What looks wrong
A software trial that becomes a polite monthly subscription you can drop any time.
What’s actually going on
The U.S. government sued Adobe in 2024 under the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act, alleging the company hid a hefty early-termination fee in fine print and then ran cancelers through extra steps, delays, and retention screens. A later proposed settlement included $75 million in civil penalties, $75 million in customer credits, and an order to disclose the fee up front and make canceling easier.
Adobe's annual-billed-monthly Creative Cloud plan looks like the friendly middle: you do not write a huge check, you just pay each month. What a lot of people missed is that leaving before the year was up could mean a fee of about half the remaining months.
In 2024 the Justice Department, working with the FTC, filed a civil complaint saying Adobe buried that early-termination fee behind inconspicuous links and then 'ambushed' people who tried to cancel. ROSCA is the 2010 law that tells subscription businesses to disclose the important terms before they take a card, get informed consent, and offer a simple way to stop the charges.
The government also said the cancel path itself was the second trick: extra steps, waits, unsolicited offers, warning screens. That is the dark-pattern twin of a hidden fee — first you do not see the lock, then the door sticks.
Adobe later agreed to a proposed $150 million resolution: $75 million in civil penalties and $75 million in free service for eligible U.S. subscribers, plus rules to show the fee before signup and to make cancellation simple. This write-up is about the published practice and the public case, not about any named customer.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Adobe $150 million ROSCA settlement announcement. We quote the public record. A settlement is not always an admission.