Canceling a software subscription is supposed to be easy—that’s what US law says. However, Adobe has played fast and loose with its Creative Cloud subscriptions in the past. The company was sued by the Justice Department in 2024 due to its practice of hiding hefty termination fees when customers signed up. The case has now been resolved, with Adobe agreeing to pay a $75 million fine and free services to users of its products.
Converting software to monthly subscriptions is very popular these days, but Adobe was way ahead of the curve in this regard. The company began offering its suite of editing tools like Photoshop and Illustrator as a monthly subscription in 2013, and most of its customers migrated to the new system.
It was easy for Adobe to avoid that change because CS6, the last permanent license offered for its editing tools, started at $700 and went up to more than $2,600 for all apps. In contrast, paying between $10 and $70 per month seems like a good deal, and it may be worth it in the short term. However anyone who has been paying monthly since the change has spent thousands of dollars on Adobe software. And when people took notice and decided they wanted to cancel, many of them were disappointed with the outcome.
The crux of the government’s complaint was Adobe’s practice of hiding cancellation fees for its subscriptions in the fine print or behind a hyperlink. Adobe charges 50 percent of the remaining subscription period when you cancel, which can be hundreds of dollars on annual plans. Additionally, the company used labyrinthine phone trees to make cancellations more difficult.
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