Shutterstock to pay $35M over hard-to-cancel subscriptions
ftc.gov103 points by Lihh27 4 hours ago
103 points by Lihh27 4 hours ago
Can they please do this with at&t internet.
A great idea of a product is some sort of unified system for companies to correctly manage subscriptions. There needs to be standards for what makes a user flow acceptable or not when it comes to cancellations.
Paddle? https://www.paddle.com/billing/subscriptions
Stripe? https://stripe.com/billing/subscriptions
Paypal? https://www.paypal.com/us/digital-wallet/manage-money/manage...
To add to this, Apple has the subscriptions panel on iOS in the settings app showing you everything on your account including third party apps as long as you subscribed through apps instead of websites.
Why would a company participate in this? Most don't seem interested in making cancellation easier.
Because they like money and having different choices for consumers to give them money wins out.
But they make way more money implementing the dark pattern playbook. It's hardly an accident when subscriptions are hard to cancel it's a deliberate optimization.
I use privacy.com virtual cards. I make a card for each vendor, and define a limit for it. I can kill the cards anytime.
Just because you revoke payment doesn’t mean you cancelled (at least in Europe). If you just stop paying, they will sue you to get the money.
Yep, in the US you can have the debt sent to collections.
My spouse got fucked by Shutterstock and we have to have a calendar reminder to cancel this when the year is up, since cancelation prior will result in us still paying out the year, but not getting the remainder of the service.
They're extremely scummy. I could certainly block the charges, but they'd just come after us and cause a headache.
Same. Apparently their privacy policy is sketchy as hell but the product has been consistent for over 12 years of using it
Did Shutterstock come out money ahead?
Is 35 million and the potential for future punishment a sufficient deterrent?
Look at the stock history. The company is on life support. This is basically an entire year of earnings.
Adobe needs to be next. I had to cancel a card because that was easier than cancelling Creative Cloud.
Adobe isn't hard to cancel if you sign up for monthly subscriptions. I do it fairly regularly because I need PS in short bursts.
A lot of people sign up for discounted annual commitments though then complain when they can't cancel before the year is up.
No, the complaint with Adobe is that if you cancel, they terminate access immediately rather than at the end of the billing period. There is no explanation for this other than a predatory one; they’re betting you’ll forget to cancel by the time your bill comes around. The immediate termination is effectively depriving you of the next N months of access for which you already paid.
This isn't true though. Again like with the annual plan people are confusing things. I just looked it up and checked a few reddit posts to confirm and heres what's happening.
If you cancel in the first 14 days they terminate immediately and refund you. After the 14 days the subscription is cancelled and you keep access until the point you paid for. If you signed up for an annual contract you have a cancel fee of 50% of the remaining agreed amount.
>No, the complaint with Adobe is that if you cancel, they terminate access immediately rather than at the end of the billing period. There is no explanation for this other than a predatory one
This is exactly what Shutterstock does. What's maddening is that you can be getting a monthly charge, but are locked into a year contract. If you cancel, they'll continue to charge monthly but without being able to use the service. It's absurd.
I had been paying monthly for 13 years straight and they still demanded a cancellation fee because it turned out I was on an annual commitment (which by the way they hiked the price of by 50% with a month’s notice and by the time you notice the larger payment go out you are in a whole new 12 months).
So yes, I complained about that.
Ok so you were on an annual plan to save money and when you cancelled you had to pay an exit fee to account for the annual discount. Seems reasonable to me.
They gave you a months notice of the price increase and you didn't cancel until after it went into effect?
Shouldn’t auto renew and auto commit though.
Why? It's a subscription auto-renew is the default. As for auto-commit why would they change your subscription choices on you without you choosing it?
Why are you defending obvious theft?
> Why are you defending obvious theft?
Where’s the theft?
It’s perfectly normal to have a fee for breaking a lease. And that’s what an annual subscription paid monthly is anyway. It’s a commitment for an extended period of time.
If you could just stop paying and retain the discounted rate, what is an annual subscription vs a monthly one?
Because it is not obviously theft. If you are getting a discount for making a year-long commitment, and then cancel, breaking that commitment, isn't a cancelation fee appropriate?
If you only need PS in short bursts, may I recommend https://www.photopea.com/?
It's not at 100% feature parity with PS but it's pretty darn close.
Appreciate the suggestion but I'm terrible at editing so I just stick with PS because the cost for a month or two when I need it isn't much and it's really easy to find videos walking through exactly what I need to do. Even a single hour spent trying to translate a tutorial would more than wipe out the savings.
I hope freelancer.com will be the next one. I canceled and renewed my credit card because of them. Even though I deleted my account, they continued to withdraw money.
Don’t they charge you to cancel or something? I also remember their suite being absolutely fucking dumb I never used it again
They let you sign up for an annual discount but still pay monthly. The cancelation fee is if you try to end the annual commitment early. If you just sign up monthly(seriously always do this when you see these offers) there is no cancellation fee.
Canceling a card isn't the same thing as canceling a subscription. Most businesses will have you still pay via a different payment method to resolve your debt.
They'll invoice you but don't actually pay. They aren't going to take you to court over a $50/month subscription; the easier route for them is to just disable your account, which is what you wanted anyway.
Never give them your actual residential address (they don't need to know it), birth day, or SSN, or be tricked into giving them such. If they ask on any customer service chat or phone, the answer is they don't need to know it.
Without these things they can't exactly put it on your credit report, either. They may send it to collectors, but don't talk to them. Let them cry. They still won't serve you a court summons over $50.
Keep businesses in check from this money-grabbing behavior. Any kind of subscription should be easily cancellable.
If your business is only viable due to shady subscription practices then it doesn't deserve to be running, whether it's Adobe, gyms, or whatever.
It's a dead company walking anyway. It might be the final blow.
> Shutterstock failed to get consent to charge consumers’ credit cards before charging them for subscriptions
This sounds like it should carry criminal penalties?
Conde Nast is _horrible_ this way, tried for a second year in a row to charge me for Wired, which i do not subscribe to, could not explain where they got the idea i did, evidently had access through some dark pattern from years earlier to charge for something i must have bought as a magazine on iOS.
It took hours of online chat argument with the unfortunate real employee fielding such pissed customers, and threats of legal action, eventually citing their legal counsel by email address and full name (from the Conde Nast site), before they agreed to _not_ charge me whatever obscene yearly subscription would be.
They can burn in crooked hell after that nonsense. I wonder if the Reddit people are bothered by their owner, as I had a personally signed generally cheery note from maybe Alexis back when i first subscribed and bought a tshirt, going on 20 years ago i guess.
Well, if you or I did it - of course!
But when Corporate does it, we just handwave it way.
Thank you FTC. Next, please go after some monoplies.
Pardon the pedantry, but I the current abbreviation of the price ("Shutterstock to pay $35M") should be "$35MM".