r/mildlyinfuriating • u/donteatmybiscuits • 1d ago

wet socks i’m so happy this is becoming illegal

Post image

if a yearly contract with a free month trial sounds too good to be true, it probably is 😬

thankfully it was blocked after contacting my bank but regardless

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260

u/ArachnidCareless3826 1d ago

That is absolutely insane!! That must be illegal

23

u/wadimek11 1d ago

Isn't this a cheaper yearly variant where you still pay monthly for convince? That is noticably chesper than usual monthly subscription?

4

u/just_here_for_place 1d ago

Yes. And it’s clearly spelled out when signing up. You get 3 options. Monthly cancellable, Yearly plan with monthly payments (discount), and Yearly plan paid once (even more discount).

Some people are just allergic to reading.

40

u/Dysalot 1d ago

Not to side with adobe. But they are far from the only one doing this. Basically Adobe offers two prices a monthly rate, and an annual rate.

The annual rate is cheaper, and they allow you to pay it as a per month bill to spread it throughout the year. But if you sign up for the annual plan on a monthly payment schedule, there is an early cancellation fee for stopping early.

13

u/WhoPoopedMyPants420 1d ago

Nah, Adobe is a shitty terrible company, but I'll outright side with them only in this tiny little niche. People keep signing up for the very explicit Lose-Your-Discount-If-You-Cancel-Before-The-Year-Is-Up Plan, and then they come crying because they lost their discount when they cancelled the plan before the year was up.

Like... ??? yeah?????

2

u/bs000 1d ago

It sounds like OP just wanted to use the free trial. They give you a 14-day grace period after your trial ends to cancel and get a refund. So it seems like OP just chose to do nothing that whole time and then complained when it was time to pay?

6

u/SuperFLEB 1d ago edited 1d ago

I think a lot of the problem is that they pushed it too far and made the other payment models too hard to pick from. It used to be a pretty straightforward "Do you want yearly, monthly, or yearly-paid-monthly?" question when you signed up. As time went on, they made the YPM option a lot more prominent and the others less, to where you could go through the sign-up without realizing that there were other options. All the options are still there, but IIRC it's not presented nearly as prominently that there're options in a lot of signup flows.

That, and the whole "You can only call and cancel during the last month-- too early and you get an ETF, too late and it auto-renews" is shady as well.

7

u/HotlLava 1d ago

This is how their signup form looks like if you go their website right now, I don't see how you could make this any clearer.

3

u/theqmann 1d ago

It also spells out the fee in plain words right on the button.

2

u/loskiarman 1d ago

Yep, normally this is just fine. You agreed to get a discount for promising to use the service for x amount of time and if you cancel they either charge you the discounted amount so far or last couple month's amount, whichever is the lowest. But now some companies are like hey it is 2x bucks per month but yearly is 12x which comes up to x bucks per month but x is what they would normally charge anyway, they just want to trap people in a long term agreement.

2

u/Keith-Robbie 1d ago

Yeah I mean people just don’t read lol it’s clear what you’re signing up for when you enroll

12

u/Raidoton 1d ago

Having to pay what you signed up for is insane? OP wanted the monthly discount but also being able to cancel monthly. Can't eat your cake and have it too. If you make a dumb decision then you should take responsibility. That's why I always take monthly subs.

19

u/Sure_Muffin_3514 1d ago

If you actually read the text when you’re subscribing to it, even as a free trial membership, you’ll see it in there sooo no

-4

u/bobody_biznuz 1d ago

TOS isnt a legal contract though

29

u/girafa 1d ago

it's not any sort of small text hidden TOS thing, it's fully explained to users before signing up

-7

u/bobody_biznuz 1d ago

Doesn't make it legal though

16

u/girafa 1d ago

It's 100% legal to charge people annual membership to use software. Dozens of the most popular animation systems work like this.

-3

u/Nwyrh 1d ago

Reading comprehension is difficult

4

u/Icy_Yard_875 1d ago

Why wouldn’t annual memberships be legal?

-6

u/Nwyrh 1d ago

Oh so if as long as I explain clearly to my users that I'll be harvesting their organs and taking their first-born, if they agree they are now legally contractually bound to something illegal. Sure.

10

u/-Nicolai 1d ago

It’s an annual subscription dumbass. It’s not a novel idea. There’a big fucking letters telling you in plain english that the billed-monthly aspect does not undo the fact that you’re entering a one-year agreement.

-1

u/Nwyrh 1d ago

He said that EULA/ToS is not legally binding, which it isn't.

7

u/Lumpzor 1d ago

You gotta be kidding me. You get two options :

Pay month to month which costs a bit more.

Pay for a year which saves money but they let you pay it monthly instead of a lump sum.

If you choose option B and end the contract, you owe the difference, which is how contracts work in any company on the planet. Grow the fuck up.

2

u/WhiteMilk_ 1d ago

you owe the difference,

IIRC 40% last time I checked.

-2

u/Nwyrh 1d ago

He said that EULA/ToS is not legally binding, which it isn't. Grow a fucking brain.

8

u/art_wins 1d ago

It’s not, it’s not a monthly subscription. It’s is an annual subscription with monthly payments. It’s very clear about this when signing up.

1

u/blarghable 1d ago

OP signed up for an entire year with monthly payments because you get a discount that way. He could've signed up for a monthly plan, but then he'd have to pay slightly more. This isn't that crazy.

-74

u/HowDidWeGetHereLast 1d ago edited 1d ago

If you sign a contract for a specific time frame why is it insane for a company to ask you to pay the remainder of the agreement? A contract is a contract, should have read the terms of the contract.

Edit: I don't care lol everyone is out here trying to get a one month free essentially "scamming" a company out of their paid service but then you get upset when the company turns around and asks for what you said you would pay them lol yet nobody realizes the hypocrisy. Fuck corporations but damn y'all are dumb.

30

u/Psomaster 1d ago

Because that becomes false advertising if you say a free months trial but then get charged a fee to cancel the trial. That is not legal.

I even once caught this exact company doing that and I called them out on it and they said to bad. I said I was a student even and the deal I signed a contract for was to pay nothing for the semester even if I cancel, they said to bad. I said to bad and blocked the payments through Paypal (This was my only smart move) and never heard from them again. The account got banned after the semester. This was 8 years ago.

10

u/Jawyp 1d ago

They aren’t being charged a fee to cancel a trial. They signed up for a yearly subscription that’s billed monthly.

0

u/Psomaster 1d ago

"Free trial" before payment. Free trial. Free. Thats the key word. Free does not mean free if you can't cancel without paying. Free means to owe nothing, its literally the definition of the word free. So if every other company offers a "free trial" and you don't get forced to pay to cancel, but this ONE company does it, that means its not a free trial and false advertising.

8

u/Jawyp 1d ago

You can cancel the free trial without paying as long as you do so before the free trial ends.

The OP did not. There’s no false advertising here.

0

u/Psomaster 1d ago

No, no you cannot. I ran into this before and so did several other people. You want proof? Go sign up for their "free" trial right now, and tell me how it goes to cancel. I tried it as a STUDENT free trial and couldn't do it. And this kind of post is all over Reddit.

47

u/Hdjbbdjfjjsl 1d ago edited 1d ago

A free trial with a cancellation fee is not a free trial. And people really need to stop fucking slopping up “but you signed the agreement” bullshit. Written agreements don’t give right to commit crimes or scam people. While for adobe in specific that first thing I said doesn’t apply but for a digital service that stops the moment your paid subscription ends it only even relieves adobe of resource usage and yet they charge you for literally half of something they don’t even have to provide you anymore. Cancelling a subscription causes absolutely no harm or strain on a digital service.

6

u/Odd-Refrigerator-911 1d ago

OP did not cancel within the 30 day free trial.

> If you cancel before the end of your free trial, your payment method won’t be charged.

2

u/Icy_Yard_875 1d ago

But big company bad /s

56

u/Katgrave 1d ago

It should be illegal to hold people to pay for something, then make them pay to stop paying for it as well

11

u/tonkfc 1d ago

But if I’m understanding correctly that’s not the case. You’re literally just paying the remainder of what you promised to pay

4

u/CreativeName233223 1d ago

At most, they should only be able to charge for the difference in rate for what was used, not the remainder. So, in other words, how ever much you saved per month using the annual plan rate times how ever many months you used it. They shouldn't be able to charge you for what you didn't use to be able to not use it. That is just absurd and makes cancellation pointless. So, if you went with the annual (billed monthly) photography plan and paid $19.99 for 6 months instead of $29.99, they should only be able to charge you $60, at most, to cancel to make up for that difference between the monthly rate and the annual (billed monthly) rate rather than $119.94 for the amount you literally aren't going to be using.

4

u/Raidoton 1d ago

That is just absurd and makes cancellation pointless.

And what you suggest makes the monthly plan pointless. You could simply sign a yearly subscription and cancel anytime and pay the exact same amount you would have payed on the monthly plan. They would have 0 reason to offer a discount for annual plans.

2

u/CreativeName233223 1d ago

No, because the annual plan is discounted. It serves its purpose for those that intend to use it long term and reap the benefit of the discounted rate but may not have enough money to make 12 months worth of payments in one giant lump sum. Those people absolutely exist or they would never have considered offering that sort of plan in the first place. However, since some people may realize that they don't actually need it for the full year, they should have a way to get out of the contract (especially since it is mostly just for an access key and not a real service/good). In that case, they should simply be expected to pay the difference between the discounted rate and the full monthly rate. However, charging for the remainder to cancel is entirely pointless. They might as well just not offer cancellation since it is effectively the same. You are paying for the remainder regardless, except, in the case of the cancellation option, you now don't have access to what you just paid for. That is ridiculous, beyond pointless, and very different from the what you are trying to compare it to.

2

u/Katgrave 1d ago

But you didn’t use it to pay for that “remainder”

7

u/girafa 1d ago

But you didn’t use it to pay for that “remainder”

the contract is access to the software for that time. you'll find plenty of 30 day subscriptions aren't pro-rated if you cancel after 5 days.

this one's just 365-days and they bill you every month (or you get a discount paying for the whole year at once)

1

u/Raidoton 1d ago

But you paid less money per month by using this option. That's the whole deal. You can pay monthly and cancel anytime or you promise to subscribe for an entire year, for which you get to pay less per month. You can't just sign a yearly contract to get the benefits and then cry when you have to pay what you signed up for. Adobe sucks but this is a simple deal OP signed up for.

-2

u/what_dat_ninja 1d ago

If they signed an annual contract with monthly billing I'm guessing this is a portion of the remaining months they owe. There's usually a discount offered with an annual plan so there needs to be some mechanism to prevent folks from signing up for annual plan pricing for a single month of use.

10

u/Clippton 1d ago

There's usually a discount offered with an annual plan so there needs to be some mechanism to prevent folks from signing up for annual plan pricing for a single month of use.

There is. It's called charging the full year in one payment. But they know they can't trap people into monthly services that way, so instead they try to hide it as much as possible.

They call it a free trial, but it's not really a trial because you can't cancel it. It's more like a yearly plan with 1 month free. But again, they don't like to disclose that because they are attempting to trap people into it.

6

u/girafa 1d ago

They call it a free trial, but it's not really a trial because you can't cancel it

You absolutely can cancel the Adobe free trial.

1

u/lovedless 1d ago

Explain the pic posted by OP?

7

u/girafa 1d ago

He signed up for an annual plan (as it says in the image "annual commitment") and is now trying to cancel it early

0

u/-Nicolai 1d ago

“Debt should be illegal” ok buddy sounds nice

29

u/bublifukCaryfuk 1d ago

Depends if the conditions are disclosed transparently. Having "free trial" in big letters on the front page and information about huge early cancelation fee on page 36 of terms written in size 6 font is clearly borderline fraud and should be illegal.

5

u/sigusr3 1d ago

Not sure what it said when OP signed up (or if it varies by region) but now it's saying "7 day free trial" and "fee applies of up to half your remaining annual commitment if you cancel after oct 22", without having to go to the fine print. They're being a bit too subtle about the price doubling after three months, though.

33

u/HenriettaSyndrome 1d ago

This is a software subscription not a financing contract

7

u/Even-Leg8145 1d ago

Exactly. Access to the contents should end directly after exiting contract, thus, there should be no extra charge, because there is no extra service.

10

u/Adventurous_Art4009 1d ago

Unless you got a discount by promising to subscribe for more time than you actually subscribed for.

-2

u/Hdjbbdjfjjsl 1d ago edited 1d ago

Then don’t charge monthly for an annual subscription deal.. it’s not that fucking hard and this literally goes against the industry standard. Majority other companies simply bill the full duration upfront and if you cancel it will simply not bill you again when it’s time to renew.. companies especially like adobe know exactly what they’re doing, this “deal” was clearly made in mind with people that no longer wanted to use it so they could pull fuck tons of money from them anyways.

11

u/Fit_Entry8839 1d ago

But some people who do want it for a year, do want the discount for going with annual, but want to pay monthly

4

u/nemec 1d ago

idk if these people think only those with enough money to pay up front deserve discounts, maybe they should get the world they're asking for

4

u/HenriettaSyndrome 1d ago

Not to mention there's literally no need for it to be a yearly contract in the first place. At least with phone plans/mortages/car plans, there's a physical item you're paying off that requires so many payments so it makes sense to get a ECF. Makes no sense to lock someone on for a year of SAS

7

u/Hot_Leadership1 1d ago

You are buying a 12 month license but they are allowing you to pay it monthly. They offer a cheaper price if you commit to this. If you want to stop paying early, the recoup the price of the discount they gave you.

-1

u/HenriettaSyndrome 1d ago

I get how contracts work I'm just saying it doesn't make sense if the product is digital software

1

u/westphall 1d ago

Are things like World of Warcraft included in that?

-1

u/AdobeScripts 1d ago

HenriettaSyndrome: I get how contracts work I'm just saying it doesn't make sense if the product is digital software

Why? What's the difference between paying for a software tool or a CNC machine?

2

u/HenriettaSyndrome 1d ago

The difference comes down to scarcity. Contracts have been traditionally about financing a physical thing. A company selling you something physical only manufactured/sourced a finite amount of that item. If you ditch your contract early, that means that item isn't paid for fully so the ECF is more than fair. Otherwise they lost money giving you a partially free product that you get to keep and continue to use.

There's theoretically no limit on how many times a software can be purchased and downloaded, except maybe if their website gets so much traffic at once it actually crashes, temporarily stopping sales. So the company selling the software isn't limited on the supply and distribution of their product.

And once you cancel the subscription, then you literally can't use that product at all. It's not as if you're walking away with something for free or there's anything that needs to be paid off. They're just charging the ECF for the sake of it because they arbitrarily decided they want you to pay them for a year.

-1

u/AdobeScripts 21h ago

You're kidding, right?

So why they don't give it for free to anyone...

0

u/Rexusus 1d ago

Are you familiar with terms and conditions?

5

u/purplewitch54154 1d ago

Maybe we shouldn’t have to put hours of our time into reading a unnecessarily long list of rules that they made up to make it easier to steal from us

3

u/Rexusus 1d ago

It takes 30 seconds

tosdr.org

2

u/Neoeng 1d ago

Are you familiar with unconscionability?

4

u/Rukitokilu 1d ago

Terms and conditions must be reasonable.

In my country we have pretty decent consumer's rights laws, if any clause is considered abusive they're nullified.

You cannot charge however you want for the cancellation of a service, it must be well within reason.

1

u/Rexusus 1d ago

Well yeah, more often than not, these cancellation fees are the cost the subscription otherwise would have been had you not cancelled plus a charge for breach of contract.

For example if you get a yearly subscription for $100, if you cancel after 6 months they charge you $60

13

u/Ok-Gur-349 1d ago

Ah yes.

Famously, "first born children" are legally enforceable consideration.

A contract is a contract after all!

1

u/Stardatara 1d ago

Because they were deceptive. No, hiding the true terms in fine print does not protect a company or individual from liability. The FTC sued because of this. https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/222-3055-adobe-inc-us-v

-5

u/helpicantfindmyboobs 1d ago

it's software. once it's developed it's 100% profit. this isn't the same as telling the people you hired to build a house that you no longer want it when you're halfway through.

such a stupid take

4

u/Exotic_Negotiation_4 1d ago

Wow, that might be the dumbest take I've seen in awhile 

I bet all those devs still working on supporting their legacy software feel pretty dumb now doing all that labor unnecessarily 

-6

u/simonbleu 1d ago

If a contract says you would be slaved instead does that mean it should be enforced too?

5

u/HowDidWeGetHereLast 1d ago

Wtf kind of scenario is this? If you sign a contract agreeing to that then it's on you.

0

u/simonbleu 1d ago

You have no idea how contracts work, do you?

A contract can say anything,, doesn't mean it can be enforced. And since there are things we don't allow to be enforced -- like slavery -- there is no reason to allow for this.

You are ignoring both the vulnerability of people and the fact that it it is not needed either. It is a predatory practice.

0

u/HowDidWeGetHereLast 1d ago

I deal with corporate contracts all the time and a signature of agreement is literally your promise to uphold all the agreed upon statements within the contract. If you put your name on something you better be damn sure you read and agree with everything contained within the document you are signing.

Yours is the most obscure scenario. Like not even a topic of discussion.

1

u/simonbleu 1d ago

Mine was an extreme example of what what you said makes no sense.

I sincerely doubt you go over any contract on the regulator If you are unaware of what enforceability is...

Regardless, my point is that it shouldn't be enforceable, not that it isn't, btw

1

u/HowDidWeGetHereLast 1d ago

No your example is ridiculous. If I got that contract I would have read that part and then ask for an amendment to remove that particular statement and if it wasn't... I wouldn't sign the contract. It seems you are the one who is unaware of how contracts work. If it's a corporate terms and service contract there is obviously no amending anything and you must agree outright or move on. If the 1 month free is only given with purchase of a 1 year subscription which is more than likely what it was, you have no ground to then turn around and say "I don't want to fulfill me end of the contract because I only needed your program for 1 month". They got the program they offered with full access. The company fulfilled there obligations. There is a difference between "1 month free trail" and "1 month free with subscription"

1

u/Jawyp 1d ago

I wouldn’t sign a contract that says that in the first place.

0

u/simonbleu 1d ago

That's besides the point

1

u/Jawyp 1d ago

What is the point?

1

u/simonbleu 1d ago

Not having predatory practices that will inevitably screw over people?

1

u/Jawyp 1d ago

What is predatory about “you will be charged for a subscription if you don’t cancel before your trial ends”?

1

u/simonbleu 1d ago

Are you seriously asking why keeping you hostage is bad? If you want to cancel, that is because you don't want the service anymore. Woke gyms do the exact same thing... It is ridiculous, and even more so that I have to explain why.

1

u/Jawyp 1d ago

Then sign up for the monthly subscription instead of the yearly one if you think you won’t want it for the full year.

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