Canceling Auto Renewal of Adobe CC Plan – Adobe Fail

If you have an annual Adobe CC (Creative Cloud i.e. photoshop, illustrator, etc.) subscription then you may be surprised to learn that you are forced to keep the auto-renewal feature on and are only given the option to remove it in the last month of the subscription.

It’s my opinion this is a dirty tactic where they are anticipating people forget to cancel the subscription and are forced to pay them for another year of service. If you do auto renew accidently, then there are cancellation fees for a plan which you did not explicitly request or want.

Here’s an excerpt from a chat with Adobe on this issue when I requested that my subscription, which ends April 14th, have it’s auto renew turned off:

If you do graphic design work then you know that Adobe has maintained a fairly comfortable monopoly over this type of software. It’s this reason that they’re able to treat users the way companies 10 years ago did and why so many choose pirated versions of Adobe over paid subscriptions.

They made a good move in going to a subscription based model, but Adobe if you’re reading this (and I know you’ll read this), it’s time to get with the times and not play games unethically trying to squeeze a few extra dollars out of people.

For readers, here’s a great free option for as soon as your Adobe CC license is canceled. I would highly recommend GIMP which you can download for free here. GIMP works on OS X, Windows and Linux and does a very good job providing a powerful, intuitive graphics program without all the headache and expense of using Adobe’s products.