Ask HN: Adobe robbed me, what do I do?

41 points by rcconf 3 years ago | 13 comments

I'm pretty salty, I've been paying for Adobe Stock for about $40/month and you get about 10 assets a month. I had 240 assets, so spent about $960 to get it. They failed to charge my credit card and now they removed all credits and said they cannot give it back.

My credit card is on file and is working fine for all other products. I basically feel robbed. It just seems silly that they cannot give the assets back. The manager told me the same thing and told me to look at the Terms of Service.

Is this my fault given they had the credit card on file and its working fine for everything else? It just seems like Adobe has zero accountability.

Also I guess a bit of a warning to anyone who has Adobe Stock, make sure your payments are being processed or they will remove years of credits... To buy the amount of credits I have on their site, it's like $3000.

uberman 3 years ago |

Read about the arbitration rules you agreed to. Likely similar to: https://www.adobe.com/legal/terms.html

Arbitration costs money (usually split between both parties). If you feel like you have a case and are willing to put up an additional $500 to $1000 you might get your assets back.

I think the bigger thing for Adobe is that invoking arbitration might force them to engage their legal council and you might find them much more willing to give you your assets back pre-arbitration than to pay their legal team to represent them.

Someone1234 3 years ago |

It is bad customer service that they didn't restore the rollover credits.

If I am understanding you correctly, you're on the Adobe $49/month plan, which gives you 25 credits/month then rolled over 240 or nearly 10 months worth. If that is accurate may I suggest you re-evaluate Adobe Stock going forward and look at their pay per stock competitors? In particular if they're going to treat rollover credits as this poorly (e.g. expiration and or sudden loss)?

The whole rollover credit thing is just a manipulative way of establishing sunk cost (e.g. "I cannot cancel I have months of value in this account!"). If you're building up rollover credit consistently over months you're likely better off either with a lower tier of subscription or a competitor. Adobe's biggest sales pitch is their integration, but third parties also offer Adobe extensions.

Unfortunately I doubt blasting them on social media will help here, Adobe just doesn't care what people think of them.

[0] https://stock.adobe.com/plans

PaulHoule 3 years ago |

Small Claims Court is definitely worth it if Adobe didn't make you sign something forcing you to use arbitration. If they did it is still worth going through arbitration because it is often cheaper for them to give you redress than go through the process.

chazzyluc 3 years ago | |

I was curious if this was true and looked it up. According to the American Arbitration Association rules section R-9:

Small Claims Option for the Parties If a party’s claim is within the jurisdiction of a small claims court, either party may choose to take the claim to that court instead of arbitration as follows: (a) The parties may take their claims to small claims court without first filing with the AAA.

I am very much not a lawyer and have zero experience with arbitration but that seems pretty strait forward unless I am missing something?

https://www.adr.org/sites/default/files/Consumer_Rules_Web_2...

PaulHoule 3 years ago | | |

What I'd say is this.

Trial lawyers like to say that arbitration is unfair and they have a point, but I've heard many stories of people who've gone to arbitration and gotten a fair settlement. Here is one I found on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31567673

Very few people go through the process, but the fact is that if you have a $2000 claim, Adobe can spend a lot more than that trying to beat the claim through arbitration and still wind up being liable. It makes sense for them to cut you a check and make the whole thing go away... And often it is faster to go through arbitration than the small claims court.

So if you have an arbitration clause in your contract you should start the process.

If you don't you should go to small claims court which has the feature that they aren't allowed to send a lawyer... They have to send somebody who isn't a lawyer and it is an expensive hassle for them that can easily go wrong.

Either way the practice of civil law is about intimidation. They are hoping you are intimidated enough by the process that you won't even try to get justice but if you do go through with it there is a good chance they will roll over because fighting a case can be a nightmare.

---

I am by no means an expert but I was a volunteer years ago at a community mediation center that mostly handled parenting plan cases. We were highly successful with those and took a load off the family court, the parties were usually happier and more compliant with agreements they made themselves than they were with decisions made by a court.

I've never been involved with corporate cases and my experience with commercial dispute (between business owners, landlords and tenants, etc.) were less successful. I think the approach we used was not so good for those because I think we had a lot of cases where party A thinks party B owes them $X and party B thinks A owns them $Y and if you itemized those claims you would get some number in the middle... Mediators at our center weren't allowed to do that so most of those cases went to court despite those efforts.

The experience has still made me a believer in mediation.

nikau 3 years ago |

Cancel subscription and head on over to pirate bay

adfm 3 years ago | |

Unless you work for a company with a corporate account, the argument for a SMB CC subscription diminishes daily. That’s why they acquired Figma. They don’t innovate; they acquire and extinguish. Grab a perpetual license for something like Affinity or whatever makes you happy and spend the time to get up to speed. Pirate Bay is a bandaid at best.

antifa 3 years ago |

> They failed to charge my credit card and now they removed all credits and said they cannot give it back.

I don't have any advice, but someone who would have advice would probably appreciate some clarity on the following:

How many attempts did they make to charge your credit card? How many emails did you receive about failed charge attempts? What kind of ultimatums/deadlines were stated in these emails in regards to your subscription or credits? After the first failed charge attempt, how soon were your subscription inactive and/or credits lost?

radiojasper 3 years ago |

They didn't rob you, your credit card company robbed you. Contact your CC company and ask why the payment couldn't be processed?

tacostakohashi 3 years ago |

If they "failed to charge" your credit card then you didn't pay for the service, didn't get the service, are not a customer, and they don't owe you anything.

Robbery is a felony where things are actually taken, and force is used. This is, at most, a customer service issue or civil matter, and not a felony.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3 years ago | |

You might want to take another read of their post. Adobe failed to charge their card, ostensibly for the first time, after having successfully charged them $40/month for a total of $960 (over 24 months).

birdyrooster 3 years ago | | |

This happened to me with Metromile and they cancelled my policy without me even knowing after years of no late or missed charges. American Express said they never attempted any charges and Metromile claimed the problem was American Express. If I had been in a collision, I would have been fucked. Now I pay for my insurance one year at a time from a different vendor.

systemicdanna 3 years ago | | |

OP's description is super unclear. What are "credits" that Adobe removed? Access to the assets OP purchased or something else?

I read it as Adobe were _never_ able to charge the card, not just this one time. If my reading is correct, then I don't see an issue with taking back something that was never paid for.