I recently received an email from Adobe asking to review their Creative Cloud suite. Unfortunately for Adobe, this email came right after a succession of terrible customer service interactions. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t able to post my review.

Back Story

Wanting to experiment with Adobe’s latest upgrades and offerings, I had decided to sign up for a Creative Cloud subscription. About five weeks later, the company I work for purchased several licenses, including one for me. This was exciting news because I‘d no longer have to pay for my own license.

Adobe apparently disagrees.

My attempted review

The following is what I attempted to post as my review of Adobe CC. In this review I describe the reason for my disappointment:

If you’re someone who relies on digital creative tools, there’s no better solution than Adobe’s suite for your every day needs. This is also unfortunately why I hate Adobe CC so much.

The creative community’s reliance on these products gave Adobe the idea that it’s okay to follow the path of cellular communications providers and squeeze every dollar imaginable from our already bare pockets. It’s already disappointing to be locked into the subscription model, and infuriating a thousand times more to learn how difficult it is to cancel one’s plan. Attempting to cancel a CC subscription is not at all an automatic process. For starters, one has to go through hoops to find a virtually-hidden link that only leads to a chat window. Once in chat, a customer service representative (read: aggressive salesperson) will desperately attempt to offer varying incentives to prevent you from canceling your plan. No thank you, Adobe, I’m just trying to cancel this thing. On top of the awful cancellation experience, if you no longer need Adobe CC after 30 days from the start of your subscription, then heaven forbid they’ll let you go in peace. For some reason Adobe adopted an insane, unethical, and plainly appalling 50% cancellation fee that, depending on your plan, may amount to hundreds of dollars. This is insane, Adobe; utterly absurd and inexcusable.

Again, you don’t need me to learn about how Adobe makes several good software applications, the Internet can attest to that in millions of ways. I just hope that anyone reading this will be very aware of what they’re getting themselves into.

Apparently I Need to Brush Up on My Cusses

I finished writing up my [one star rated] review, read it once over and clicked ‘submit’. Adobe, presumably having anticipated a backlash immediately produced an error stating, “We’re sorry, but we have encountered the following issue(s): Your review text contains inappropriate language.”

Inappropriate language? Some clarification, please.

Can you — the reader—pick out exactly which words are inappropriate to post as a legitimate product review? I have included precisely zero known curse words, and the only negative language is to convey my honest disappointment. So what about my review had been interpreted by Adobe’s automatic reviews censor to be inappropriate? A hint or two would have been super helpful, of course, but no guidance was given other than the vague error message.

As you can imagine this only added to my already-high levels of annoyance, and I became determined to figure out exactly what part of my review was deemed inappropriate. I started removing parts of my review and submitting the revised text, but no matter what combination of word reduction I attempted, the error message persisted and my voice remained silence by the Adobe machine.

Sigh.

Raising Hell in the Good Internets

After spending the better part of an hour trying to get my review posted, I decided to turn to Medium and publish my account in its entirety. I know I’m not the first to be frustrated with Adobe’s latest sales model. A search for “cancellation fee Adobe CC” will lead to plenty of similar horror stories. There is even a change.org petition to eliminate the Creative Cloud service altogether.

So why am I even bothering with posting yet another account? Because every voice matters, and because being silenced by Adobe themselves for an honest review of their services is not at all o.k. with me.

Being silenced in a free speech country is never okay.

When I first heard of the change.org petition many months ago, I decided not to sign it. After all, I had a hard time understanding what is so bad about changing one’s business model to allow for success in the long run. Now that I’ve had the runaround from Adobe, I finally came to realize the flaws in their plan. I still don’t think that Creative Cloud should be eliminated, but considering the monopoly that Adobe is, the fine print of their plans must be reviewed and revised by a higher authority, and they should not be allowed to hold the reign on swindling the creative community so very ungratefully.

I finally joined the 46,000+ petition signers and urge you to do the same.

My Final Review

As per the review of Creative Cloud on Adobe’s site? I finally went with:

Not so great subscription, good software, though.

And it went through.