Have you ever felt like companies are intentionally making it harder for you to cancel subscriptions? Well, you may not be wrong. Subscription-based pricing models are wonderful for businesses who are just praying and hoping you’ll forget you’re even subscribed. Then they don’t have to provide any services while they still get the money. It’s arguable the strategy helps keeps various gyms alive!
As much as this has been a running problem for many consumers, it appears that the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) feels like Adobe has gone too far and now the feds are suing them over their subscription policies.
(We were kinda hoping this lawsuit was more about the company’s recent push to ‘own’ any and all content created in their programs. Yes, really. )
Adobe offers a suite of different products that millions of people around the world use on a regular basis. These can range from simple PDF readers to image editing software like Photoshop. One does not simply buy an Adobe product these days however, you subscribe to it. For a point of reference, the author here had to work on editing some PDFs and had to subscribe to an Adobe Acrobat upgrade just to separate pages out of a PDF and reassemble them in a new manner. Thankfully I could do this under a free trial, but that trial wouldn’t have been so free if I hadn’t cancelled.
This is where part of the government’s problem comes in. They claim Adobe is intentionally making it hard to cancel by making subscribers jump through multiple different hyperlinks and webpages to cancel their plan. Alternatively, those who want to cancel by phone are met with disconnected calls and having to redial to start a conversation over from scratch. The same goes for live chats that disconnected partway through a cancellation.
The Department of Justice is arguing that Adobe is deceiving customers into subscribing to plans that are more expensive and elaborate than what is needed, and THEN charging you to cancel. So basically, the general situation the DOJ is putting forward states that the average consumer is being unfairly manipulated by Adobe. They’re drawn in looking for a program only to be steered towards a more expensive plan. Then, the company will pop up with hidden fees that weren’t mentioned previously only to then make it hard to cancel that plan. Finally, if you do cancel, you’re hit with a previously undisclosed cancellation fee.
It brings to mind a 2013 lawsuit settlement between the US government and Ticketmaster. The ticket company had been accused of signing people up for subscriptions that the customer didn’t ask for, after purchasing tickets through the Ticketmaster platform. Subscriptions should be fully disclosed to the consumer and cancellation should be made easy for anyone. It’s good the DOJ is cracking down on things like this, but it’s still likely that Adobe will end up not being penalized nearly as much as they would have profited from the allegedly deceptive subscription marketing.
If the case develops further, we’ll provide updates. Our guess is Adobe will act to dismiss the case. If not successful it’ll probably wind up settling. And at least they’ll be plenty of PDFs for their Acrobat reader to keep busy with.
