Dark Patterns: Why Subscriptions Are Worse Than Ever

One Adobe employee compared a Creative Cloud to heroin for the business. The subscription you rely on to do your job is also the one built hardest to leave.

That charge shows up midway through a segment from John Oliver on how subscriptions swallowed nearly every product category. Oliver notes that the FTC accused Adobe of hiding the details of its early termination fee in fine print and behind optional text boxes and hyperlinks, so customers on an annual plan billed monthly discovered the penalty only when they tried to quit. Internal emails cited in the case are blunter than any critic could be. One employee wrote that there was no way to kill the fee or disclose it more openly without taking a big business hit, and described it as a bit like "heroin" for Adobe. The company frames the structure as flexibility and convenience.

Adobe also sits near the start of this story. Oliver traces the shift to the late 1990s, when Salesforce pioneered renting software from the cloud rather than selling it in a box, with Adobe and Microsoft following soon after. Creative Cloud arrived in 2013 and retired the perpetual licenses photographers had bought for years, which turned an occasional purchase into a monthly line item that never ends. Every appliance maker and automaker copying that model since is following a path software companies paved. General Motors expects subscriptions to bring in as much as $25 billion a year by 2030, and BMW has charged monthly for cruise control the car already has.

The tactics that keep people paying have a name. Oliver walks through dark patterns, the deceptive interface choices that steer you into decisions you did not intend, and the examples are unmistakable once you see them. The FTC accused Amazon of swapping which checkout button glowed yellow so the Prime signup became the one your thumb was already trained to hit, and internally called the cancellation flow the Iliad. HP remotely disables the ink cartridges in printers when an Instant Ink subscription lapses, so a customer with ink still in the machine gets a page telling her the printer will not print. HelloFresh buried its cancel option behind a chain of screens that highlighted the button to stay.

Photographers are unusually exposed here. Creative Cloud is not a streaming service you can drop for a month and pick back up. It is the toolchain your catalogs, presets, smart objects, and client deliverables are built on, which means the switching cost is measured in workflow rather as well as dollars. That dependency is exactly what makes a hidden exit fee effective. The practical move is to know which plan you are actually on, since the annual plan paid monthly is the one that carries the penalty, while the month-to-month plan costs more per month and lets you leave clean. Check that before a slow season, not during one, and treat any tool you cannot walk away from as a business risk worth pricing.

There are smaller defenses too. On an iPhone, open Settings, tap your name, then Subscriptions to see everything billed through the App Store. Android has an equivalent feature. Set a reminder before any free trial converts, and read your bank statement for charges you no longer recognize. The broader fix was policy: the FTC under Lina Khan wrote a click-to-cancel rule requiring that anything you signed up for online can be canceled online, and a federal appeals court voided it on procedural grounds days before it took effect. California, Virginia, Louisiana, and New York City have since passed versions of their own.

Watch the full segment above for the Adobe emails, the Amazon button swap, and the printer that refuses to print ink you already own.