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Tell HN: I managed to unsubscribe from Adobe CC without being charged

frereubu · 2 days ago

I had an educational Adobe CC subscription that went from ~£25 per month to ~£67 recently. When I went to cancel after I realised I didn't really use it that much and could just use Affinity, I was shocked to find out that I was going to be charged ~£250 because although I pay monthly I was in a yearly contract. (I did know that, which is on me, but it's easy to forget that because of the payment structure). It's a serious barrier, so I looked at the other options, and you're able to transfer to an Adobe Photoshop Express plan for ~£98 per year and avoid that charge. I figured I'd do that and immediately cancel so I didn't forget to at the end of the year, whether I kept access to Photoshop Express or not - I just wanted out of the Adobe ecosystem. To my surprise I was refunded for both the balance of the month on the CC subscription because of the plan change and then refunded for the entire year's Photoshop Express because I still had 12 months to run on it. YMMV, but if you do it in that order, you can potentially escape Adobe without being penalised for it.

1 comments

  • andyjohnson0 · 1 days ago

    I managed to cancel a (non-edu) Adobe subscription a few years ago, despite being a few days past the cut-off date for cancellation.

    What worked for me was to phone them and insist on cancelling. The person I spoke to insisted right back that it wasn't possible. When I persisted they offered me an extended term for the same price. Then a discount, and then a better discount. After that they agreed to cancel.

    My impression was that they had a customer retention flowchart to work through, and it was just a matter of getting to the right terminal node.

    • al_borland · 1 days ago

      A retention flowchart shouldn’t include the step of lying to the customer.

      If a business makes it easy to cancel, I’m left with a positive image and may be back. If they make it difficult, they lost me for life, and I’ll tell my friends.

      • noplacelikehome · 10 hours ago

        Adobe don’t have to care what their customers think because their business practices have eradicated most of their competitors, leaving them trapped.

        Neoliberalism is not a viable way to run an economy without enforcement of monopoly legislation.