[oliwarner]

I struggle to think of it as insidious. The problem you have is you're reading it wrong. There is no monthly licence. It's an annual licence that you can either pay up front or split, either way, you need to pay.

In 1995 it cost us the equivalent of $2k up front to buy Photoshop. I think there was actually a small discount but it was a hecking big payout. You'd get to keep that version forever, but what if you only needed it for a month? What happened when just a year later Photoshop 4 came out? Tough.

I get that software subscriptions suck, but it's the compromise that makes it both affordable to you in your life, and affordable to Adobe.

[bnj]

It’s insidious because you’re being required to agree to pay for a year of use, split monthly, but cannot decide to cancel during the term of the agreement without paying for use that you don’t want. Just because the terms are clear doesn’t mean it’s not an insidious pricing scheme.

If it were not insidious, it would be easy to answer the question: “what costs for adobe are being covered by the early termination fee?” - but there aren’t any costs, the fee is a punishment to dissuade you from cancelling and hoping that you will miss the window to prevent automatic renewal.

[oliwarner]

I can understand not wanting to pay Adobe every month, but the commercial reality would require a month-long contract would have to be extraordinarily expensive, to offset the people who do only need it occasionally who'd otherwise be on an annual contract.

Is that predatory? Maybe, but is it worse for those users than only offering the $1k package they used to? Of course they're trying to get you hooked, pricing at a point to minify budget issues, and recurring year-round to avoid expense approvals. Educational licenses also pretty predatory.

Don't get me wrong, they want your money; as much of it as they can extract. You don't have to play the game if you don't want to.

[LocalH]

"commercial reality" is just executives deciding they don't like how the world really works, so they're going to change it out from under us

they'd monetize the open air of the earth if they could figure out the logistics

[oliwarner]

Yes, but it's theirs to monetize.

What post-scarcity utopia do you think you're living in?

The commercial reality is them finding the way to get the most from the market. This isn't a bizarre twist of software licensing, every company is doing this to you.

[ilt]

You are paying less monthly if you commit to annual pricing, if not, you can still pay monthly pricing which is higher. Commitment means you will likely be a paying customer for a year at the least and hence company gives you a discount. What’s the insidious aspect? The whole thing can be confusing, yes, but it does what it says.

[bnj]

For an adobe creative cloud subscription? I just looked at their pricing page and could only locate "annual, billed monthly" options. If there's an actual monthly subscription which is just a little more expensive then I'd say the insidious aspect is in hiding it.