I was happy to use Lightroom way back when I bought a so called perpetual license for it. Then they started the subscription garbage. Not for me thank you very much.

They just seem to have degenerated into a company that keeps infinitely gouging their victims, (sorry, customers)!

Fortunately, there are still a few paid and free alternatives: Serif deserves credit for the Affinity series, which is now free, but I've been using Photoline32 happily for years.

IF it is clearly in the contract that's one thing

But also IF I am going to be charged 50% of the remaining subscription then I better well GET 50% of the remaining subscription. Otherwise this smells strongly of fraud - pay for a service you don't actually get...

However, as an aside, this is why avoiding subscription-based software is the best approach where possible.

It's driven purely by greed.

I fully agree with you about the commercial greed aspect plus it generates customer ill will. You used to be able to get perpetual licences for the cut down Photoshop Elements but now it's only a three year licence and then the software stops working.

The free Canva Affinity range can be combined with, for example, a Lightroom equivalent that offers a perpetual licence, eg Exposure 7.

Adobe is somehow equating a physical thing like a phone to software. Problem is a phone did cost the cellco company real money and you got the phone. So makes sense if you cancel the cellco svc agreement, you still owe for the phone. But software. Be real adobe. Thankfully I'm not a customer of the vulture co. The pity is how they dominate with pdf format. I'm glad pdf is reverse engineered enough that I can use open source tools to read the files.

'Thankfully I'm not a customer of the vulture co' - err you are posting on here and I'm pretty sure this is run by a commercial entity...

(Relatedly, how has it taken me 15 YEARS to realise 'the register' is a pun)

we have the EU Unfair Contract Terms Directive to curb such "significant imbalance(s) in the parties’ rights and obligations to the detriment of the consumer."

I almost feel sorry for the Americans who will continue to get rinsed by Adobe. Can't see their government standing up for consumers in the same way.

We just stop using them in perpetuity. Well, we smarter ones anyway. I for example was ripped off by Ford in 1993. Bought a new car with a bad trans and they refused to fix under warranty. I've bought several new cars since, and not one came from a Ford lot. I've also successfully talked half a dozen other people out of buying Fords. Icing on the cake - back when Ford was paying dividends I invested money, took dividends and got the money I paid them for the car back from their profits.

That seems to be something too many business people seem to have forgotten - it can take years to build a positive reputation, and these days just minutes to destroy it. Pee off a customer, and they tell their friends about it, and your reputation can be trashed at the speed of social media.

Of course, the only reason some of them don't actually care is that they have sufficient market power that they really don't care how peed off their victims are - if you are in the creative business, then in practical terms you have to be able to handle the files clients bring you, and in practice that means running the same software, and that means you are stuck paying whatever Adobe decides you can be fleeced for this month. Going back "a few years", Quark had an "annoying feature" in XPress - when a new version came out, they also updated the file format, and didn't offer a "save in older version" option. So if you had v3.3, it would automatically update any file you opened to v3.3 format - and there was no way to save in (say) v3.2. So that forced people to upgrade whether they wanted to or not - if you don't update, you can't open files your clients send you; if you do upgrade, any clients who don't can't open any files you work on for them.

And MS don't care what customers think, thanks to some shrewd moves, and many illegal ones*, they've engineered a situation where it's "very difficult" to not use the full MS stack in a business of any size**.

* A proved in court

** Yes, a small business can use alternatives, but for large businesses, it's really hard to put together the full stack without using 365, and 365 is deliberately designed to make swapping out any components more or less impossible.

Thanks, but that's all I would need to know in order to walk away. I come from a time when you bought a bit of software, it came on a tangible spinny thing, and it was "yours" in that you could dump it onto your machine and it would do its job and that was about as complicated as it usually got (though some companies did mess around with dongles and weird copy protection).

Now? Subscription up front costs are much cheaper than the product ever cost, but they are recurring so it'll add up to more. And, of course, the more you use the software, the more your data and creations will be held hostage to the necessity to keep on subscribing.

So, now, it seems that Adobe don't only want to take away your use of the software, and potentially the ability to access your data maintained with it, they also want to charge you a ransom while having no obligation to provide the service that such money would have paid for.

As my mother would have said: they can go and sit on a bayonet and rotate.

And that "creative cloud" bullshit. No, I'll edit my photos on my own hardware ty very fucking much.

This sort of thing was a problem in France with recurring subscriptions, often things like magazines or medical top up etc.

Now (and since around 2019ish), after one calendar year you can cancel with a simple demand (no jumping through hoops), at any time (and not within a tiny window around the annual renewal time), and without penalty or charges. The only thing you will have to pay is "until the end of the calendar month" (though some magazine subscriptions push this by saying it'll take 28 days to deal with the request). At any rate, it's much better now than all the weird ways companies tried to take advantage of customers.

It used to be a massive problem in the UK, back in the day with things like wine, magazine or music (tape/CD etc) "clubs".

It's classic dark patterns - make it as difficult to cancel as possible - you have a limited window, have to write in to a specific address using specific words, have to send back what was previously sent to you but would cost an arm and a leg. etc etc.

I don't know if gyms are still guilty of it, but they used to use tactics such as having to visit a specific gym on a specific day and time to speak to the only person who could approve the cancellation that you had to also bring in writing. Not their problem if said person wasn't there when you tried etc.

For online subscriptions where there is nothing tangible exchanging hands, this sort of thing should be illegal.

My own other pet hate is booking sites that charge a "booking fee" despite it being done online and no physical tickets changing hands. Also should be utterly illegal.

With some gym subscriptions it was even worse. Ashbourne Management runs membership services on behalf of some gyms and used to have contracts that tied you in for possibly several years. They would report you to a credit reference agency if you tried to cancel in a way that they didn't like. In 2011 the old OFT investigated and took them to court where it was found some of the contract terms were illegal. There's a Q&A at [1]https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20140402175100/http://oft.gov.uk/OFTwork/consumer-enforcement/consumer-enforcement-completed/ashbourne/ams-qanda .

[1] https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20140402175100/http://oft.gov.uk/OFTwork/consumer-enforcement/consumer-enforcement-completed/ashbourne/ams-qanda

... free services to people who decided they don't want those services? No, this is a penalty that penalizes nothing. Require a cash refund.

is that the (alleged) creative types that use Adobe really won't work with anything else as it isn't cv-friendly.

My last place had 3 people in marketing who accounted for nearly all the paid for software budget because they had to "have Adobe". Despite better FOSS versions for their tasks.

Move it their budget, not IT's. If the employers start stamping down on this Adobe won't be CV-friendly, possibly just the opposite.

Abandoned Adobe years ago. No loss.

"Or, as others suggest, choose another vendor."

Or use FOSS, no vendor at all, in the strict meaning of the word.