Canceling Creative Cloud.

So frustrated.

Adobe’s offerings have become clunkier and more frustrating to use instead of better. So I’m jumping ship and encouraging others to, too.

A year ago, I decided that it was worth giving Adobe the benefit of the doubt and signing up for a Creative Cloud membership. I had my doubts then about SaaS and relying on it, but I thought it was worth a shot.

Since then each new version (CC, CC2014, CC2015) of the programs that I use daily has become slower and clunkier. In particular Illustrator CC2015 compared to CS6, is just a dog.

As for my core workhorse, Photoshop, Adobe has been “listening” to what it’s users wants and is producing hacked on additions instead of fixing the core experience (or producing a separate UI-centric application). In the cases where they produce a feature which I’d like to use, like Artboards, it is implemented so poorly and is so slow that it is barely usable on my 2013 Macbook Pro Retina with 8GB of RAM.

Adobe, this is not ok.

I’m tired of paying $500+ a year for applications which don’t fit my needs and are progressively worse with each iteration. I feel like I’m being pumped for cash and have no recourse.

But, the real truth of the matter is that I actually do have a recourse and should be voting with my wallet.

Today, I cancelled my Adobe CC account and the process of cancellation is a perfect example of how bad things have gotten with Adobe.

Every other software service which I use online (Harvest, DigitalOcean, Asana, Github, etc.) allows me to simply pay monthly and then cancel when I’m done. No fuss, no mess.

But not Adobe. Oh no.

Where the fuck is the creative cloud plan i’ve been paying for the last year?

There is no way to cancel an account from within the Adobe ID panel — you have to contact Support directly.

Seriously. I just want to underline how incredibly stupid this is.

It took me about ten minutes to find this. Then another ten minutes to actually cancel the account. Luckily I decided to do this exactly a year after I started the account, because apparently the terms that I signed up for stipulate that if I cancel before that, I’ll be charged a service fee.

A service fee for deleting a row in a database.

This is nothing more than a big player strong-arming its user base and milking it for money. Adobe, not cool.

Half an hour of my precious time wasted. I won’t forget, Adobe.

Your business practices are greedy, and despicable. I’m happy to give my money over to people who create tools which I use to make a living. I’m very unhappy to give them to people who make tools which make making a living harder.