No, that's correct. If you cancel within 7 days you pay nothing. If you cancel after 14 days you have to pay for half the year. I'm not sure what happens between those two points— I'd guess it's a grace period but I'm not sure— but personally I'd be surprised to have any reduction in cost if I went beyond a clearly stated free trial I agreed to.

Folks have legitimate bones to pick with Adobe— including the cost alone— and I think that’s why folks want to pig-pile on them for something like this. That said, I don't think this is a dark pattern. I don't even really think it's critique— more like conspiracy theory.

Dark pattern: Buttons confirming difficult-to-undo actions not in a user's best interest hiding in buttons styled and positioned like cancel buttons.

Dark pattern: Ad modals with undersized X closing symbols in low-contrast colors with transparent backgrounds over complex graphics making it hard to find and harder to not click on the ad.

Dark pattern: Cookie consent boxes w/an “accept all” option but only line-item rejection of dozens of entries requiring 2 or 3 clicks each.

Dark pattern: Cookie consent boxes with “reject all” options which don’t reject cookies selected in other tabs/cards not visible unless you click on them.

Dark pattern: Inconspicuous opt-out adware in Windows installers that rarely require user interaction beyond clicking next.

Dark pattern: One-click sign-up requiring in-person, written, or phone cancellation via a ‘retention specialist.’

... this pattern: Bait link that doesn’t tell the whole story leads to a screen with a prominent order form. It has only one line item near the top that’s labelled commitment which says "annual plan, paid monthly £49.94/mo" with the monthly price. It clearly states the length of the free trial, twice, including the explicit date you need to cancel by to not get charged. The terms modal, which could be more clearly styled, explicitly states the penalties for not cancelling before twice the length of your free trial passes.

So if a user signs up for an annual subscription and doesn't cancel until more than double the time their free trial passes then they get charged a penalty. Ok.

Adobe has room to improve here, but sorry— this is just not a dark pattern by any good faith measure.

The first page is obviously a bait link, It should prominently state a 12 month commitment and save non-interested users the click. While it's overly salesy, it's a standard advertising tactic and incredibly mild compared to what you see at your average car dealership. Newer SAAS companies (e.g. Slack) do a much better job, here, and Adobe should follow suit. I would absolutely levy a dark pattern accusation if users only saw that before committing more than a click, but it's not.

I don't understand how anyone viewing an order form occupying ~ 1/3 of the screen with a prominent box labelled "commitment" saying "annual plan, paid monthly £49.94/mo" would not understand that you're making an annual commitment to pay £49.94/mo, and that the total cost will be £49.94/mo * 12. Never has any phone plan or car lease or gym membership or anything else I paid for monthly with some multi-month commitment prominently displayed the explicit total price. The free trial end dates are prominently mentioned twice.

The cancellation terms box styling should more clearly convey the document structure, but even someone quickly skimming the first 8 paragraphs would see the content didn't end with the headline “Cancellation Terms:”. Hanlon’s Razor shreds the assertion of deliberate malfeasance over a site-wide design system flubbing form follows function.

Normally love a pig pile on Adobe’s pricing practices, but this looks a lot more like histrionics intended to drive twitter traffic than a useful analysis of Adobe’s sign-up process.

I tend to agree on principle, but this whole concept of 'annual, monthly' is really scummy.

Even YC startups are doing it now, showing you a per-month price while de-emphasizing the fact that you're paying for a year up front. Adobe is the first one I'm familiar with that does normal monthly billing but forces you to stay a year.

>Hanlon’s Razor shreds the assertion of deliberate malfeasance over a site-wide design system flubbing form follows function.

Hanlon's Razor is a heuristic, not a law, and ceases to apply in the face of bad-faith actors. If Adobe wanted to be clear, they'd say "$X/month for 12 months", and not hide the commitment terms in WCAG-violating grey-on-white text. I offer instead the heuristic of "follow the money".

> Adobe is the first one I'm familiar with that does normal monthly billing but forces you to stay a year.

Really? The Commitment Subscription payment model is super common and old as time.

Oracle. Microsoft for some services. Lots of random SaaS companies. Unity Pro. Gyms. Internet service. Webex since forever. POTS service. Mobile service until Verizon got greedy and they started letting phone subsidies do the same thing. Leases. Service contracts for everything from software support to pest control. Consulting contracts. Columbia's Record of the Month Club.

I am firmly against blaming people who've been ripped off because they didn't' prevent it, but this is not new. It is a standard business practice across many industries. It's not even new to software.

Beyond that, even with Adobe, you don't even have to use it— it's just the only one Adobe lets you sign up for a free trial with. If you go to Adobe's sub page: https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html

And click on the 52 whatever a month plan, the three options for subscriptions— Month-to-Month, Monthly with a 12 month commitment, and annual paid upfront, are listed clear-as-day on the right.

I think the Hanlon's Razor play on words is clear. When the two possibilities at large seem to be "Adobe, the world standard in creative software, maliciously styled their cancellation terms to trick the sliver of people suspicious enough to read the terms but not suspicious enough to realize the text was cut off" and "Adobe fell behind on user testing for infrequently viewed text-only fine print pages," Hanlon's razor is the heuristic people should use, and the results are self-evident.

I got caught up in one recently but was able to talk the operator out of it. I thought I was signing up for a 1 month trial not for a year. Evidently they didn't push the people on the other side of the phone to refuse just make you have to at least call and talk to a human. I could find no way on the website to do it. Some people would just have let it go for a few months after not being frustrated enough to call customer service, as it wasn't a lot of money $8/month if I recall correctly.