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Dara30587910gme8
Participating Frequently
June 19, 2023
Question

Unreasonable Cancellation Fee

  • June 19, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 3538 views

Hi there,

 I wish to cancel my subscription to the Acrobat Online Service.

 I subscribed as I thought for a few months because I needed to edit some documents and although I did get some use out of it, I found the online version generally hard to use and not suitable for the purpose.

 Mostly I wanted to highlight text on some PDFs and though I did mostly manage to do this, I found it faster and easier in the end just to use a highlighter pen on hard copy.

 The most recent job I tried to do was to fill in a form online but for no apparent reason it kept saving the filled-in text at 2.5 pt which was illegible and in the end I used Apple's free Preview Markup Tool to do the same job.

 I have generally been a big fan of Acrobat over the years and have recommended it to many people so I was disappointed with its performance in this context.

 When I try to cancel this morning I find there is a cancellation fee of almost eu100 which I think is very unreasonable given the product has not served my purposes and this cancellation fee was not brought to my attention when I signed up.

 As far as I was aware, I was signing on from month-to-month and could cancel at any time without penalty. If I had known of this fee I would not have signed on because I only needed the produce for a few months for a specific project.

 I do not seem to be able to find a customer service portal or email to make these points to Adobe so perhaps someone will pass this on to them and I would like not to waste further time or money on a product which has been fit for purpose.

 I am very disappointed with the online product and with Adobe's cancellation policy which I think is greedy and excessive.

 Adobe has a dominant position in the electronic documents market and many public and private institutions send out documents in .pdf format so one has to engage with Acrobat as a product but I think this is very close to price gouging.

 Why should I have to pay eu100 for a product which did not work for me especially when such an onerous cancellation clause was not brought specifically to my attention as required in consumer laws?

I imagine many other loyal Acrobat users are feeling the same so perhaps Adobe will take this into account when considering my complaint.

 I have paid around eu75 so far for a product that hasn't worked for me and am now expected to pay even more to cancel and I can't evene seem to find the customer service portal.

 

 I will be looking for alternatives to Adobe's products in future if this is the way the company plans to treat its paying customers. 

 

 All the best,

Dara

    2 replies

    K
    kathilm
    Participant
    March 11, 2025

    I understand, I just cancelled Adobe Pro because I got the use out of it I needed in two months and it was never made clear there would be a fee. It was for $100. Also, Adobe Pro crashed my comuter on occassion! Not fair!

      K
      kathilm
      Participant
      March 11, 2025

      To be more specific, it was Adobe Acrobat Pro that I just cancelled and recieved the fee of $100! They offered a lesser plan when I cancelled which would have been perfect for my needs, but never offered that before I needed to cancel. And again, it crashed my computer on occassion!

       

      try67
      Community Expert
      try67Community Expert
      Community Expert
      June 19, 2023

      My guess is you subscribed for a year, and therefore had to pay less on a monthly basis than those who only subscribed on a month-by-month basis. The other side of the coin is that you agreed for a full year, so if you cancel if before that term ends, it involves a fee, as you were paying a discounted price all of that time based on your commitment.

      Anyway, if you want to appeal to Adobe and ask them to forgive that fee you can try doing so here:

      Chat support: https://helpx.adobe.com/contact.html?rghtup=autoOpen
      (make sure pop-ups are not blocked; type "Agent" to chat with a real person, or via phone)
      There's no email support.

      Beware of people contacting you via the forums' messaging system pretending to work for Adobe! Only those with an "Adobe Employee" tag under their name are legit. Also, Adobe will never offer to contact you via Skype, or use an email account that's not under the adobe.com domain...

        D
        Dara30587910gme8Author
        Participating Frequently
        June 19, 2023
        Thanks for that - I only used it twice and it didn’t work satisfactorily either time. Subscribing was a very expensive mistake imho - I could have done the same work using paper or Preview…

        Sent from my iPhone
        D
        Dara30587910gme8Author
        Participating Frequently
        June 26, 2023

        You are upset that there is an early termination fee, but in no way, you have subscribed to a product that is not working. There may be one or the other bug, and sometimes a new version of the software turns out to be more buggy than it should be. But in the very most of the cases, the product is working. If it wouldn't work, nobody would buy a subscription. 

         

        Your initial post here has some false assertations. 

        • Adobe is not the only company creating tools to work with PDF documents. The PDF format is an ISO standard, and no more controlled by Adobe.
        • There is no need to use a paid product to interact wit PDF documents created by institutions or corporations.
        • It is very clear from the beginning on, that you took an annual subscription paid monthly and not a monthly subscription. All documents, forms and communications from Adobe point to that fact. You can wrongly read the terms, when not reading them at the pace you should, but they are more than clear.

         

        I suppose that more than that, other of your problems come more from a misunderstanding on how the product works, than from bugs in the software. However, as I do not know exactly what you did on what documents, so I can't be certain. 

         

        I suggest again, you contact Adobe, sort out your troubles with them and be happy.


        For someone who doesn't work for Adobe you seem extraordinarily energetic in their defence, even making your own false assertions while accusing others of doing so. 
        No doubt this reply will result in further misrepresentations by you which I do not intend to reply to but just to keep the record straight for anyone in Adobe who might be reading this, this is not the kind of advocate you want in your corner.
        1. I didn't assert Adobe was the only company making tools to work with PDFs - I explicitly said I used Preview to edit the document when Acrobat online failed. I said Adobe is in a dominant position in that space.
        2. I didn't say there was any need to use a paid product to interact with PDF, only that I was attempting to do so and that in the business world, interaction with PDFs is unavoidable.
        3. You're leaving out the most pertinent fact which is that the product did not work for me. As I said before, you are consistently minimising my complaint and taking a very legalistic approach to customer care which fortunately Adobe did not do when I contacted them.
        Have a great day...

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