I recently went through a hectic scenario with Adobe that I never thought would happen. Let me explain and hopefully you won’t fall into the same issues.
Adobe
We all have needed a PDF viewer for many occasions. Getting documents and reading them digitally is just the norm now. When I was in college and high school, Adobe was number one for all things tech. Dealing with the web design world, I had just about every piece of software that Adobe offered, this was the early 2000’s so it may seem like a long time ago. Over time though, things begin to change. You never know if it’s for good or bad until it actually happens.
My Background
I went to school to be a web designer/developer. There is a slash because I believe I do one better than the other, but that isn’t important. The high school I went to had a medical curriculum, meaning I had classes that taught things dealing with hospitals, care giving, nursing, and things like that. We did stints where we would work in the hospitals and they even took us to the morgue.
After 2 years of doing those things, I knew deep in my soul, that I wanted no part of it. I had thought about being a radiologist, but I just wanted to step away from the medical field all together. So, that’s how I ended up doing web design. I remembered while trying to choose my degree, that I used to help my friends fix up their social media pages and design them to their liking. Think of the site MySpace, but probably smaller. I wanted to create web sites and get on board with technology by sitting behind a computer. I am not the most talkative person, so I thought it was the perfect niche! It was… ok. There are still some drawbacks, but that’s not why I’m here.
Using Abobe Now
When I started college and started going to my classes for web design, I noticed at that time Adobe was a very popular software. We had the chance to use Adobe Suite for our classes and that included the PDF software that they also offer. Adobe software used to come on disks, just like everything else back then. Unfortunately, that meant people would steal or pirate the software which led to where we are now.
Everything is digital. Our games, our movies, our software, our music, heck, even our medical records are easily accessible to us (this one I actually think is a bad idea, but I digress). Adobe Creative Suite can still be purchased or rented, but they are not cheap. The good news is you can rent or purchase whichever software you need or use the most. The bad news is getting out of that agreement may be harder than you think.
Cancelling
With many things in life, sometimes we need to cancel. As I stated earlier, things change and products change with time. I had Adobe PDF viewer a couple of months ago. I likely wouldn’t be using it as much, so I decided to cancel. Seems simple enough, until it wasn’t. So I go to cancel, they hit me with the pop-up, saying something along the lines of, “don’t cancel, just downgrade your subscription for less money. “
No thanks, I don’t use it enough. Automatic system comes back and offers me an extra 3 months for $15. Well, that piqued my interest and I ok’ed it.
What has anything in life taught us? Read the fine print! Basically, the 3 months are almost up, so I figure I better cancel before they try and charge me again. Same thing again, “lower your subscription”, “don’t cancel”, blah blah blah. I am sure that I don’t need it. Now a screen appears that says, because I am cancelling early, I have to pay 50% of the annual fee in the amount of $67. I have no idea what they mean. I never signed up for them to charge me annually. This is wrong. So the next step, chat with a representative.
I get the person on chat. I explain what is happening and let them know, I never signed up for an annual subscription. He does his salesman pitch and tries to get me to lower the subscription amount. I decline multiple times, until I’ve had enough and ask for a supervisor or anyone above them. Side Note: I was in chat with this person for well over an hour. No Bueno! After a few times going back and forth, they finally say they will do me a “courtesy” and cancel my subscription and not charge me the fee.
I wrote all of this to say, Adobe has been doing this practice for years and basically tricking people into signing up for what seems like a better deal, only to find out you have to pay a fee to cancel early. There was apparently a whole twitter movement by someone because Adobe did this to him for trying to cancel the Creative Suite. He didn’t owe $67 like me, they were charging him hundreds of dollars to cancel.
Here is a link to someone on the Adobe customer support page trying to cancel their service. This isn’t me, but I feel the frustration they were going through in the chat thread.
This isn’t just about Adobe software either. This is about any software company that may manipulate you into getting a subscription to their product, or not allowing you to easily cancel. These are billion dollar companies and treating consumers like this should be illegal. Be sure to read everything before signing up with this new digital world we live in! You could be the next victim of being hustled into these subscriptions.
