Editorial: I have Stockholm syndrome and Adobe is my captor
It’s Thursday, which means it’s print day in the Massive office. I’m rushing to put my final touches on the ‘Sex’ issue. My InDesign file is affectionately called ‘SEX_final_FINAL_actualfuckingFINAL’. I drop in a paper texture I paid a random on the internet $3 for. Then comes that cursed rainbow spinning wheel of death. No.. no....please Adobe don’t do it… I haven’t saved in over an hour. My whole screen turns black. Adobe InDesign crashes so badly my MacBook opts out of living for the next 20 minutes. I turn to editor Sammy with an emptiness behind my eye she’s seen many times.
“It crashed again, didn’t it?”
Despite the stress of The Great Sex Issue Crash (and my subsequent crash out), no experiences with the software itself can compare to the stress of Adobe’s exploitative pricing and subscription-based plans. Something you used to be able to pay for once, all apps included, now costs $131.68 NZD a month.
Like Massey, the Dunedin polytech where I studied offered us Adobe as part of our course fees. But we couldn’t use it on our personal devices, and it didn’t give us access to arguably the best part of the creative suite — Adobe Fonts. So many of us fell into the subscription trap. At least the first year was discounted.
But when graduation hit, my Adobe subscription automatically switched to the regular full price with no warning. Over $100 a month. Needless to say, as a broke recent grad this was about a third of the money I had to my name. I couldn’t pay rent that week. I panicked and immediately went to cancel my subscription. I had been on the plan for three weeks, just passing the 14-day free cancellation policy. My early cancellation fee would now be to pay 50% of the remainder of the one-year term.
So, I pleaded my case to several customer service reps, my reasoning getting more extreme each time. Until my final plead: “I have a newborn baby!”
I just told Adobe I have a newborn baby to get out of a cancellation fee — and it worked. Phew, now I can pay rent.
Adobe’s creative suite hasn’t always been a subscription-based product. Before there was Creative Cloud, there was Adobe Creative Suite (CS). The first version of CS was released in 2003 and included Illustrator, InCopy, InDesign, Photoshop, ImageReady, Version Cue, design guide and training resources, and Stock Photos. You could buy CS1 with a one-time purchase, and you were guaranteed to be able to use that version of the software forever. You owned the software.
But since Adobe switched to a subscription service in 2013, it feels a lot more like Adobe owns you. In 2024, the US Government even sued Adobe, accusing the company of violating consumer protection laws with "hidden" termination fees and a complicated cancellation process.
The most unfortunate part of all of this is I wouldn’t even encourage any creative to use alternatives to this evil company. Many of us spend upwards of three years paying to learn how to use this software, because we are told it’s the industry standard. And it is. I have been working as a designer for three years now and have spent every day using Adobe products. For all their flaws, regular crashes, and terrible cross compatibility, I do love them.
Will Adobe ever change? Probably not. But if you can take anything from my experiences, get out of your cancellation fee with a completely not fictional totally real newborn baby.
And hey, maybe one day we should all just take to the seas and become pirates…