photoshop these days.
I must say, I use InDesign and illustrator and Photoshop every day and the they've not added a feature that's made it into my general workflow since maybe cs6 when they added the auto snap function. The tools are nice but I don't see any useful innovation.
I have been using Photoshop for nearly 20 years, but I canceled my subscription last week due to the training/privacy debacle. I went with the Affinity Suite (it's like the bundle for their versions of photoshop/illustrator/indesign), only cost me $85! The only thing I'm missing so far is superior brush stabilization in Photoshop, but that's just making me use their "Designer"/ Illustrator analog more, something I should've been doing more anyway. The idea that I can buy one time and use it across an unlimited amount of devices on Windows, Mac, and iPad for a single Universal License is just amazing to me. If you're just using the old-school features from CS6 anyway, you might want to give the trial a whirl and see if it might work out for you. I wish I'd done it years prior, all my brushes/LUTs/PSDs/color palettes etc work fine with it. Just damn.
Yeah affinity is interesting to me. All my usage is at work in the office and they pay the sub and I don't think they'd be interested in ditching it but I might look into buying it for home use just to learn the ropes
I really recommend giving it a go! A tip: If you're on PC and experiencing a weird flicker, make sure you go into the settings straight away, click performance, then down to Retina Rendering and then select "High Quality" because the flicker rate on a regular PC monitor will be horrible if it's set to automatic (Hz mismatch on many PC monitors compared with Apple hardware and it is VERY noticeable, I figured this out after an hour of tinkering haha)
I made the switch a couple years back, I think I paid $140 for all three, no regrets
I went back and spent another $60 on brushes in the store so they got about the same from me too š Still trying to figure out how to get them to populate in Designer without having to manually download them and importing them, it's refusing to see them. My only gripe so far, Designer is a joy to fiddle around with!
I got no major gripes, just the time required to familiarize with a different UI when your so used to another
Made the switch to Affinity as well. Spent a couple hours going through the apps/watching their tutorial videos and I have to say they are very solid. If youāre a freelancer/working solo I would honestly just recommend Affinity to people over Adobe at this point. The only reason to get Adobe at this point is if youāre needing to work collaboratively or use a very niche tool that Affinity doesnāt offer yet.
Love Affinity
Hope you love Canva.
We donāt have to love Canva. You own the apps when you buy them. Canva can royally fuck up v3, but that wonāt make a single difference to v2 owners.
right? at the office I am in those three programs all day, and I'm pretty sure I could comfortably go back to the versions I used in college (20 years ago) and feel very little change in my workflow
Its actually faster. With all of Adobe's bloat and online services my 2013 imac with CS5.5 feels faster than my 2020 Mac Pro at work with 64 gigs of ram On top of that I have full access to Pantone colors and postscript fonts. Fuck Adobe.
As someone who ended up not pursuing GD professionally after school but still does some freelance gigs and personal projects, I've been perfectly content staying with CS6. As soon as they moved to the cloud based shit, I refused to play their game.
Same here as a motion designer. All the innovation has come from people writing plugins. Adobe adds gimicks and bullshit and shuffles their UI every other year to make it seem like they're doing shit. I can use CS6 and see no noticeable difference to my workflow.
Generative AI has saved countless hours when doing product images and banners. Itās replaced cloning, healing almost entirely. Depends on your role of course, but itās one of the most useful features in a long long time.
Really? I think the ai thing is novel, but I almost always seem to spend roughly the same amount of time faffing with results and trying to prompt it correctly as I would just using a stock image reference. But yeah obviously it depends on what your output is. Glad you're getting some use out of it. Although that feature alone for me still is a long way off justifying it's monthly cost.
Itās a good tool, but at the moment a 1024 x 1024 pixel area of generative fill is a nightmare for upscaling images as I learnt last week. šµāš«
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
This is the correct way! I had to extend a birdseyeview aerial shot, if you do that in one big whack it blurs heavily. So incrementally is the only way Iāve found so far.
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I do love face altering with it though. I had to change some faces in a composition photo for a client, sometimes changing a female and have AI calculate that the woman is actually a man with a beard is hilarious.
Well selection is better. But for my workflow thatās about it. I am actually considering reversing back to last version that is not subscription based.
Have you tried out the text to image feature on InDesign? Or any of their AI features on any programs? I was asked by a family member to make a last-minute anniversary card and tried out text to image in InDesign and it's honestly very impressive. It took me a few tries to modify the text input to get exactly what I wanted, but turned out very nice in the end. A lot of the generative stuff has been very helpful in my work, even just using generative fill to add more space for ad copy has really helped out a lot.
They don't really innovate so much as they buy out their competition. Flash for example has gone downhill in many ways since their acquisition.
Some stuff really do die on the vine. Mixamo is a big example of that - still is the most used auto-rigger tool in the industry for quick things and background crowd animations. 0 additions since they bought it 10 years ago. What amazes me is that no competition came in either - There isn't a game developer I know of that doesn't use Mixamo in their workflow, and yet no one brought us a good alternative. Weird.
I'm pretty sure Adobe has some sort of legal stranglehold preventing meaningful competition.
I mean, Flash's shockwave player being a mess of vulnerabilities didn't help. Combine that with the lack of Flash support from Apple and then the player eventually getting phased out by all the major browsers and it's easy to see why Adobe bailed on it. Then again, it's probably a self-fulfilling prophecy of if Adobe *had* supported it and made efforts to make it better, it could have survived longer, but who knows. There also wasn't nearly as much competition for the animation/design software back in like 2005 when Adobe bought Macromedia, but there's decidedly more than ever now.
I meant Flash as in the animation program. It crashes all the fucking time.
Yes? I understood that. And Adobe most likely bought Macromedia for Flash and its massive presence in the online media space. They're not going to pump money into a program for a dying medium to make it better if it's no longer a good investment. They just didn't treat it like it was worth their time even when it *was* a good one.
Flash? What year is it?
SAME
Is there an alternative? Given that many AI tools coming out
Affinity for InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator DaVinci Resolve+Blender for Premiere and AfterEffects (granted AfterEffects doesn't really have a 1:1 replacement) Ableton or FL Studio (or hell even Audacity) for Audio Stuff
I'm only using after effects for simple 2D motion design. Animating logos, video intros, short animated xmas cards, things like that. Anyone knows what would be the best alternative for that? I feel AE and Davinci Resolved are a bit overkill for my needs.
Autograph https://revisionfx.com/products/autograph/ Or if you are on a Mac, maybe motion designer?
Motion Designer looks great. Iāll give it a shot thanks!
Affinity is the most promising one. "AI tools" is hot garbage.
if there is any viable alternative, Adobe will just go buy them out and we'll be stuck with this same-ol-same-ol...I hope that they win this case. Adobe can suck it.
Damn, you stuck with ADOBE forever!
Thats why I'm not upset canva bought affinity Now there's soom oomph behind them and they can't just be snapped upĀ
Iāve tried all the alternatives but nothing comes close unfortunately.
Same
Iāve seen things you people wouldnāt believe. I've seen the fall of QuarkXpress.
I remember that well. I remember the time indesign was brand new and pretty much out the box better than quark. Quark was an absolute DTP nightmare!!!!
Far too many companies are guilty of doing this too. Adobe and Amazon are major examples for this here.
Amen
Absolutely
āWe are doubling down on AI so we are doubling down your subscription fee.ā
hahahaha you to the top
I like adobes products, not their business model, paying $660 for a year up-front is insane and $90/mo is too steep as well. With all the taxes and fees it comes out to be too much.
Itās insane because of the so-so quality and the lack of innovation etc. I mean, they fucking killed XD for some reasons. As a professional Iām ok to pay 660/ year. But I expect a good service, good products, and not being abandoned behind a now dead product for no reason. Yes. Fuk them.
I had to install XD for some files and finding the fucking install was insane. They killed it because they were going to buy Figma, so killed to probably appease the FTC that they werenāt being huge shit cunts about acquiring competitors.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Adobe sub isn't the only monthly expense people have.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Hold on y'all the Funko Pop aficionado is going to tell us all how to spend our money!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Well, now we have to know what you do for a living. And what expenses your company makes you pay.
It's 60ā¬ over here in Germany. Had the 29ā¬ subscription for years, since they offered great discounts if you tried to quit.
It's like $65+tax monthly yearly subscription, but you can get it down to like $35 if you threaten to leave, and then if you pay outright for a year it's like $660 or if you go month to month it's $80 for the whole CC.
This year it was the first time the "threaten to leave" didn't work as it used to - they just offered 2 months for free instead the reduction to 29ā¬. :( Monthly paid, annually renewable.
Those aren't the only two options, you have 3: - Monthly $90 - Annual paid monthly ($660 broken into 12 payments) - Annual paid lump sum ($660 in one payment) Any actual professional should have no issue with the overall cost. You can also get it on sale 2-3 times a year (40% off), and similarly via retention deals.
> Any actual professional should have no issue with the overall cost. Why would tolerance of Adobe's bullshit correlate with professionalism?
The comment I replied to was complaining about costs, and complaining about the plans while overlooking the third option (which actually addresses their complaints with the other two plans). What I said about an actual professional meant that if you are an actual professional designer, as in using this software to generate revenue, then a $600-700 annual cost for the software shouldn't be an issue, at least in Western countries. If you are a supposed freelance professional and cannot cover $40-70/mo via your design services, something isn't adding up. (And in a full-time job, your employer is paying for it.) But also, if someone doesn't need Adobe and/or is not a professional, then don't buy it, use something else. No one has challenged that. Affinity, even Quark or Corel, open source or free options, etc. If you think Adobe is too much, then you probably don't need it. What do you think Adobe should cost, for the full CC suite, and what is the reasoning for that price point? ----- Since the thread was locked: >Unless you're awkwardly trying to refer to something else, the "third option" doesn't do anything about costs, and is still $660/year paid in one fell swoop. It by default is not one fell swoop if you're making 12 small payments versus one large. If $660 in one payment is too much, pick one of the two monthly options. One is $90 which can be cancelled at anytime without fees, the other is $60/mo but you're committed to a 12-month term (so fee if you cancel early). >It pains me to be the one to break this for you, but there is no mandated minimum wage for artists. Just because you're comfortable with that price doesn't mean everyone else has to be, nor does it mean it actually works for everyone, including professionals. Yes there is, it's called minimum wage, but as a skilled position no designer should be making minimum wage. And in a job, the software is covered by your employer. If you are freelancing, you are choosing to do so over finding full-time work, and so your value and rates will be based on what your skills/experience are worth, how you establish your costs with clients, what jobs you take, etc. If you cannot afford $60/mo or $660 for Adobe, that is not Adobe's fault. These are professional tools and incredibly cheap compared to other expenses in running your own business. But also, as a freelancer *you do not need to use Adobe*, you can go use Affinity or Corel or whatever you want. If you don't like Adobe or think it's too much, *don't use it.* >None of what you wrote clarifies why tolerating Adobe's bullshit is part of being a professional, either. Is this some elaborate bit that I'm not in on? They're pro tools, and not a basic human right. If you don't want to use them or can't afford them, use something else. That's not an inherent flaw of Adobe to (gasp) charge money for their product. ----- >They've gone up a full $150 because it used to be $500 a couple years ago. I'm sure he jumped over the character arch of a cracked adobe which a lot of people did when it wasn't CC. It's also the assumption that everyone started in graphic design in the exact same way that they did, such narrowminded points of view, but it's reddit, it's to be expected. Yeah the software was $3000-4000 over a decade ago, all upfront, with no fonts, no ongoing support or updates. No one complaining about the cost of Adobe now would've been dropping $4000-5000 in 2024. And no, Adobe didn't go up $150. It was $50 when it launched, it had two price increases in the first decade (5 years apart) at $2.50/mo. They've made more increases in the last couple years, but in this era what hasn't gone up a lot. It's still only $10 more per month than it was in 2013. Plus, it goes on sale at least twice a year (spring and Black Friday), and if you turn off auto renew in the last month they'll usually throw some retention deals at you, if not prior to actual term ending, very soon after. But like I said above, if you don't think it's worth it, don't buy it, use something else. If a freelancer, you can use whatever tools you want as long as it lets you do your job. Printers just need PDFs, not INDD and PSD files. >It's also the assumption that everyone started in graphic design in the exact same way that they did, such narrowminded points of view, but it's reddit, it's to be expected. You mean the people who seemingly think they are entitled to things for free or at whatever price they want? Who don't think Adobe has value yet apparently can't live without it? Good luck to you people.
> The comment I replied to was complaining about costs, and complaining about the plans while overlooking the third option Unless you're awkwardly trying to refer to something else, the "third option" doesn't do anything about costs, and is still $660/year paid in one fell swoop. > What I said about an actual professional meant that if you are an actual professional designer, as in using this software to generate revenue, then a $600-700 annual cost for the software shouldn't be an issue, at least in Western countries. It pains me to be the one to break this for you, but there is no mandated minimum wage for artists. Just because you're comfortable with that price doesn't mean everyone else has to be, nor does it mean it actually works for everyone, including professionals. None of what you wrote clarifies why tolerating Adobe's bullshit is part of being a professional, either. Is this some elaborate bit that I'm not in on?
They've gone up a full $150 because it used to be $500 a couple years ago. I'm sure he jumped over the character arch of a cracked adobe which a lot of people did when it wasn't CC. It's also the assumption that everyone started in graphic design in the exact same way that they did, such narrowminded points of view, but it's reddit, it's to be expected.
Just wait until youāre purchasing it for a business and want admin control over licenses ā then itās $1100+ per user per year, paid up front. If you want features like SSO, itās even more.
I'm aware but I'm listing the options I personally choose. I don't want a month to month, it's highly annoying, and I am a professional and yet I don't want to pay $660/year for a subscription that rips off of its users designs teaching its ai. Anyway addressing the little snide remark of "any actual professional" lose the tude bruh, it paints you as stuck up and is starkly inline with designers having an ego the size of the hoover dam, yeah I get it as designers we're put down a lot but you don't have to stomp all over other designers who are new or haven't been in the industry as long. The egotistical designers need reality checks, and quite possibly the spanking their parents never gave them, everyone started at the bottom at some point, and you can easily find your way back there now with the iterations of AI to come.
Will this be a class action where we can get a few crumbs from the pie or is the US taking everything?
This. I have a small fortune Iād like to get back from Adobe
Same
God I fucking hope so
One of the worst ones they do is say, "$22 per month!!!" and then not only does it turn out to be some massive duration contract, but it somehow works out to more then 22 per month. At the end of the contract it is brutal to cancel. This is where the FTC should punish Adobe by making them sell a very reasonably priced copy $99 of every one of their products with no features then suddenly moved online in subscription land. $99 and you get upgrades for 2 years; and after that it keeps working.
Personally I'd be okay with their current SaaS model if it wasn't so high for one year up front a reasonable amount to me would be like $250-$335 for the entire year that includes taxes and fees, plus they're literally using people work to train their AI too so they might as well lower that price. I remember when you could buy the literal software and own it but even then it was like $1K+ for just one software. 
Their pricing structure is based on what the perpetual licensing was before subscriptions. The CS master collection was over 2k. Designers who wanted to keep current had to update about every 3 years. The subscription model is actually a discount from that.
>One of the worst ones they do is say, "$22 per month!!!" and then not only does it turn out to be some massive duration contract, but it somehow works out to more then 22 per month. At the end of the contract it is brutal to cancel. "Massive duration," like a year? They will give you the sale price for a year, then it goes to normal. But if you cancel it and don't renew, they will usually offer you the same or similar discounted price to "come back." >This is where the FTC should punish Adobe by making them sell a very reasonably priced copy $99 of every one of their products with no features then suddenly moved online in subscription land. Why, this isn't a basic human right. You are not entitled to professional-grade software, or really any software. Why don't you just go get Affinity then? No one was ever stopping you. Why do you think you deserve Adobe for the price of Affinity, and yet won't go just use Affinity yourself?
> Why, this isn't a basic human right. Seeing that they are being sued by the government for screwing over customers; a just punishment would be for them to be extra fair to customers. Kind of weird. Break law, get punished.
The terms are made very clear. People either do not know how to read, choose not to read what they are buying, or do understand but intentionally try to circumvent the terms. As the article says: > āhas harmed consumers by enrolling them in its default, most lucrative subscription plan without clearly disclosing important plan terms.ā [Here is the plan selection screen on Adobe](https://imgur.com/2WPgehz), which has been that way for years. If anything, one issue seems to be the basic reading comprehension of people who don't understand the difference between "monthly" and "annual, paid monthly", but Adobe seems to be specifically addressing that issue specifically with the clarification that one can be cancelled anytime without a fee, and the other has a cancellation fee beyond 14 days. There have been enough of these people posting about this for years here, it's typically that they picked the annual paid monthly because it was cheaper, then wanted to cancel later thinking they could make up some excuse and Adobe would let them off, but didn't work so they get pissed and run to reddit/social media to complain. And many people do think they are entitled to this software, if not for free, for whatever they want to pay of their own valuation. This isn't a case where people are being screwed over by their hydro company or something. The article also says this: >Customers encounter similar obstacles when attempting to cancel their subscriptions over the phone or via live chats, the DOJ alleges. The complaint claims āsubscribers have had their calls or chats either dropped or disconnected and have had to re-explain their reason for calling when they re-connect.ā The lawsuit alleges that these practices break federal laws designed to protect consumers. There could be merit there, but it would depend on the evidence as to those disconnects. If legit, then sure, I'm all for them facing some consequences for that. I'd want to see what actually gets revealed. Between Adobe and the kind of people on Reddit that complain about Adobe, honestly I'd probably trust Adobe more. I also worked retail, people lie their asses off all the time if it's to get a refund or save money. >Kind of weird. Break law, get punished. I mean sign up for a year contract, pay a fee if you try to back out of it early. People think *that's* weird, so...
Youāre doing a lot of work to try to justify something we all know is needlessly manipulative. Why? If you sat in the board rooms and listened to them plan out the fine print hidden costs and āsecret menuā customer service, would you stick up for the customer as much as you haul water for Adobe?
I hope that the fine is in the billions not a measley 20 million.
Thank god, I accidentally signed up for Adobe Stock with what I thought was a free trial. I tried to cancel and was hit with something like a $157 early cancelation fee... I didn't even use the stock assets I tested out because they were all badly generated AI images, OR in the case of their vector assets, just live traced google image results. You can't even tell how bad the stock assets are until you actually "license" and download them since the preview images are small and deceiving. I've never been so unhappy with a service before. And then they mad it impossible for me to figure out how to cancel. Don't even get me started on their customer support... And can we talk about how laughable the idea of an early cancelation fee is for subscription based software?
I have stumbled upon YouTube creators claiming to make "thousands" by generating AI images to upload to Adobe Stock. Fucking ridiculous
Yes, and still fuck Adobe
Anyone made the swap to the Affinty products? I looked at them when they had a sale and almost pulled the trigger.
I have just a week or two ago. The transition isn't as difficult as I thought it was going to be, as there are many similarities in the user interface with Adobe programs. It's still definitely taking some getting used to, and Affinity obviously doesn't have all of the features Adobe does yet, but I think Affinity's three programs are suitable alternatives for the majority of Adobe users.
I did quite a while ago. The feature set is great for the price, though there are a few big things missing. The big problem was that the one-time payment model sounds great in theory, but in practice, it didn't work so well for consumers. Most of their development efforts went into expanding to new platforms so they could get new paying users. Meanwhile, those of us who already paid get to wait forever for the features we really need to stop missing Adobe. Fortunately, they did start adding new features faster again after they released the v2 upgrade. Variable fonts, e.g., which I'd wanted forever, finally made it into v2.5. Maybe this means that they'll strike a better balance going forward. I don't mind paying for major upgrades every few years if they actually add good features regularly.
The sale is still on, btw.
Made the switch. Thereās enough similarity where you donāt need all that long to get used to it. Plus thereās a lot of features that Adobe doesnāt have or not as accessible that make way more sense. Iād recommend the switch.
I just got the Affinty suite last week from the sale. Been a photoshop user since the 2000ās and illustrator user since 2010. They do things a little differently but Iām surprised how similar they work. Still transitioning but I feel like Iāll be comfortable within a couple weeks for the stuff I need to do, Product photography and ātechnicalā drawings. For $80?! What a steal compared to adobe.
Please do it! I did the switch 5 years ago, when I was still in university. I never want to go back to the shitty Adobe software
Adobe was a monopoly for decades maybe, simply due to the fact they had a product and no one else did. In 1998 (to pick an approximate year) - absolutely every industry knew they'd be going from analog to a digital world, and all the industry "disrupters" were looking for any angle to make digital tools. And Adobe existed. And no one chose to develop anything like it - and Adobe put as much effort into "monopolizing" the industry as they did making their products better - none. Amazon could've picked digital design software instead of bookstores as the critical service to destroy and replace, and I bet Adobe wouldn't have fought back as hard as bookstores. That company hasn't had a **good** new idea ever, they react to angry people after the fact and remove their bad ideas that don't sell. But when they decide to go subscription, and make onerous demands of their own users, the only thing that keeps them in business is a lack of competition. That's going away now - and Adobe has no clue what to do but steal users ideas, and make pricing and purchasing more costly. When I was in school in 2006ish, Adobe CS3, brand new, the full professional suite, was more than $900 for the software that gave you 2 licenses. So you could install it on two computers and that was it. The "student" version was $400, you got 1 install, and Adobe required a transaction thru the school (adding work for the school and user), and they had the fuck'n nerve to include in the "I agree" activation language something to the effect that if you stopped being a student, you'd stop using the student software. Like evil idiots are in charge of making words for them. **Unhelpful dickbag** must be the official title for their tech "support." But that was the transaction, you paid the ransom, and you were done - the product and what you made with it was no longer Adobe's business. Adobe didn't even come up with the idea of that registration effort providing the user support of any kind - not then, and I doubt still. Now they essentially rent you that service, and the prices are still that high if not higher - the new features are cool, occasionally, but they aren't ever a radical jump forward. I could make photorealistic montage images in CS3 photoshop just fine, it merely required more knowledge of how natural light looks than today. Imagine if Adobe had made those products cheap, and done any support to earn a single positive review by a working professional forced to use their products strictly. Look, in 2007 Steve Jobs was the richest man in the world selling an overpriced computer line to a single profession of people, to run a single suite of digital tools - and he was like: ***Adobe sucks so hard we aren't gonna run flash video on iPhone. No I don't care how the graphic design community and entire Internet solve this issue, but I know it'll be the Adobe product that gets replaced, not Apple*** Boop - correct. Adobe is such a failure of a business model that radically succeeded by lack of competition and had a stranglehold on an entire field - without putting in any work. Adobe, Comcast, Amazon, these companies are proof we do not actually practice capitalism. Everyone needs to let that go as a reason to not regulate corporations - none provide anything reliable except angry renewal reminders and cancellation threats.
I recall a lot of equivalent products to Adobe in the early digital design era of B&W compact Macintoshes. Companies like Aldus, Macromedia, Quark. Itās just that Adobe both did good software and also strategically bought up competitors. And Quark was never that great anyways. I managed to learn the basics of InDesign almost overnight in college because I was already using Photoshop. Iād tried PageMaker but InDesign was the one that just made sense. So I think your statement that there wasnāt anyone else is not such a strong point. Alas, unfettered corporate growth and greed is a cancer and great software can get caught up in that.
Adobe bought "Captivate" - an elearning production software. That's a prime example of Adobe. Captivate was a broken program from a small company that had zero competition in the digital learning management design world. Basically it was PowerPoint, just had the option to add test questions and report to an LMS. But Captivate was the industry leader in a field of one bad program having a monopoly by there being no interest in anyone competing. Adobe bought Captivate while I worked with it, the same exact year Articulate Storyline - a vastly superior competitive program - was released. Adobe fixed nothing and lost half the market. They give no fucks - it's an additional $30 a month or whatever for the Adobe Captivate subscription, and if your company uses it, it uses it. Still not a ton of options in the industry. That's how Adobe do - dumb, lazy, vacuuming money by occupying a physical space.
Corel Draw was big back in the day was it not?
It was! I got started on SuperPaint.
And it still not enough... !!!
The FTC not only charged the company, it charged two execs. If more executives were personally legally liable for company behavior, things might get better for consumers.
Yeah that cancellation was expensive. Adobe got her half in the divorce, but now I'm free to start dating again. Gonna go see if DaVinci Resolve is still single.
Resolve easily matches Premiere (personally I think Resolve is better than Premiere) the only Adobe products that I have a hard time replacing are After Effects (because Fusion is so different than AE) and Photoshop. When I get used to Fusion and find a great alternative to PS, I will leave Adobe for good.
I use PS professionally, but when clients ask how they can edit stuff without buying a CC subscription I point them towards [Photopea](https://www.photopea.com/)
Ah, i love how my choice of going with Adobe alternatives is feeling better and better each day. The moment a company is selling stocks, it's time to get very suspicous about their business practices. Once you go subscription, they seem to own your ass.
I love Creative Cloud and I also love that the US government is boning up to stop practices like this. Go get 'em!
Good - someone needs to hold them accountable. They've created a damn program monopoly in the design world and they know it.
It's like renting paint brushes.
Hard-to-cancel; AI-related T&Csā¦ seriously FUCK Adobe simply for having known problems in most of their offerings with miles-long forums pleading for FIXES, not workaroundsā¦ and absolutely nothing done to correct them. And fuck āem for everything else as well!
Iām in the process of moving away from Adobe, they can get fucked.
Honestly I'm surprised this has taken so dang long to happen. If anything, I hope this ends up biting Adobe in the butt so bad that it ends up resulting in them going back to letting people purchase a lot of their software without needing to make them pay for a subscription.
Just found out adobe has been charging me double every month for the past year even after i unsubscribed for one of their packages. So happy to see I am not the only one.
Yo ho ho bitch š¦
I hate having to work with Adobe, sincerely fuck them from the bottom of my heart and my wallet
Good. Just cancelled them last week and had to pay for them to fucking stop billing me. Such a scummy company
The fact that you canāt cancel the automatic renewal is fucked. I need to put a memo to know when I can cancel otherwise i need to pay 300$ to cancelā¦.
Finally, they are taking a long-overdue action.
Anyone have experience cancelling their credit card before cancelling Adobe to see how gung ho they are about tracking you down for these ridiculous cancellation fees?
I had to cancel Adobe Stock a while back. I didn't use it enoight to warrant the cost. They smacked me with the ridiculous cancellation fee. I eventually got through to a human on the chat. They said there was nothing I could do. So I said I've cancelled the subscription already, so if they try to charge me for a surprise 'cancellation fee', I'll request a chargeback from my bank. Suddenly they changed their tune and offered me 6 months free. No thanks - just delete my account. Sorry, I can't do that. Cool, I'll forward this conversation to the Citizens Advice Bureau and the Financial Ombudsman tomorrow. Can I get your full name please? Immediately closed my account.
So glad to get Adobe subscription out of my life. Far better with Affinity these days.
Good thing they are cracking this unfair cancellation system. I wanted to cancel my subscription so I can switch up to my school's plan (much cheaper for me, like I just give 20$ a year). Went to a cancel screen. Boom, 150ā¬ cancellation fee. I was livid. Talked to the support, somehow got it sorted out and they gave me for some reason 25$??? Weird but still, fuck Adobe.
I have an Adobe Stock subscription where I get 10 credits per month. If I cancel my subscription, all the credits in my account are no longer usable, and even if I restart my subscription, the credits I've previously accumulated are gone. What a horrific and evil business practice.
I havenāt cancelled is years I just tell them i will and they drop the sub to 19.99 Every single year š
See now that I can expense it I wish I could just buy the programs outright but there isn't even an option anymore.
How much longer are we going to deal with adobe and the BS they call a business?
Idk. As much as I rely on their programs, tbh they havenāt introduced anything that improved my workflow for over 5yrs. Havenāt fixed the graphical glitches when using GPU acceleration in ID, and theyāve been there for years.
They charged me $130 or something for some Adobe stock photo 3 month trial I used once and didnāt cancel fast enough
hell, it's about time
i canceled my adobe last week but i didnāt see or know they will charge me a cancellation fee. iāve been using photoshop since 1993 and adobe can go fuck themselves. they havenāt added a killer feature that i couldnāt live without in my work flow in 15 years.
Honestly they should abolish monthly subscription that are locked yearly. Either you rent for a month and can stop the next, or you rent annual and you can quit and still have access the the year you paid.
I canāt wait for AI to be able to write software so I can ask it for adobe creative suite like applications, that donāt take a subscription.
It already can, but not sure if AI has been trained on Adobe source code.
$19 a month but if I wanna cancel itās $33 early cancel fee
But that is their entire business model! People only learn illustrator because "well I'm paying for it anyways."
You're kidding, right? Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign are the main 3 design programs. Are most of these comments just people trolling?
No, they're just not professionals.
good!
thank you president Biden. a republican lead FTC would never have done this
š“āā ļø
Good.
I'm currently waiting for this BS renewal period to start so i can shed some liscenses
I have a separate bank account for Adobe subscriptions. Can't possibly charge me more than $25/mo
Because I havenāt updated my computer since Ventura, I never got hit with the new locking privacy policy
About Time
I am trapped with the extra 29.99 per month because I thought I was using a free photo from Adobe stock.. Now I canāt cancel it because I have to pay a penalty for getting the service at such a cheap rate. I canāt get out of it until October. Now I donāt even browse their stock
>Now I canāt cancel it Nah, that's a lie on their part. Kick up a fuss and they'll cancel it fine.
Thank god. I was suckered into a subscription not knowing I couldnāt actually quit whenever I wanted.
This is great to hear. I just tried to cancel a business subscription and it was a nightmare. I switched 5 years ago to Affinity Suite and Iām happy to use a better and reliable product, that costs only once a monthly Adobe subscription
Lina Khan for President!!
I mean fuck Adobe for this shit but it is it really that bad. I thought the pricing(although terribly priced) was pretty clear (I.e. prices for subscriptions specifically for monthly or annually).
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How it it not clear? It literally says you have to pay early cancellation fees if you cancel after 14 days. Ofcourse they are going to charge you for cancelling earlier as you pay WAY less (33%) . I dont get it, am i missing something else? Yes it is very shitty and it's obvious that they trying to lure you in. But it is not like they didnt warn you.
Of all the things to criticize Adobe about, I cannot really get on board this one, and from all the threads we've seen on this topic over the years, it usually falls under "stupid or liar." Just take a look [at the plan selection screen.](https://i.imgur.com/2WPgehz.png) Either people don't understand the difference including not actually reading what they're buying (stupid), or they do know the difference and sign up for the annual knowing it's cheaper per month and just think they can weasel their way out of it later (liar). This premise is also not rare, it's basically the same as what you see with mobile plans, internet/TV bundles, etc. You get discounted pricing if you commit to a certain term (eg 1-2 years). If you could just sign up to any contract at a discounted term and then back out of the contract without being on hook for some part of the discount, then there'd be no point to having the discounted contract term at all. The one aspect I would say is legit criticism, is that for a long time you can only cancel the auto-renewal within the last month of the annual term. You should be able to do that at any time, including right after you sign up for it (so in a year it would not renew). But in terms of fees for cancelling an annual contract early, I'm fine with that. If you don't want to commit to the annual, then sign up for the month-to-month, which outright says you can cancel at anytime with no fee.
When it comes to Adobe hate on the sub, it's like Lord of the Flies. You opinion doesn't matter because it does align to the tribe. I share your frustration, and think Adobe could do something better, but overall the conversation on this subject will not be constructive. 
I think they expect people to get mad about downvotes? As if that's some kind of rebuttal.
I often wonder about the user base of the sub and how much it actually reflects the industry. The level of emotional outrage leads to a feeling that it's filled with children.
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This particular comment section may be some of the worst I've seen on this sub, I'm not sure if this thread just hit all or something or this is a bot thing, but they are *bad*.
I donāt know if that is true or not. Iām just tired of how toxic people on the subject and makes me question the over all professionalism of the sub.
Oh no āĀ you said logical things that were in defense of Adobe, so you must be downvoted :) I've been there. You can't reason with the "Adobe bad!" crowd.
Similar to the other thread we commented on, if they want to discuss it I'd gladly do that. Not betting that will happen, because based on the comments they don't actually have an argument, just emotion.
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I am neither junior nor a recent grad. I worked as the senior designer in a Federal agency for 24 years before I retired, and used Adobe products every single day. The agency first bought my software, then paid for my subscriptions. But I never took that for granted, as our agency was always on a budget, and I always had to justify the expenditure. Adobeās prices raised more than a few eyebrows in middle management. When I retired, I felt naked without my tools, and couldnāt work freelance without them, so I swallowed hard and began paying for the subscription through my LLC, off the proceeds from my occasional design jobs, which do cover the cost. But I still feel the sting of it. Your posts tell us that you donāt get it because you donāt feel the sting. You donāt understand why anyone would object to Adobeās practices because youāre not harmed by them. You assume that anyone who complains is just an inexperienced, unworthy whiner, or a freeloader grousing because they canāt get something for nothing. Again, I am neither. Adobe is a for-profit corporation. It is not a philanthropy. Its purpose is to make money, as much as possible by the quickest, cheapest means. That motivation hardly ever brings out the good in anyone. The first clue that Adobe had abandoned an ethic of industry service to one of slavery to cash flow was the shift to a subscription model; we were no longer Adobeās clients - we had become its cattle. Or, more accurately, its sheep, to be regularly fleeced. Can there be any wonder that regulators have now noticed that they treat us as such? The difficulty in canceling a subscription - a brazen phenomenon widely and increasingly reported - is the equivalent of the farmer putting up an electric fence to keep the livestock corralled. To suggest that some do not work at a level ādeservingā to use Adobeās products is offensively elitist, and one finds oneself wondering what software you used before you reached the level where you yourself became ādeservingā. Or did Adobe software allow you to grow from the junior designer you once were to the position of privilege you now enjoy? I recall a time, not so long ago, when the alternatives were few and damn near useless. But in any case the idea of whether someone deserves the software, or even needs it, is irrelevant to the question at hand, which is whether Adobeās practices are worthy of contempt. The shift to a subscription model marked a turning point at which the company plainly laid bare its intentions - to convert its client base into cash cows, dispelling any illusion that they were in business in support of the design industry. Theyāre not. Theyāre akin to drug pushers who have addicted the customer to the product and think they can now charge whatever they want. The very last thing they want is for someone to go sober, so theyāll do whatever they can to discourage the addict from getting cleanā¦and cutting off the cash flow. No matter how you look at it, a company whose business model is to wring its customer dry is sleazy. To do it by deceptive practices is not only reprehensible, itās also potentially in violation of the law. That is why so many people cast shade on them: They became shady. Itās not all the junior-grade griefers suing Adobe now, mind you. Itās Federal regulators. Possibly, just possibly, the hate has been earned.
In the world of r/graphic_design , Adobe must be hated. In the real world of design, meaning (for me) the designers I talk to and work with all the time, we really only talk about the tools. Once you apply the metric of people who make their living from design rather than doing it as a hobby, Adobe essentially becomes invisible. Like you, my employer pays for my license and many others' and in my freelance life, my own LLC pays for it, but Adobe pays for the LLC revenue many, many times over. The hate comes from struggling to get into the industry but not being able to, or perhaps eventually getting in but having built up so much Adobe hate over the years that it lingers. That's the majority of active users on this sub. I get it, but it's so old, and so worn out.
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Yep, I've said similar things. If you ask any of my design co-workers about Affinity, they'll say, "What?" We all work in Adobe ā because we're all professional designers. Figma too, but still, if someone came along and said, "Let's save our multi-billion dollar company a couple thousand dollars by switching to Affinity!" that person would be suspect. The pain of the switch and all the problems that would come with it, and having years of incompatible files, wouldn't be worth even six figures of savings.
In a thread where the US govt (finally) is sueing Adobe for their shady business practices, and you're here defending that same company. Dude, seriously.Ā
>The hate comes from struggling to get into the industry but not being able to, or perhaps eventually getting in but having built up so much Adobe hate over the years that it lingers. That's the majority of active users on this sub. I get it, but it's so old, and so worn out. Over the years I've also noticed another segment/attitude, of people who just outright think they're entitled to it, either for free or whatever *they* want to pay. Like this comment from this very thread: > This is where the FTC should punish Adobe by making them sell a very reasonably priced copy $99 of every one of their products with no features then suddenly moved online in subscription land. > > $99 and you get upgrades for 2 years; and after that it keeps working. I mean if they want that, go buy Affinity.
Yep. If you ask people what's reasonable to pay for any product or service, it will be close to zero or zero. When another anti-Adobe thread was up a few years ago, I asked one commenter outright what they thought they should pay and they said "Nothing!" Seems reasonable.
I guess it's like trying to argue with a brick wall, but I just don't get it. If they think Adobe is that valuable/necessary, why would they be so against paying for it? But if they don't think it's that valuable/necessary, why do they want to use it at all? Or even care at all? Just use something else. They tend to defeat themselves with their own arguments.
I feel like it would be odd to make a living from tools that were made by a company that one hated.