If you told me that the Adobe executives were holding meetings over there to brainstorm new ways to trick us into giving them money for no reason, I'd absolutely believe you.
1. Adobe has the most inaccessible products on the market
Literally, it moved to a subscription plan so we have to give them money forever indefinitely instead of buying the software one time, but I digress because if you want to do anything cool with it, you’ll need to watch a 38-minute tutorial too.
And if you want to cancel … well forget that, as it's being sued as we speak by the United States Department of Justice. The lawsuit is alleging that Adobe obscures fees and makes it illegally tricky for users to cancel their software subscriptions.
We've seen worse cancellation flows (ClickFunnels, anyone?) — especially when you have to email/call the company. BUT, this is annoying. It appears Adobe has already made some changes, or the individual plan differs from the business plan, because earlier screenshots showed people being charged for the year's balance. That's not our experience here.
2. Annoying abuse of power ... including emojis
I also don’t like that Adobe holds a voting seat on the Unicode Consortium (world standard for text and emoji), which enables them to abuse their clout to approve and veto what symbols we're given to communicate with each other.
I thought originally that it would never be able to surpass that level of annoyance, and then Adobe started using AI to kill art instead of funding AI to do cool sh*t like delete the plastic trash island that's floating out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
I mean... seriously, why can't someone (looking at you corporate overlords) use their AI powers for good?
3. Adobe's anti-artist, anti-privacy TOS
If there is a Hell, there'll be a whole section for the Adobe think tank.
You see, when artists got a notification recently and realized that Adobe had quietly changed the terms of service (not unlike Zoom's recent AI TOC firestorm) to allow Adobe to analyze content created by artists and stored in their Creative Clouds or Document Cloud “to provide product features and improve and develop our products and services,” they were p*ssed, and rightfully so.
Adding insult to injury, Adobe immediately started walking it back on their blog and acting very reactionary on social media, while doing everything it could to pacify the ticking time bomb.
Users found that even if you opt out of Content Analysis, you could still find yourself automatically opted back in for a multitude of reasons like submitting feedback or simply uploading to Adobe Stock.
Where it gets tricky is when you consider how many people are working under NDAs in the creative fields, or even how many classified documents it's had access to because someone accidentally put it onto an Adobe server.
4. Is it worth it? ... Seriously? That price tho
Honestly, I cringe every time someone wants me to use Adobe professionally.
Thankfully, as a business owner, I say no.
If I can’t do it by hand, with Affinity, or in Canva, please, I'll pass and recommend someone who doesn’t read the Terms Of Service. I'm glad that I left Adobe long ago — getting hit with a cancellation fee right now sounds like a headache — eer lawsuit, waiting to happen.
Tara Bisme is a freelance writer and artist. Read her WCB articles.
