How to cancel Adobe CC subscription without paying a “cancellation fee”?

AFAIK you only pay a cancellation fee if you want to cancel a subscription early (E.g. you booked a yearly plan and then cancel it a few months before renewal), which of course is legal.

At some point there was the hack that you could switch your subscription to a offer they throw at you when you try to cancel, and then that counted as a new subscription, which you could cancel within the first 14 days. Not sure if that still works.

Use privacy.com and give them a temporary credit card. Close the card when you want to cancel.

Is this ethical? You're not using the software anymore, so you're not getting something for nothing. Rather, you're avoiding paying something for nothing.

I did exactly that around 4 months ago.

Luckily I subscribed using PayPal, so when Adobe charged me the cancellation fee I immediately contested it. My guess was that Adobe won’t bother to deal with a contested fee of around $100.

They didn’t, so PayPal refunded me the fee.

Edit: I replaced Photoshop with Pixelmator Pro, which is an excellent piece of software. Most other needs are covered by Sketch/Figma. Haven’t found a good Illustrator alternative yet, but didn’t look much.

I recently switched to Corel because they still sell perpetual licenses.

On physical media.

I won’t say it is as good or better than Adobe.

Only that it is good enough for me at this time.

Thanks for the heads up. I just checked, and apparently I got scammed into an annual plan by a customer support agent without realizing it. Even better, they don't appear to have a way for you to delete your old credit card information, even after adding a new one. Time to finally look for Adobe alternatives.

This doesn’t answer your question, but it may help folks who haven’t ended in this situation.

Amazon sells (at least in EU) CC annual prepaid subscription. Buy that instead and redeem it on Adobe to activate subscription. No direct purchase from adobe, no credit card on file. End of one year, your subscription will just expire out.

Fuck Adobe. It triggered the auto-renew while on vacation for a year, I cancelled within a week later, and was forced to pay a massive cancellation fee. One of the worst companies I've interacted with, will never use their products again.

If you update / change your subscription to another one, you go back into the 14 days free cancellation policy.

Then just cancel.

Piracy is once again the better choice.

Tell them your employer is now paying for your subscription

Worked for me plus two others that I know of

I'm currently testing what happens when I sign up for a free trial with a card from privacy.com that has a $1 spending limit.

Now that the free trial is over, Adobe keeps trying to charge my card for the monthly fee every 2-3 days or so. I'm not sure if my Acrobat license will get disabled and everything will be dropped, or if my account will get sent to collections, or what.

Eager to find out.

Talk to their representatives on the chat and they will help. That is how I avoided paying the cancellation fee.

I would also like to know, how to debloat CC. There are tons of unvanted processes and verifying subscription every day. It is not even possible to use legally CC offline.

Cancel your card, the fee is small enough that it won't be worth their time to actively pursue you for it.

EDIT: I should append this with "It Depends"/YMMV/Do this at your own risk. Based on my years working in and around the collections space, I can say with a fairly high degree of certainty that you will most likely not be pursued in a meaningful or enforceable way for a small amount like this. But then again Adobe might sell your "debt" to someone who will choose to pursue you heavily for it in the hope that they can find a court to agree with them.

If you're in Europe you could do a subject access request, request phone calls or whatever way you entered into the contract and see if they messed up.

Pay the cancellation fee and learn from it, to read the terms and conditions before you buy.

Then in the future, depending on your needs, use alternative applications, like many of the excellent Affinity programs such as Affinity Photo (vs Adobe Photoshop), Affinity Designer (vs Adobe Illustrator), etc. that are an affordable one-time purchase. Likewise Luma Fusion video editor (on iPad) instead of Adobe Premiere Pro or Final Cut.

Pay it. Then tweet @ them how disgruntled you are that you have to pay it. Worked for a buddy of mine.

I pay via PayPal then cancel the billing subscription. Privacy.com is how my partner got out of it.

I meant to add that Luma Fusion also runs on the M1/M2 Mac as well as iPad.

Cancel and open a dispute on your credit card.

Privacy.com and freeze the card

You switch plans and quit the new one…