[megiddo]

Let me regale you with the story of my Adobe Subscription cancellation.

I had been considering learning Illustrator and to align myself, I decided to get a little skin the game. I signed up for the "monthly" subscription. I downloaded Illustrator, and this screenshot was my entire experience:

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...

Suffice it to say, this didn't meet my expectations. I thus decided to cancel and was presented with a $108 cancellation fee.

Boo.

I hit up customer service and explained my frustration. I was told that I was going to pay that $108 since I agreed to it. I countered that contracts required consideration and since Adobe had provided no consideration for my valuable cash, no contract had been perfected betwixt us. He was unwilling to see my point. I asked for his contact information for follow-up, which he provided. I then explained to him that after I hung up, I was not only NOT going to pay, but that within 60 days Adobe would cancel the subscription voluntarily on their side and not collect a single further dime from me.

His response basically amounted to "good luck with that."

So, I got a temporary prepaid credit card number with $5 on it and swapped out the CC on file with Adobe.

I then went over to Amazon and spent that $5. Who knows on what.

A month goes by, turns out $0 is insufficient for a monthly subscription payment. I get a notice that the balance isn't good. I get several more notices.

Then I get a notice that if I don't pay, I'll lose access. At about 60 days, they cancelled the subscription. I took a screen shot and emailed it to the CSR's contact with my "I told you so" scrawled on it.

I never heard back, but in my mind it was a great victory. Tickertape and swooning ladies.

[rootusrootus]

IIRC the trick with Adobe is to cancel on the web site, and when it says "but, but, how about this great upgrade?" you say yes, and then you can cancel your 'new' plan during its introductory period.

Maybe they closed that loophole, but it did used to work not that long ago.

[Spoom]

Great story, but you should be careful with this method if you care about your credit. They are arguably within their rights to report this to the credit agencies as an unpaid debt and send it to collections, including the cancellation fee since they can point to the clickwrap contract that states it.

[metabagel]

Great Story!

I think you could also dispute the charges via your credit card company. The credit card company should reverse the charges.

[jacobgkau]

I thought he was just going to say he did a chargeback, with how the first seven paragraphs went. What he described was not ideal for several reasons:

- Some websites won't accept prepaid cards (largely because they can be used to get around things like this).

- Who knows if a platform's going to save your previous card info to use as a fallback?

- As another reply stated, the company can send you to collections if they think you owe them money. They can also do that if you do a chargeback, theoretically. However, with a chargeback, your card company did some basic checking of the situation and agreed with you that something was wrong about the payment, so assuming you win the chargeback, you've at least had a second pair of eyes on the case, and you have that tiny bit of metaphorical "precedent" to use if you take the collections order to court-- both of which also mean they're less likely to take you to collections. If you just swap out your card number for one that doesn't work, that shifts some of the shadiness to your end, and it legally appears less like you have any grounds to stand on.

[megiddo]

If I recall, the problem was that they were refusing to cancel the subscription unless I paid the cancellation fee.

My argument was that while I may have agreed to the cancellation fee in the fine print, they contract was not perfected because they never provided consideration.

The software would not work on my computer.

My grounds for cancelling the software wasn't that I wanted to cancel early, I was satisfied with a year-long subscription. My grounds for cancelling was that the software simply didn't work. It crashed when opening AI files are creating new files.

[shiroiushi]

This is a great story, but I'd like to also point out that it shows why the popular trend of only blaming a company's top management for that company's terrible behavior is wrong: many people have a tendency to want to sympathize with the lowest-level workers at a company, saying "they're only doing their jobs and have no say in business decisions" when interacting with customer service personnel. As you can see here, many (if not the vast majority) of these low-ranking foot soldiers are sociopathic assholes who really believe the corporate BS and are happy to do their utmost to screw over customers. It's not just the higher-up managers or CxOs, though they usually set the direction.