For a large company, they also have pretty shady pricing. Like their “annual plan, paid monthly”. You’d think you’re just paying for the monthly subscription, but they hide the fact that you have to pay a penalty for early cancellation in the fine print.
There are dark patterns in Adobe's pricing plans up the wazoo. And each year it seems that they change their UI just a little more to try to lock your data into their Creative Cloud. Photoshop now tries to save your files to the Creative Cloud (instead of your computer) by default.
I think the concern has definitely gone to an anti-trust level. Adobe packages Lightroom for free with Photoshop, probably with Capture One directly in their sights. Anti-trust definitely needs a reinvigoration.
Sounds like Adobe has taken a page out of Microsoft’s book. That is, defaulting saving to their paid cloud storage solution instead of the user’s local system.
It’s a scummy tactic but it must pay if companies keep doing it. I suspect it preys mostly on the vulnerable less-tech-savvy users.
That pissed me off so much when it got me. I can count the number of dark patterns I've ever fallen for (well, and eventually found out about) on one finger.
It's so stupid too, I'm happy paying subscriptions for things and happy paying a fair price but being tricked into doing it - never again, Adobe. They target their own customers with it to scrape a few more dollars into the current quarter, I guess. Probably some executive bonus targets or something.
Literally the only time I've ever fallen for a dark pattern.
Shame that I've managed to avoid the most aggressive dark patterns used by scammers and shady practioners. The one that got me was from a $150B company.
And depending on your use case, bloated. In all the features Photoshop has gained since 6.0, 7.0, and CS1, only a tiny handful add anything of value for my usage. If 7.0 or CS1 were ported to modern operating systems they would fill my needs well and then some.
This is another reason why alternatives such as Affinity Photo and Pixelmator are increasingly enticing; their core feature sets have reached near-parity with that of Photoshop for many and so Photoshop offers very little extra value.
My wife tried to cancel her subscription but the agent on the live chat just quickly and out of the blue gave her 4 months of free subscription. Not sure if this is unusual or part of their playbook.
Part of their retention playbook. I needed Illustrator for a short term project. Only needed it for less than a month so paid for a 30 day term. Almost forgot about it but went to cancel it on the last day. They gave me a month for free automatically. No customer service rep was involved.
- It was rather annoying I had to check & double-check that I was only paying for 30 days and not getting ensnared in the annual plan with monthly payments & a big cancellation fee. Next time I need a vector editor, I'll just buy one from the app store.
Yes, their "3 months for 3" and then: oh, now you're locked into a paying 12 month contract was absolutely the last straw for me. Swore off their products.
Dishonest, expensive, slow.