Dang. Upgraded from Designer 1 to the whole 2 suite when you released the video. Still totally worth - no regrets. This is an awesome offer for those who haven't bought it yet!
@@bevansbenchwhat is he supposed to use then? Affinity isn’t subscription and doesn’t have a history of any of these bad practices. Obviously affinity might do something bad in the future but they’re the very best option at the moment.
@@MrDasfried I answered this in my comment in the main thread. Figuratively, stoping making deals with crossroads demons that offer short cuts. use gimp and inkscape, they aren't as polished, but they're damn good, and the only thing stopping them is lack of funding, so fund them.
if buying is not owning piracy is not stealing , their excuse is that releasing new version to buy again then they change to subcription , have you heard winrar its the same thing since the god created earth and they keep updating it that works on any keys, if only they have brains that they just sell addons or features
@Nodsaibot that's a supremely stupid take. Just don't agree to idiotic terms which basically consign you to a digital rentee. Paying for an immutable lifetime license to use software is good, predatory subricptions are bad. Know and fight for your rights, people
@@jonessii agreed, I will gladly pay for a lifetime license (assuming the pricing is reasonable for the software lifetime), especially to support companies who went that route with their pricing. It’s not always viable for them to do so and i respect when it is
Similar story here, I never bought Adobe products before but boycotted them shortly after they announce Creative Cloud. I just pirated everything Adobe from then on and just recently I am looking to move to Affinity.
I think that is a bigger part of the problem. It wrote it as a comment under a different video and some people just didn’t seem to get that if you pirate it, it doesn’t help because it is cementing the monopoly and not allowing for competition to grow.
well thats me. i would not want to waste my life learning to use software i cannot buy later… wether that’s pirated or a bait a d switch student/education/startup/non commercial deal thanks for the affinity tip… going to take s look
The definition of subscription has changed over the years. Think of how subscriptions started. Think of magazines. You used to own everything that you already paid for and cancelling meant not receiving anything new. Software should be no different. If I paid for a subscription, and cancel, I should still own the software, as-is, but no longer receive updates or access to external services provided by the developer. That is what a subscription is. We are leasing software with no buy-out option, not subscribing.
JetBrains offers subscriptions like this and I love them for it. I can cancel my rider subscription any time and always have access to whatever the most recent version was 12 months prior. Things don’t change so much that that’s a problem.
Absolutely. This is not subscription. Imagine if when subscribing to a magazine, if you cancel, the company would come to your house and take away all the previous issues you received. That's exactly what software companies are doing. Well, though these days with online magazines and newspapers that's probably what happens with that too. I don't know, but I image that if you can only view the content online, when you cancel you won't have access to previous content anymore. Buy anyway, software companies are allowed to get away with bullshit no other kind of business is allowed.
It's what practically every "fitness center" does. I once had to have my dad contact a gym to "prove" I had moved out of state so I could get out of my contract.
recently cancelled my annual sub a month early. paid $60 to cancel. i messaged support to express my desire to cancel due to recent terms changes which I believe are anti-artist and anti-consumer. they refused and instead offered me three free months. i refused that and kept asking to cancel for the previous reasons. they FINALLY relented after probably 15 minutes of back and forth where the support agent would take 2-3 minutes between messages (kinda felt like they were hoping i'd forget and leave the chat or something). i'm never paying for their sub on an individual plan until they offer no-fuss monthly service at a reasonable price where i can cancel anytime without fees. so, probably never subscribing again.
This is exactly what happened to me, but my fee was over $149 to cancel and I couldn’t pay that much at that time, I didn’t have the money, I was hostage to keep paying monthly until I eventually had the money to CANCEL? Insanity.
There is a loophole actually for tbose who are stuck. Renew your plan to something else which is a monthly plan.. which is allowed. Then cancel this plan. It saved me 200 dollars.
@GHOSTSTARSCREAM until they get debt collectors involved, I don't know if they actually do that but if they do it would ruin your credit and you'd end up paying way more.
@@matthew9677at this point just pirate the thing and donate the money to your favorite open source dev. If you're going so far to not pay adobe, then just don't, at all.
@GHOSTSTARSCREAM Is that an American thing? Here in Europe, we have laws against automatically-renewing annual contracts. And against making it too difficult to cancel. But in general, a yearly contract is of course allowed. And that is what you're signing up for with Adobe. And here, if you sign up for a yearly contract, and then refuse to pay for the second half of that year, you will absolutely get debt collectors after you. And they _will_ collect, because you willingly signed a yearly contract, and "I changed my mind" is not a reason to cancel that. (Yes, a collection will come after you for not paying a $200/€200 invoice for a service that you committed to)
@GHOSTSTARSCREAM The problem with that is that you've still entered into a contract for a year, which you're now breaking. Adobe would be fully in their rights to declare the sum of outstanding payments to be your debt to them and send it to a collections agency. Don't think they won't, soulless corpos can be amazingly *petty* like that. The better way would be to either try and get the termination fee declared illegal (something something hiding terms material to the contract is probably the angle) *because* they did their best to obfuscate it, or, if you can, change your plan to the one without a termination fee and then cancel.
Adobe deserves all the crap they are going to get. But if history is any indication, it's only time until affinity starts disallowing the perpetual license. 😢
I believe this to be true as well. But hopefully they adopt the Nova (Panic Inc.) model of small yearly fee for updates to what you bought permanently. If you don’t want the updates, you just stay at the version you’re at.
"...this model has been a key part of the Affinity offering and we are committed to continue to offer perpetual licenses in the future." Affinity put out a public statement to hold themselves to this when Canva acquired them. Insanely bold and even more reason to support them 🫡
@@supdawg7811Their current pricing model is minor version updates are free, and for major version updates you need to purchase a complete new license. This sounds bad (because, in theory, you need to pay the full price for every major release), but taking the comparatively low pricing into consideration, and also taking into account that current license-holders get a massive discount, this seems very fair. The Affinity products were first released in 2014, and they are now on version 2.x. I bought the original suite at a discount, and upgraded to v2 at a discount. It’s a bargain. Of course, there are plenty of ways around their promise to always provide a subscription-free version. E.g. they could release a new major version every 6 months and charge full price for it, but if that happens, I’ll just continue to use the ‘old’ version.
I got suckered into this too. I went to cancel after 2 months and was presented with a massive fee. I was so annoyed I was just going to pay it, but they offered me a few months free…so I decided to postpone my cancelation. Those sneaky mfs…
For future reference, there are companies that issue virtual cards which you can top up and use a single card for a single service or similar. Then you can just cancel the card (if you're in the US I think this might have some connection with credit score tho, research first) Edit - theo mentioned it in the vid 10 seconds after I left my comment, my bad.
@@RandomNon-interestingguy For reference, this doesn't work in Europe. If you sign up for a yearly contract, you're supposed to honour that commitment. Even if that yearly contract is invoiced monthly. (Any mobile phone or internet subscription is usually also a 12-month minimum plan, even though it's invoiced monthly.) So, finding a trick to not pay automatically with your credit card, is still defaulting on a commitment that you made. It's not paying a justified invoice. That gets you into debt collection.
@@RandomNon-interestingguy I actually did this when I first set up the subscription. There was already a bunch of negative press about this shady practice, so I created a virtual card. The cc company let me set my own expiration date (don't know if you can still do this, so I set it to expire the last month of my subscription. Of course, when I tried to cancel, they offered me a better rate.
Be warned. They did the same to me and promised to contact me before reinstating charges. They didn't. They reinstated charges without contacting me. Adobe is run by SOBs who deserve this prosecution. Even by the dismal standards of Silicon Valley post-subscription Adobe has morphed into the worst of Big Tech when it comes to treating customers well. That is vile and it has not always been so. I used to know Adobe's InDesign team when it was located in Seattle before it was moved to India. The team in India would be best described as a non-development team. For years they have brought out no improvement to the app beyond the trivial and cheaply implemented.
The subscription model alone was enough to make me switch to Affinity. Subscriptions models for proprietary file formats amount to a monthly ransom fee to prevent data loss.
Yeah, it's seriously bloatware at this point. I use Affinity in all my personal work but I still have to use Illustrator for my job and the other day I made a symbol. It still gives you the option to make it a movie clip or static. The dialogue goes on to explain that movie clips are used in Flash animations. Adobe killed Flash support 3 years ago and they still haven't updated their software.
Several years ago, I got a free cell phone if I signed a 2 year contract with a carrier. After 2 breaks in 3 weeks, they wouldn't give me a new one. The cancellation cost me $400 and they kept the phone. Now illegal in Canada. I dropped Adobe at the beginning of 2010's when they asked for a monthly fee for Acrobat Editor.
Hell I still keep CS3 on an old Mac. I admit I don't switch it on very often now I have Affinity Photo, but it is still able to do some tasks much more easily than Affinity Photo so I am not giving it up just yet.
man this is cathartic, pretty much your exact experience happened to me, fresh out of college and forgot i was still subscribed. once i noticed i was still subscribed and getting charged i tried to cancel and saw that it'd cost an absurd amount of money to cancel while still losing access to the services immediately, so didn't immediately cancel and missed the next deadline to not renew the subscription again, and so on... also paid more than 1k euros for adobe because of their anti consumer tactics
If that was actually the case, and Adobe allowed a one-payment option, you need to make sure that such a shitty company like Adobe wont just hide a "we need to go back to subscription-based plan, your product is no longer yours, where da paper?
The best way to stick it to [BILLION DOLLAR COMPANY] is to fund their competitors. After a wile of doing that, they just might become viable for others to switch away too.
I was on a student (education) plan for creative cloud in 2020. After 1 Year they somehow cancelled my cheaper edu plan for the normal one. I regognized it to late, an when I cancelled the 60 Euro (instead of my 20 Euro) plan I got charged I believe like 300-400 Euro. SInce then NO Adobe anymore ... I switched to Affinity Edit: Oh Theo had the same problem with the student discount. I haven't watched the whole Video yet
Similar issue, I forgot about my Adobe subscription renewal. I had the annual subscription, which was set to be renewed in January, but I didn't receive any notifications about its expiration and forgot to cancel it. So, as you know, you wake up in February or March and you're stuck with a year-long subscription because the cancellation fee is hugeand they apply one year annual plan automaticly. I paid a 50 euro cancellation fee last week and I'm not going back to Adobe, screw them and their policy.
Should have done this long ago. I had to cancel my credit card because they kept on charging it even though they confirmed that my subscription was cancelled 8 months earlier.
Adobe Photoshop on my iPad would LITERALLY SHUT DOWN MY IPAD!!! When I cancelled it through my iCloud subscription, they sent tons of emails trying to sell me stuff like Xd because somehow they know I'm a developer??? thank god i use hide my email 😮💨
I learned this when I tried cancelling my monthly subscription. A workaround to this has been to switch to a single-product subscription then cancel right away because technically that's a "new subscription" and you get a new 14-day window. Still a shitty practice and it has been like that for a long time, idk why this is getting discovered just now. Then again, you can use a service like Privacy and use a burner card to pay for the service each month, stopping it when you want to cancel
This happened to me! It took so many phone calls to cancel my account. They made it horribly hard to get a refund and cancel my account. I’m a little scared to check my credit cards now to make sure nothing else was billed. 😞
Adobe fucked me on this. I waited til the end of the contract in order to cancel without getting charged a fee, and then they renewed the contract automatically so I was back on the hook for another year!! I would have to pay the cancellation fee for a full year if I wanted to cancel at that point. Thankfully, I was able to cancel the renewal, but I had to spend hours contacting support. I truly had to battle to get it cancelled as they claimed they did not have to contractually, because I had missed the initial 14 days after it had been renewed again. They told me that it was cancelled only in “good faith”
You should make a video on Evernote. What they do is that if you are outside US, they will show you the price of the plans in local currency. Like if you in India, they might show you the price in INR. The problem comes with the price. They actually don't convert the price according to currency rates. They just change the symbol of the currency. Their plan is around 10$. So if you are from India and you visit their pricing page, they will show you 10 INR instead of converting via actual currency rates. And when you sign up and go to buy the plan, there they show the price in usd. That means you saw the price of 10INR on pricing and now have to pay 830INR. That's like 10 times price hike. And if you mail them, they won't even reply or just try to avoid the question altogether. They will not honor their advertised rates.
Yeah don’t. They’re not worth piracy. And like the other person said, it just stalls competition. It’s like saying “I hate you” but then stalking them on socials and keeping their phone number. If you hate them, stop caring and looking back.
whats so evil is they know when it comes to creative work, no one is cancelling in 14 days. even people who arent the biggest creatives and are just testing the waters may keep it around for some months then decide they’re not that interested.
from the frying pan to the fire. You've realised that your current relationship is toxic so you're jumping straight into the next one. Give affinity you're money they'll become just as corrupt as Adobe is.
@@bevansbench admittedly adobe is mildly more comfortable to use, but thats just the difference in software. If people primarily used affinity...life would be dream.
@@bevansbench I agree that workflows built around predatory subscription software should be scrapped and replaced with workflows built around FOSS alternatives, but that's a significant investment of time to get over the learning curve, and time is money. Affinity has publicly committed in writing to continue to offer perpetual licenses, so unless that changes there's no compelling reason to avoid them. Maybe GIMP v3.0 will have a good enough UX and features to replace Photoshop, but what's available right now ain't it.
@@bartolomeothesatyr Fair points, let's discuss. I realise I am of a pretty strong opinion in this. The "time is money" and pragmatism are the same philosophies that got us all into this mess of being predated on by such companies in the first place. Google used to have in writing "don't be evil" right up until they didn't. I heard Chris Do say "Every dollar you spend is a vote for the kind of world we want to live in". Every time we spend a dollar on a proprietary tool over spending it on FOSS we are saying "I want to live in a world where these guys have the power". I'd rather my vote go to an Opensource tool that CAN'T predate on its users. Sure affinity has it in writing now, but just wait.. Do you know the story of the Frog and the Scorpion? All software companies who gain a huge market share turn on their customers, I can't think of one case where that hasn't happened. If you know some, well that's a positive story I want to hear about it.
I've been boofing Adobe for half off of their monthly plan because of their student plan. I don't believe they verify IDs, you can just put in any info and it'll let you get it. I recommend doing that for anyone who is stuck on Adobe or is considering Adobe.
I remember this happening to me like 10 years ago. Had to time the cancellation like the last month before the annual subscription renewed. Disgusting. Hope their fine is to refund everybody affected in the last 10 years.
I'm tripping because I cancelled my subscription shortly before all of this was being so widely talked about and I swear it was one of the easiest cancellations I've ever had. I keep checking my account to make sure it's actually cancelled.
It's gross violation of consumer rights by Adobe in the name of 'doing business'. Milking users to fill up their pockets has become their game now instead of ethically running their business. They must learn their lesson and be made to pay for it principal and interest
Speaking of affinity being cheaper If you owned any of the original v1 apps they give you an extra 25% off for the complete suite for the upgrade So if like me you only owned the iPad app the upgrade would be 62$ to get all the apps
Adobe is just being used to much. In the music production software business several companies tried to go subscription only and all got so much shitstorms that they eventually backpedaled. Even ProTools gave up subscription only after they sold the company because the numbers were too bad. Of course it is a smaller market but it shows the importance of competition.
I don't think GIMP is ever going to improve unfortunately.. I suggest you try Krita if you want something more similar to Photoshop, doesn't have all the features ofc but fits my needs
One of the reasons why I'm thankful that I'm a Linux user, as Adobe was never available for our platform, so I didn't become trapped in their ecosystem. 🙂 This Adobe situation reminds me that I really need to learn GIMP, Inkscape & Scribus!
Actually, I think this is illegal. When you purchase something, it is considered a contract, where one side (seller's) states the services/products provided, and the other (buyer's) can either accept or deny the contract. In case the consumer accepts it, they are only bound by specifically the terms they were informed of while purchasing it. If the information about the fee doesn't exist in any of the text, links or licensing stated on any of the pages you go through to purchase a subscription, then it's not legally binding and is effectively a ransom (as in illegal extortion of money).
The key term for the FTC complaint is "adequately inform" because Adobe actually informs you of the monthly paid annually terms but they try to downplay/hide it as much as legally possible.
I've been at Adobe customer since 'nearly forever'! For the past two years I've had a $30 a month "All Apps" subscription. Just last week I canceled it. It took three clicks of a mouse on my computer to complete that process. I received a notice that I would receive a $14.53 refund within the next 10 days. I received a refund two days later. GREAT job Adobe!
It’s insane how much these greedy managers get away with. I’m sure Adobe has many talented engineers who are just nerfed by the management. And this has been a trend in so many companies recently
GIMPs performance is terrible compared to both Photoshop and Affinity Photo, and it cannot open very large image files at all, it just locks up. It also crashes with monotonous regularity on my machine, which greatly exceeds the recommended specifications. I personally would recommend paying for Affinity Photo if you're serious about image editing. If it's an occasional activity for you with no deadlines or money changing hands GIMP may be fine, but it is not useful for paying work.
Been a victim myself. They asked for $150+ because I did not continue for 6 months. F them really. I know photoshop is a great software, but I would not use it paid, because of Adobe's policy. Affinity photos isn't as good, but hey, I like them because they are honest.
@@joebrown4564 I mean it works fine. But the shortcuts are a little different and I didn’t find a way to do content aware fill. Photoshop’s content aware fill is awesome. I wish I could use it in affinity.
@@joebrown4564 For some professional uses Affinity lacks the feature set of Photoshop. It is also less well suited to painting images from scratch and for preparing textures for 3D modelling work. If you don't do the things it is not good at though, Affinity Photo is excellent, and I use it myself. Unfortunately for some kinds of work I still have to keep my old Mac with CS3 on it, and occasionally I still power that thing up and use it. I will not be paying a subscription fee for a newer version of Photoshop and I will move to non-Adobe software for everything as soon as I can.
They'd probably just gonna spend lest than 1% of their income for all these things and then move on like nothing happened. I encourage piracy against companies like Adobe.
Imagine being so malicious to customers that the FTC notices and sues you... I honestly cant believe they weren't sued when they completely removed the single payment option
Now do the same thing for these shady credit card processor contacts. Door sales people, misleading or lying rates, not informed about ETF, and then bite you to collections if you don't pay up.
I STILL don't get why I need to pay for canceling the plan as it make no sense. I don't think that I've ANYWHERE that you need to pay to cancel a PAYMENT PLAN
8:21 they told me this, 2 or 3 months in a row without applying any discount. I then demanded free cancellation because they lied to me. I got the cancellation
If someone has an issue cancelling do this: 1-From your account switch to the cheapest plan, browse through all plans, 2-Swith to the plan, 3-Cancel this plan within 14 days, 4-Doing this it might cost you something but it would be way less than the canelation fee
Trying to move away from Adobe now. Already moved video editing to Resolve and downgraded to the photo plan. Using trials of Affinity but noticed that when we need to print stuff for our business the compatibility is awful cos most printing shops are using old ass pirated copies of Adobe :/
If people took a stance aganist Adobe when they stopped allowing people to buy the software and went with subscription-only plan we wouldn't have reached this point.
9:53 oof... they can notify you zero times about *that* ... but they sure can spam you dozens of times a day when they *CANT* take your money. Funny how that works, maybe they should've been comedians.
This policy makes me wonder: Does this have anything to do with their new ToS? Could they have anticipated users jumping off CC after the new policy and added this to try to mitigate profit losses for a while? Or maybe I'm giving them too much credit...
i got affinity in 2019 the whole suite and at this point I would pay a subscription to a company that screws with adobe, that's how badly I would like for adobe to fall. this whole cancellation charges thing happened with me too
USE DISCOUNT CODE THEO10 WHEN BUYING AFFINITY FOR A DISCOUNT AND TO SUPPORT THE CHANNEL
Dang. Upgraded from Designer 1 to the whole 2 suite when you released the video. Still totally worth - no regrets. This is an awesome offer for those who haven't bought it yet!
Bruh, add $700 dollars to the damage you’re doing to Adobe cuz your content helped me hop over to Affinity this year.
I switched to affinity today
Now you're just helping affinity become the next crook. won't people ever learn :(
@@bevansbenchwhat is he supposed to use then? Affinity isn’t subscription and doesn’t have a history of any of these bad practices. Obviously affinity might do something bad in the future but they’re the very best option at the moment.
@@bevansbenchwhat are the people supposed to do in your opinion? Just dont edit Media i guess since when u use a Tool it could become popular?
@@MrDasfried I answered this in my comment in the main thread. Figuratively, stoping making deals with crossroads demons that offer short cuts.
use gimp and inkscape, they aren't as polished, but they're damn good, and the only thing stopping them is lack of funding, so fund them.
I boycotted Adobe 15 years ago because I saw this coming. Eff them in the profit margin.
NEVER buy software, none.
well maybe if its on steam sale
if buying is not owning piracy is not stealing , their excuse is that releasing new version to buy again then they change to subcription , have you heard winrar its the same thing since the god created earth and they keep updating it that works on any keys, if only they have brains that they just sell addons or features
@Nodsaibot that's a supremely stupid take. Just don't agree to idiotic terms which basically consign you to a digital rentee. Paying for an immutable lifetime license to use software is good, predatory subricptions are bad. Know and fight for your rights, people
@@jonessii agreed, I will gladly pay for a lifetime license (assuming the pricing is reasonable for the software lifetime), especially to support companies who went that route with their pricing. It’s not always viable for them to do so and i respect when it is
Similar story here, I never bought Adobe products before but boycotted them shortly after they announce Creative Cloud. I just pirated everything Adobe from then on and just recently I am looking to move to Affinity.
the ultimate nail in the coffin would be when people wouldn't even pirate their stuff
That's been me for a few years now.
I bought Clip Studio Paint for $25 once, and it did everything photoshop could do but better and with a better UI.
I'm already at that point for Microsoft Office. Switched to LibreOffice's predecessor back in the mid-2000s and never bothered with it again.
I think that is a bigger part of the problem. It wrote it as a comment under a different video and some people just didn’t seem to get that if you pirate it, it doesn’t help because it is cementing the monopoly and not allowing for competition to grow.
@@mudi2000a I have same opinion as you, but people won't frickin learn
well thats me. i would not want to waste my life learning to use software i cannot buy later… wether that’s pirated or a bait a d switch student/education/startup/non commercial deal
thanks for the affinity tip… going to take s look
The definition of subscription has changed over the years. Think of how subscriptions started. Think of magazines. You used to own everything that you already paid for and cancelling meant not receiving anything new. Software should be no different. If I paid for a subscription, and cancel, I should still own the software, as-is, but no longer receive updates or access to external services provided by the developer. That is what a subscription is. We are leasing software with no buy-out option, not subscribing.
JetBrains offers subscriptions like this and I love them for it. I can cancel my rider subscription any time and always have access to whatever the most recent version was 12 months prior. Things don’t change so much that that’s a problem.
Yeah, we REALLY need to have some law about what you can call "purchase" and what you have to call "rent" or "use temporarily".
Absolutely. This is not subscription. Imagine if when subscribing to a magazine, if you cancel, the company would come to your house and take away all the previous issues you received. That's exactly what software companies are doing. Well, though these days with online magazines and newspapers that's probably what happens with that too. I don't know, but I image that if you can only view the content online, when you cancel you won't have access to previous content anymore.
Buy anyway, software companies are allowed to get away with bullshit no other kind of business is allowed.
Some companies still do this, you pay for updates, not the software itself
@@ItsDan123 Yes, I am a loyal JetBrains customer, their subscription model is fair and their products are quality
It should be illegal to make cancelling more difficult than signing up
And it should be illegal to charge cancellation fees. If the customer asks to cancel, you cancel, and never charge them a cent ever again.
It already is in a lot of jurisdictions, it's just not enforced.
@@LordOOTFD example?
It's what practically every "fitness center" does. I once had to have my dad contact a gym to "prove" I had moved out of state so I could get out of my contract.
recently cancelled my annual sub a month early. paid $60 to cancel. i messaged support to express my desire to cancel due to recent terms changes which I believe are anti-artist and anti-consumer. they refused and instead offered me three free months. i refused that and kept asking to cancel for the previous reasons. they FINALLY relented after probably 15 minutes of back and forth where the support agent would take 2-3 minutes between messages (kinda felt like they were hoping i'd forget and leave the chat or something). i'm never paying for their sub on an individual plan until they offer no-fuss monthly service at a reasonable price where i can cancel anytime without fees. so, probably never subscribing again.
This is exactly what happened to me, but my fee was over $149 to cancel and I couldn’t pay that much at that time, I didn’t have the money, I was hostage to keep paying monthly until I eventually had the money to CANCEL? Insanity.
There is a loophole actually for tbose who are stuck. Renew your plan to something else which is a monthly plan.. which is allowed.
Then cancel this plan. It saved me 200 dollars.
@GHOSTSTARSCREAM until they get debt collectors involved, I don't know if they actually do that but if they do it would ruin your credit and you'd end up paying way more.
@GHOSTSTARSCREAM add fake name and temporary email address for extra effect!
@@matthew9677at this point just pirate the thing and donate the money to your favorite open source dev. If you're going so far to not pay adobe, then just don't, at all.
@GHOSTSTARSCREAM Is that an American thing? Here in Europe, we have laws against automatically-renewing annual contracts. And against making it too difficult to cancel. But in general, a yearly contract is of course allowed. And that is what you're signing up for with Adobe. And here, if you sign up for a yearly contract, and then refuse to pay for the second half of that year, you will absolutely get debt collectors after you. And they _will_ collect, because you willingly signed a yearly contract, and "I changed my mind" is not a reason to cancel that. (Yes, a collection will come after you for not paying a $200/€200 invoice for a service that you committed to)
@GHOSTSTARSCREAM The problem with that is that you've still entered into a contract for a year, which you're now breaking. Adobe would be fully in their rights to declare the sum of outstanding payments to be your debt to them and send it to a collections agency. Don't think they won't, soulless corpos can be amazingly *petty* like that.
The better way would be to either try and get the termination fee declared illegal (something something hiding terms material to the contract is probably the angle) *because* they did their best to obfuscate it, or, if you can, change your plan to the one without a termination fee and then cancel.
Damn you Theo, I purchased Affinity because of you. And F**K ADOBE!!
Adobe deserves all the crap they are going to get. But if history is any indication, it's only time until affinity starts disallowing the perpetual license. 😢
That’s why imma buy the whole suite when I can before it happens!
I believe this to be true as well. But hopefully they adopt the Nova (Panic Inc.) model of small yearly fee for updates to what you bought permanently. If you don’t want the updates, you just stay at the version you’re at.
"...this model has been a key part of the Affinity offering and we are committed to continue to offer perpetual licenses in the future."
Affinity put out a public statement to hold themselves to this when Canva acquired them. Insanely bold and even more reason to support them 🫡
@@theorants people say a lot of things. But definitely enjoy it while it lasts.
@@supdawg7811Their current pricing model is minor version updates are free, and for major version updates you need to purchase a complete new license. This sounds bad (because, in theory, you need to pay the full price for every major release), but taking the comparatively low pricing into consideration, and also taking into account that current license-holders get a massive discount, this seems very fair. The Affinity products were first released in 2014, and they are now on version 2.x. I bought the original suite at a discount, and upgraded to v2 at a discount. It’s a bargain.
Of course, there are plenty of ways around their promise to always provide a subscription-free version. E.g. they could release a new major version every 6 months and charge full price for it, but if that happens, I’ll just continue to use the ‘old’ version.
I got suckered into this too. I went to cancel after 2 months and was presented with a massive fee. I was so annoyed I was just going to pay it, but they offered me a few months free…so I decided to postpone my cancelation. Those sneaky mfs…
For future reference, there are companies that issue virtual cards which you can top up and use a single card for a single service or similar. Then you can just cancel the card (if you're in the US I think this might have some connection with credit score tho, research first)
Edit - theo mentioned it in the vid 10 seconds after I left my comment, my bad.
@@RandomNon-interestingguy For reference, this doesn't work in Europe. If you sign up for a yearly contract, you're supposed to honour that commitment. Even if that yearly contract is invoiced monthly. (Any mobile phone or internet subscription is usually also a 12-month minimum plan, even though it's invoiced monthly.) So, finding a trick to not pay automatically with your credit card, is still defaulting on a commitment that you made. It's not paying a justified invoice. That gets you into debt collection.
@@RandomNon-interestingguy I actually did this when I first set up the subscription. There was already a bunch of negative press about this shady practice, so I created a virtual card. The cc company let me set my own expiration date (don't know if you can still do this, so I set it to expire the last month of my subscription. Of course, when I tried to cancel, they offered me a better rate.
Be warned. They did the same to me and promised to contact me before reinstating charges. They didn't. They reinstated charges without contacting me. Adobe is run by SOBs who deserve this prosecution.
Even by the dismal standards of Silicon Valley post-subscription Adobe has morphed into the worst of Big Tech when it comes to treating customers well. That is vile and it has not always been so.
I used to know Adobe's InDesign team when it was located in Seattle before it was moved to India. The team in India would be best described as a non-development team. For years they have brought out no improvement to the app beyond the trivial and cheaply implemented.
I remember a saying: The only morally acceptable way to use adobe products is pirating them...
I f.cking HATE Adobe.. the SECOND my "subscription" is done, I'm leaving those pieces of sh.t and never looking back
The subscription model alone was enough to make me switch to Affinity. Subscriptions models for proprietary file formats amount to a monthly ransom fee to prevent data loss.
Tbh, it's not even worth pirating Adobe software anymore. It has become so bad and industrial. All of them are basically crapeware
Yeah, it's seriously bloatware at this point. I use Affinity in all my personal work but I still have to use Illustrator for my job and the other day I made a symbol. It still gives you the option to make it a movie clip or static. The dialogue goes on to explain that movie clips are used in Flash animations. Adobe killed Flash support 3 years ago and they still haven't updated their software.
I learned recently that you have to log into your account just to be able to uninstall their products.
Several years ago, I got a free cell phone if I signed a 2 year contract with a carrier. After 2 breaks in 3 weeks, they wouldn't give me a new one. The cancellation cost me $400 and they kept the phone. Now illegal in Canada. I dropped Adobe at the beginning of 2010's when they asked for a monthly fee for Acrobat Editor.
The wild thing is I am PERFECTLY HAPPY, using Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator CS6.
Hell I still keep CS3 on an old Mac. I admit I don't switch it on very often now I have Affinity Photo, but it is still able to do some tasks much more easily than Affinity Photo so I am not giving it up just yet.
I hope affinity makes a Lightroom alternative
Darktable (free) and Luminar (one-time purchase) are pretty good.
There's Luminar Neo
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darktable
man this is cathartic, pretty much your exact experience happened to me, fresh out of college and forgot i was still subscribed. once i noticed i was still subscribed and getting charged i tried to cancel and saw that it'd cost an absurd amount of money to cancel while still losing access to the services immediately, so didn't immediately cancel and missed the next deadline to not renew the subscription again, and so on... also paid more than 1k euros for adobe because of their anti consumer tactics
As the great Buzz Lightyear once said, "to Affinity...and beyond!"
Lol good one
I’ve tried canceling before, but they billed me 200$ if I did.
Many are saying you can downgrade to the cheapest plan, and _then_ you can cancel without a fee
@@LV4EVRthe fact that this workaround exists is fucked as it is
@@Starrypaws64At least (and luckily) this works, right?
The cancellation fee shouldn’t exist
They didn’t have to actually do any work to sign you up for the service like a cable company might
9:14 they would have the AUDACITY to hire a collector to demand payments. The crap being done by gyms.
7:50 It's not even that they don't care, they rely on consumers not being well informed. Disgusting.
Yep. They suck. They didn't let me cancel and then made me pay more to cancel.
its a shame adobe is subscription only, i would actually pay quite a lot to have a one-off, permanent license.
Very true.
If that was actually the case, and Adobe allowed a one-payment option, you need to make sure that such a shitty company like Adobe wont just hide a "we need to go back to subscription-based plan, your product is no longer yours, where da paper?
You can still purchase copies of CS5 and 6. Not from Adobe mind you, but they're out there and they still work just fine.
The best way to stick it to [BILLION DOLLAR COMPANY] is to fund their competitors. After a wile of doing that, they just might become viable for others to switch away too.
I was on a student (education) plan for creative cloud in 2020. After 1 Year they somehow cancelled my cheaper edu plan for the normal one. I regognized it to late, an when I cancelled the 60 Euro (instead of my 20 Euro) plan I got charged I believe like 300-400 Euro. SInce then NO Adobe anymore ... I switched to Affinity
Edit: Oh Theo had the same problem with the student discount. I haven't watched the whole Video yet
Getting out of Adobe sub was like pulling teeth. I was nearly in tears by the end
Similar issue, I forgot about my Adobe subscription renewal.
I had the annual subscription, which was set to be renewed in January, but I didn't receive any notifications about its expiration and forgot to cancel it. So, as you know, you wake up in February or March and you're stuck with a year-long subscription because the cancellation fee is hugeand they apply one year annual plan automaticly. I paid a 50 euro cancellation fee last week and I'm not going back to Adobe, screw them and their policy.
Should have done this long ago. I had to cancel my credit card because they kept on charging it even though they confirmed that my subscription was cancelled 8 months earlier.
Lina Khan has been the best thing to happen for consumer acts this generation. Hope she keeps up the good work.
Adobe Photoshop on my iPad would LITERALLY SHUT DOWN MY IPAD!!! When I cancelled it through my iCloud subscription, they sent tons of emails trying to sell me stuff like Xd because somehow they know I'm a developer??? thank god i use hide my email 😮💨
Thank you for bringing light into this! I also payed them 400$ extra and was outraged.
I learned this when I tried cancelling my monthly subscription. A workaround to this has been to switch to a single-product subscription then cancel right away because technically that's a "new subscription" and you get a new 14-day window. Still a shitty practice and it has been like that for a long time, idk why this is getting discovered just now. Then again, you can use a service like Privacy and use a burner card to pay for the service each month, stopping it when you want to cancel
I personally just have an issue that you cannot unselect auto-renewal until the last 30 days and the end date is really hard to find
Aaaannd they still havnt built a viable iPad app. Could you imagine more of a failure of a company. Stop giving Adobe money.
This happened to me! It took so many phone calls to cancel my account. They made it horribly hard to get a refund and cancel my account. I’m a little scared to check my credit cards now to make sure nothing else was billed. 😞
Cancel your cards. Trust me on this.
I say within 72 hrs Adobe will serve Theo with a cease and desist or law suit threat.
People are sleeping on blender for vector graphics
Blender is an amazing tool. I don't know why people don't give it more credit.
Adobe fucked me on this. I waited til the end of the contract in order to cancel without getting charged a fee, and then they renewed the contract automatically so I was back on the hook for another year!! I would have to pay the cancellation fee for a full year if I wanted to cancel at that point.
Thankfully, I was able to cancel the renewal, but I had to spend hours contacting support. I truly had to battle to get it cancelled as they claimed they did not have to contractually, because I had missed the initial 14 days after it had been renewed again. They told me that it was cancelled only in “good faith”
You should make a video on Evernote. What they do is that if you are outside US, they will show you the price of the plans in local currency. Like if you in India, they might show you the price in INR. The problem comes with the price. They actually don't convert the price according to currency rates. They just change the symbol of the currency. Their plan is around 10$. So if you are from India and you visit their pricing page, they will show you 10 INR instead of converting via actual currency rates. And when you sign up and go to buy the plan, there they show the price in usd. That means you saw the price of 10INR on pricing and now have to pay 830INR. That's like 10 times price hike. And if you mail them, they won't even reply or just try to avoid the question altogether. They will not honor their advertised rates.
Im start to pirate since CC was a thing, even my every printing/cutting machine intergrates CS6, never go full CC. I miss good ol CS6 days
This video makes me want to pirate all Adobe products.
To hamper competition and give adobe free ad? kek
Yeah don’t. They’re not worth piracy. And like the other person said, it just stalls competition. It’s like saying “I hate you” but then stalking them on socials and keeping their phone number. If you hate them, stop caring and looking back.
whats so evil is they know when it comes to creative work, no one is cancelling in 14 days. even people who arent the biggest creatives and are just testing the waters may keep it around for some months then decide they’re not that interested.
This is THE reason to pick FOSS and FUTO-built software over proprietary ones. 8-)
I ve already dropped adobe and recommended everyone including my place of work of the existance of affinity. Might push for it harder.
1000 dollars XD
from the frying pan to the fire.
You've realised that your current relationship is toxic so you're jumping straight into the next one.
Give affinity you're money they'll become just as corrupt as Adobe is.
@@bevansbench admittedly adobe is mildly more comfortable to use, but thats just the difference in software. If people primarily used affinity...life would be dream.
@@bevansbench I agree that workflows built around predatory subscription software should be scrapped and replaced with workflows built around FOSS alternatives, but that's a significant investment of time to get over the learning curve, and time is money. Affinity has publicly committed in writing to continue to offer perpetual licenses, so unless that changes there's no compelling reason to avoid them. Maybe GIMP v3.0 will have a good enough UX and features to replace Photoshop, but what's available right now ain't it.
@@bartolomeothesatyr Fair points, let's discuss. I realise I am of a pretty strong opinion in this.
The "time is money" and pragmatism are the same philosophies that got us all into this mess of being predated on by such companies in the first place.
Google used to have in writing "don't be evil" right up until they didn't.
I heard Chris Do say "Every dollar you spend is a vote for the kind of world we want to live in". Every time we spend a dollar on a proprietary tool over spending it on FOSS we are saying "I want to live in a world where these guys have the power". I'd rather my vote go to an Opensource tool that CAN'T predate on its users.
Sure affinity has it in writing now, but just wait.. Do you know the story of the Frog and the Scorpion?
All software companies who gain a huge market share turn on their customers, I can't think of one case where that hasn't happened.
If you know some, well that's a positive story I want to hear about it.
When Adobe introduced Subscription only, They didn't do it because it would be good for their customers. They did it to rip off their customers .....
No shit
@@Othman1992on Try and keep up this was 2 weeks ago, Old news now .....
@@Keepingthefaith72 2 weeks ago is not old news lol
I've been boofing Adobe for half off of their monthly plan because of their student plan. I don't believe they verify IDs, you can just put in any info and it'll let you get it. I recommend doing that for anyone who is stuck on Adobe or is considering Adobe.
I remember this happening to me like 10 years ago. Had to time the cancellation like the last month before the annual subscription renewed. Disgusting. Hope their fine is to refund everybody affected in the last 10 years.
I'm tripping because I cancelled my subscription shortly before all of this was being so widely talked about and I swear it was one of the easiest cancellations I've ever had. I keep checking my account to make sure it's actually cancelled.
Lol I just got a suspension confirmation trying to get me to update my payment type
It's gross violation of consumer rights by Adobe in the name of 'doing business'. Milking users to fill up their pockets has become their game now instead of ethically running their business. They must learn their lesson and be made to pay for it principal and interest
Speaking of affinity being cheaper
If you owned any of the original v1 apps they give you an extra 25% off for the complete suite for the upgrade
So if like me you only owned the iPad app the upgrade would be 62$ to get all the apps
Adobe is just being used to much. In the music production software business several companies tried to go subscription only and all got so much shitstorms that they eventually backpedaled. Even ProTools gave up subscription only after they sold the company because the numbers were too bad. Of course it is a smaller market but it shows the importance of competition.
That happened to me 2 years before and now I'm a less-happy pirate user for ever until GIMP improves.
I don't think GIMP is ever going to improve unfortunately.. I suggest you try Krita if you want something more similar to Photoshop, doesn't have all the features ofc but fits my needs
In the netherlands on the photo editing plan I dont even have a montly option. Only the year one that you can pay per month.
Yep, and that is how it was for everyone back in 2013 when they started this crap.
One of the reasons why I'm thankful that I'm a Linux user, as Adobe was never available for our platform, so I didn't become trapped in their ecosystem. 🙂
This Adobe situation reminds me that I really need to learn GIMP, Inkscape & Scribus!
Actually, I think this is illegal.
When you purchase something, it is considered a contract, where one side (seller's) states the services/products provided, and the other (buyer's) can either accept or deny the contract.
In case the consumer accepts it, they are only bound by specifically the terms they were informed of while purchasing it. If the information about the fee doesn't exist in any of the text, links or licensing stated on any of the pages you go through to purchase a subscription, then it's not legally binding and is effectively a ransom (as in illegal extortion of money).
You know some Adobe exec tried to cancel their gym membership and realized - "hey that nightmare of obstacles and fees is a great idea!"
Thanks for reminding me to cancell my subcription. It would have been continued after the 1st September. Their business tactics are horrendeus.
I'd flat out cancel my card to not be charged the cancelation fee.
@@Othman1992on 💀👌
I applied to an SRE position at Adobe over a month ago. Now I'm glad I haven't heard back from them.
The key term for the FTC complaint is "adequately inform" because Adobe actually informs you of the monthly paid annually terms but they try to downplay/hide it as much as legally possible.
Sounds like what health clubs do. Keep you paying, until they cant. Crooks every where.
Jail Crooks, period
Same story on my side for the student discount stopping without notification.
Affinity doing things the "2005 and before" way. That's amazing.
That is an amazing simile that points out, for those who keep saying "what's the problem", exactly what the problem is. Bravo, sir
Been an Affinity user for years. To hell with Adobe!
I've been at Adobe customer since 'nearly forever'! For the past two years I've had a $30 a month "All Apps" subscription.
Just last week I canceled it. It took three clicks of a mouse on my computer to complete that process. I received a notice that I would receive a $14.53 refund within the next 10 days.
I received a refund two days later.
GREAT job Adobe!
Increased price for cancellable plan is super common for airline tickets
And hotels.
Airline tickets are for a limited space and timeframe. RUFS?
This is the kind of thing that caused us to no longer use Adobe or more recently, Autodesk products.
It’s insane how much these greedy managers get away with. I’m sure Adobe has many talented engineers who are just nerfed by the management. And this has been a trend in so many companies recently
Adobe ACTING like they are giving you a "service" AKA connect to their servers to check your licence
And the loyal sheep continue to line up. Makes no sense.
Let's be real, this is gonna blow over or Adobe will lobby or just stall this case. Nothing ever changes.
I switched to Affinity series around 6 years ago.
I subscribed in adobe for three days and then i cancelled it and they charge me with another 100$ apart from the subscription fees. Corrupted.
I used to pray for time like this.
They are using cellphone contract scheme for their products/services.
GIMP is also a solid choice. It may not be the most stable program but, for a freebie, it has a lot of features, more-so with plugins.
GIMPs performance is terrible compared to both Photoshop and Affinity Photo, and it cannot open very large image files at all, it just locks up. It also crashes with monotonous regularity on my machine, which greatly exceeds the recommended specifications. I personally would recommend paying for Affinity Photo if you're serious about image editing. If it's an occasional activity for you with no deadlines or money changing hands GIMP may be fine, but it is not useful for paying work.
I just canceled my Adobe Acrobat Pro, and it took almost 45 mins in the effing chat app to finally get it canceled with that month/annual BS!
Been a victim myself. They asked for $150+ because I did not continue for 6 months. F them really. I know photoshop is a great software, but I would not use it paid, because of Adobe's policy. Affinity photos isn't as good, but hey, I like them because they are honest.
What’s the reason why affinity isn’t good? I love it. Works for me.😊
@@joebrown4564 I mean it works fine. But the shortcuts are a little different and I didn’t find a way to do content aware fill. Photoshop’s content aware fill is awesome. I wish I could use it in affinity.
@@joebrown4564 Does affinity photos (i have the v1 perpetual license) have content aware fill of some kind? Perhaps I am missing the feature.
@@joebrown4564 For some professional uses Affinity lacks the feature set of Photoshop. It is also less well suited to painting images from scratch and for preparing textures for 3D modelling work. If you don't do the things it is not good at though, Affinity Photo is excellent, and I use it myself. Unfortunately for some kinds of work I still have to keep my old Mac with CS3 on it, and occasionally I still power that thing up and use it. I will not be paying a subscription fee for a newer version of Photoshop and I will move to non-Adobe software for everything as soon as I can.
its always morally correct to pirate adobe
Even if Adobe was fully transparent about the cancellation fee. It should be illegal regardless no doubt about it.
They'd probably just gonna spend lest than 1% of their income for all these things and then move on like nothing happened.
I encourage piracy against companies like Adobe.
I had to stop using my bank because of this
Every night at 3 am I get about 5 attempts in my account
Imagine being so malicious to customers that the FTC notices and sues you... I honestly cant believe they weren't sued when they completely removed the single payment option
Now do the same thing for these shady credit card processor contacts. Door sales people, misleading or lying rates, not informed about ETF, and then bite you to collections if you don't pay up.
I STILL don't get why I need to pay for canceling the plan as it make no sense. I don't think that I've ANYWHERE that you need to pay to cancel a PAYMENT PLAN
8:21 they told me this, 2 or 3 months in a row without applying any discount. I then demanded free cancellation because they lied to me. I got the cancellation
Keep in mind they just added that side note for the cancellation fee
My son had a student subscription and he was no longer a student. Even then it was so very difficult to cancel it.
6:37
Whatever you say Adobe! I can't argue with you on this one.
And then they ask why we pirate softwares
If someone has an issue cancelling do this:
1-From your account switch to the cheapest plan, browse through all plans,
2-Swith to the plan,
3-Cancel this plan within 14 days,
4-Doing this it might cost you something but it would be way less than the canelation fee
Trying to move away from Adobe now. Already moved video editing to Resolve and downgraded to the photo plan. Using trials of Affinity but noticed that when we need to print stuff for our business the compatibility is awful cos most printing shops are using old ass pirated copies of Adobe :/
I love how the United States government is outdated that it took him over 20 years to figure the subscription pricing from Adobe was bad.
If people took a stance aganist Adobe when they stopped allowing people to buy the software and went with subscription-only plan we wouldn't have reached this point.
9:53 oof... they can notify you zero times about *that* ... but they sure can spam you dozens of times a day when they *CANT* take your money. Funny how that works, maybe they should've been comedians.
This policy makes me wonder: Does this have anything to do with their new ToS? Could they have anticipated users jumping off CC after the new policy and added this to try to mitigate profit losses for a while? Or maybe I'm giving them too much credit...
i got affinity in 2019 the whole suite and at this point I would pay a subscription to a company that screws with adobe, that's how badly I would like for adobe to fall. this whole cancellation charges thing happened with me too