Does your business require image and video editing? Adobe Creative Suite is the gold standard when it comes to image editing and similar services. Adobe Creative Suite (with Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier, After Effects, InDesign, LightRoom, Acrobat, Animate, Audition, Flash, Muse, Bridge, Captivate and other flagship programs) subscriptions are expensive. It is at least $80 a month for total cost including taxes and it can easily be more expensive if you aren't a student. Especially when there are so many free online image editing programs available for computers and smartphones. A lot of social media marketers and companies will end up deciding to cancel their services eventually. If only it was as simple as hitting a cancellation button!
Shame on Adobe for making it very challenging to cancel your Adobe Creative Suite graphic designer software membership. Although making it a difficult process helps them earn a few extra million dollars, it has turned me off to their entire company. Such a large and successful software business resorting to such lowly tactics on their website, email and social media.
Adobe Illustrator or any Creative Suite membership needs to be canceled through a very specific and hard to find series of annoying websites. The process is a confusing maze on purpose. If you don't select the right options, you will continue in a never-ending loop of frustration on their website.
Start off by selecting “Contact Us” on their website (towards the bottom). You then have to specify that you want to “Cancel Your Membership” and you have to do it via Telephone or Chat with a representative from outside of the US. During the phone or chat they’ll attempt to talk you out of it, and one time the chat even froze conveniently before they finalized cancellation. I was livid. Make sure you get the cancellation email to know that it was done. If you don’t confirm then they might not actually do it because that’s what their reps are trained to do.
Even if you just paid for the month, they’ll cancel your service immediately. Supposedly they can charge you an extra month unless you provide them with over 14 days of notice as well. It reminds me of when I worked at several gyms and health clubs. It was always standard procedure to require customers to cancel in person instead of over the phone or email. The management pretended this policy was for the account security of the member, but it was really a way to prevent lazy and non-confrontational people from canceling for at least another month or two.
This is the oldest trick in the book for customer (dis)service and very immoral and frustrating. Enjoy the extra cancellation fees friends! You can also prepare yourself for an endless amount of email spam to try and get you to renew your subscription. They even make it tricky to uninstall the programs on your computer! They really do try every trick in the book to make an extra buck and save some pennies.
Skip the social media messages to Adobe, their customer service team (if they have one) aren't reading them or doing anything about it. Keep my experience in mind next time you find yourself dealing with Adobe or any other SaaS company for that matter.
Adobe has some great programs, but luckily every year there are more free or low-cost business alternatives. Hopefully over time it will be completely unnecessary to have an Adobe Creative Suite account and we can all save ourselves some money and frustration.
I hope you enjoyed this article about a public service announcement for canceling your Adobe Creative Suite software.
Interested in more articles from the Lean Startup Life blog?
Read My Related Posts:
- Pinterest Versus Instagram For Social Selling Supremacy
- The Power Of Proof In Social Media
More Lean Startup Life Lessons Below
