Adobe Executive: Early Termination Fees Are ‘Like Heroin’

Longtime Slashdot reader Sandbagger shares a report from The Verge: Early termination fees are “like heroin for Adobe,” according to an Adobe executive quoted in the FTC’s newly unredacted complaint against the company for allegedly hiding fees and making it too difficult to cancel Creative Cloud. “There’s absolutely no way to remove ETF or talk about it more prominently” in the order flow without “taking a major commercial hit,” the executive said. That’s the big reveal in the unredacted complaint, which also contains previously unreleased allegations that Adobe was aware internally of studies showing that its order and cancellation flows were too complicated and that customers were unhappy with the surprise early termination fees. In response to the quote, Adobe’s general counsel and head of trust management, Dana Rao, said he was “disappointed by how they continue to use non-executive employee comments from years ago out of context to make their case.”

Rao added that the person named was not part of the executive team that reports to CEO Shantanu Narayen and that whether to charge an early termination fee was “not their decision.” The early termination fee in the FTC case represents “less than half a percent of our annual revenue,” Rao told The Verge. “It doesn’t advance our business, it doesn’t advance our business decisions.”