Unfortunately as an industry ‘standard’, there really isn’t a serious alternative to Adobe.

When it comes to their design suite of Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop and Adobe Acrobat (among others), they really are the King of the Heap when it comes to design work.

Despite Adobe’s exciting brand promise to ‘Change the world through personalised, digital experiences’ … their industry monopoly has led to some of the worst customer service I have ever experienced.

I grit my teeth whenever I have to deal with the ‘dreaded Adobe chat’ as I know from experience that I can typically expect the following two things:
1. The interaction will take much longer than necessary, usually more than half an hour for something simple
2. If it involves money, the first offer the Agent makes will not be the best one they can offer. They will only offer a serious financial incentive when pushed.

Founded 40 years ago, Adobe has suffered from a lack of industry competition and indulged in a range of foul business practices that include charging more for their products in non-US countries, pushing unwanted third-party software on users, smashing their competition out of the market and charging outrageous cancellation fees.

Which brings me to my most recent Adobe interaction.

I discovered that I had been wrongfully charged an Adobe Stock image subscription since last November 2022 (ten months). When I discovered this unexpected charge I immediately contacted Adobe who informed me that during this time I had accrued 100 stock images.

Amazing – right?! Bummer about the extra charge, but at least I had plenty of stock image credits to use up.

After the Agent cancelled my subscription and refunded me the last 3 months of charges, I was then informed that all of the credits were now cancelled as well. So now I was both out of pocket $650 and without any stock image credits… which of course, they could not reverse.

After some back and forth – and eventually some pushing – the Agent finally relented to providing me with a full refund of the entire subscription, as I obviously hadn’t used it. So credits gone, but money refunded. The whole interaction logged in at 45 minutes as yet another underwhelming Adobe service experience.

Of course I would have loved a stock image to go with this post, but I’m back to 0 image credits and looking for a new stock image supplier.