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Shutterstock to pay $35M over hard-to-cancel subscriptions

63 points by Lihh27 3 hours ago | 26 comments

raincole 45 seconds ago

It's a dead company walking anyway. It might be the final blow.

runako 6 minutes ago

> Shutterstock failed to get consent to charge consumers’ credit cards before charging them for subscriptions

This sounds like it should carry criminal penalties?

whh 2 hours ago

Adobe needs to be next. I had to cancel a card because that was easier than cancelling Creative Cloud.

sanswork 60 minutes ago

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.

IneffablePigeon 38 minutes ago

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.

sanswork 28 minutes ago

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?

hartator 6 minutes ago

Shouldn’t auto renew and auto commit though.

sanswork 47 seconds ago

[delayed]

cryzinger 28 minutes ago

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.

sanswork 27 minutes ago

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.

cryzinger 15 minutes ago

Totally fair, I understand :)

x86hacker1010 42 minutes ago

Don’t they charge you to cancel or something? I also remember their suite being absolutely fucking dumb I never used it again

sanswork 25 minutes ago

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.

nih567 53 minutes ago

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.

charcircuit 33 minutes ago

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.

dheera 24 minutes ago

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.

rectang 2 hours ago

Did Shutterstock come out money ahead?

Is 35 million and the potential for future punishment a sufficient deterrent?

bpodgursky 32 minutes ago

Look at the stock history. The company is on life support. This is basically an entire year of earnings.

exabrial 40 minutes ago

Thank you FTC. Next, please go after some monoplies.

chancek 2 hours ago

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.

Modified3019 2 hours ago

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.

x86hacker1010 42 minutes ago

Same. Apparently their privacy policy is sketchy as hell but the product has been consistent for over 12 years of using it

t-writescode 2 hours ago

Paddle? https://www.paddle.com/billing/subscriptions

Stripe? https://stripe.com/billing/subscriptions

Paypal? https://www.paypal.com/us/digital-wallet/manage-money/manage...

f001 42 minutes ago

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.

recursive 41 minutes ago

Why would a company participate in this? Most don't seem interested in making cancellation easier.

dawnerd 19 minutes ago

Because they like money and having different choices for consumers to give them money wins out.

ktallett 29 minutes ago

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.