Shutterstock to pay $35M over hard-to-cancel subscriptions
ftc.govOne time for my small business I shared a login with one of my employees and they tried to get us to buy some sort of Enterprise subscription because they claimed that dozens of IP addresses were logging into the account and when we refused they simply closed our account. We were paying like over $300 per month and not even using the full subscription limits... We ended up finding a cheaper solution and now just use AI images so yeah it was pretty dumb on their part.
Who cares how much you paid? This doesn't seem predatory, you signed up for it and you violated the TOS.
It's not predatory, it's just Shutterstock being shitty. And in this case, self-destructive.
Shutterstock should care how much OP paid, because if they were paying a subscription and not maxing it out, Shutterstock lost money because they had a draconian TOS that they aggressively enforced to their own detriment.
I didn't use the service. Well sometimes I would log in just to check they were actively using it and seeing which images were licensed to make sure they weren't using it for other purposes (remote employee). Only my one employee actually used it. I think she used a VPN which is why they thought dozens of people were using it apparently. Regardless the only loser in all of this was Shutterstock...
The only options they have is single seat or "talk to us" Enterprise level and for basically a one-person company using a virtual assistant we pretty much fall through the cracks there.
Good. There needs to be a US-wide law that any method used to sign up for a subscription has to be a valid way to unsubscribe too. If you allow users to sign up online, you should also be required to let them unsubscribe online too.
Basically, take the Californian setup, and apply it to the whole US. And pretty much every country in Europe.
Gyms
Can they please do this with at&t internet.
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.
regardless, still likely came out ahead
Getty’s trying to acquire them pending approval from UK’s regulatory body.
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.
You have to participate in order to get access to most iPhone users.
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
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.
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.
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?
Take a step back and think of the company who designed this machiavellian scheme and generated this dramatic situation...
is this a business relationship with trust and maturity?
"We will give you access to annual pricing discounts but not require you to pay the full year up front"
It's not complex or dramatic.
An annual plan shouldn't require a termination fee. If I purchase an Annual Subscription, I should be able to cancel it whenever, with no fee whilst retaining the benefits for my subscription, as I paid for a whole year up front anyways....
Adobe software being a subscription service is nonsense too, but thats for another discussion.
Yes, and if you get an annual plan from adobe and pay up front there is no fee for cancelling. The fee is if you get an annual plan with a monthly payment and cancel early.
I remember when it was like $600 for photoshop for a single version(like 25 years ago so what would that be today?). The subscription pricing is a steal.
If the subscription pricing was a "steal" and the perpetual licensing was genuinely more expensive and worse, they'd still offer the perpetual licensing.
Instead they killed it, they clearly do not want to cannibalize their subscription offing. It clearly makes them more money.
Your first point is valid, I was misunderstanding the yearly subscription pricing, they offer an upfront payment as well as a monthly (but with year commitment).
I believe still however, if you pay for a year, cancel, you still get access cut off. Which is absurd.
The subscription pricing makes it more accessible to consumers where as previously the only people that paid for licenses were companies(and probably only large companies given it was basically always the most popular warez). So they charge less per release but they dramatically increase the possible consumer base and release lumpy revenue based around semi-regular annual releases with constant cash flow. So on a per user basis it is without a doubt cheaper but overall they can still make a lot more money.
>I believe still however, if you pay for a year, cancel, you still get access cut off. Which is absurd.
I've not seen anyone claiming this actually happened but maybe I just missed them? Everyone I've seen has said the opposite.
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?
> It's a subscription auto-renew is the default.
There are a number of subscriptions where I regularly want only a single month of service at a time.
What happens if Adobe changes the price from $299 yearly to 29k?
Do you think that is fair? After all they gave you 30 days!
Why do you feel the need to make up ridiculous numbers?
Because it's not the price you agreed on? Crazy what you people are willing to accept as normal.
The notification is telling you of the new price. If you don't do anything at that point then it is the price you agreed on.
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?
Is upping the fee and automatically confirming the contract without a re-up "perfectly normal"? Seems doubtful.
Yes? Commercial leases (and residential for that matter) commonly have increase clauses that operate automatically (CPI, 3/4/5%, market review, etc).
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?
Is that the whole story? Or did you miss literally half of what GP said happened?
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.
Totally fair, I understand :)
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.
Maybe now, after they had to pay a $150M fine for using dark patterns and making unsubscribing difficult: https://www.gadgetreview.com/adobe-pays-150m-to-settle-subsc...
They did a lot more than just making it hard to cancel, too: https://www.deceptive.design/brands/adobe
Your deceptive design link is literally outlining the plan discussed in the rest of this thread.
The first one in your deceptive design was:
Adobe: Unclear yearly subscription terms and cancellation fees "Apparently monthly subscriptions, but you are signed up for a year. Cancelling early results in a 50% of remaining months subscriptions being applied as a cancellation charge."
Then you click through to look at it and the button the user selects says
Annual, Paid Monthly Fee applies if you cancel after 14 days
With an information popup.
Scrolling through the rest all of it is them just selecting this option without reading the details then being upset when the Annual plan is an annual plan.
I have no clue why they decided to settle that lawsuit since they still have the same plan. I'm not a lawyer.
You are describing the current state of Adobe subscription. If you check out the post linked on the deceptive.design page [1], one of the replies states [2]:
after the original thread a year or so ago, team made a clearer way to show pricing options to give ppl/teams who buy an annual sub a discount w/o paying it all up front
So the clear language is new. And that doesn't touch on the losing access during the current billing period either.
> I have no clue why they decided to settle that lawsuit
Because they have changed their subscription page as part of the settlement. All the posters telling you how Adobe ripped them off are describing Adobe from before the settlement.
[1] Adobe's subscription model deploys recurring annual plans or termination with massive penalty - https://x.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1660907518430699523
>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 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.
Figma isn't much better these days
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.
What you are describing is fraud.
From which party?
The customer lying about their information to intentionally bypass companies' anti fraud systems.
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.
> I wonder if the Reddit people are bothered by their owner
Quick note -- Reddit went public in 2024, so Condé Nast is no longer their owner.
Well, if you or I did it - of course!
But when Corporate does it, we just handwave it way.
I'm old enough to remember when we had a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to push back against this kind of anti-consumer crap. It got doge'd by Dumpty/Musk.
They stopped Shutterstock?
Pardon the pedantry, but I the current abbreviation of the price ("Shutterstock to pay $35M") should be "$35MM".