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Shutterstock to pay $35M over hard-to-cancel subscriptions
- chancek 4mo agoA 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.
- t-writescode 4mo agoPaddle? https://www.paddle.com/billing/subscriptions https://www.paddle.com/billing/subscriptions Stripe? https://stripe.com/billing/subscriptions https://stripe.com/billing/subscriptions Paypal? https://www.paypal.com/us/digital-wallet/manage-money/manage-subscriptions https://www.paypal.com/us/digital-wallet/manage-money/manage...
- f001 4mo agoTo 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.
- Modified3019 4mo agoI use privacy.com virtual cards. I make a card for each vendor, and define a limit for it. I can kill the cards anytime.
- echoangle 4mo agoJust 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.
- supern0va 4mo agoYep, 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.
- x86hacker1010 4mo agoSame. Apparently their privacy policy is sketchy as hell but the product has been consistent for over 12 years of using it
- recursive 4mo agoWhy would a company participate in this? Most don't seem interested in making cancellation easier.
- dawnerd 4mo agoBecause they like money and having different choices for consumers to give them money wins out.
- benoau 4mo agoBut 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.
- neallindsay 4mo agoYou have to participate in order to get access to most iPhone users.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
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- rectang 4mo agoDid Shutterstock come out money ahead? Is 35 million and the potential for future punishment a sufficient deterrent?
- bpodgursky 4mo agoLook at the stock history. The company is on life support. This is basically an entire year of earnings.
- whh 4mo agoAdobe needs to be next. I had to cancel a card because that was easier than cancelling Creative Cloud.
- sanswork 4mo agoAdobe 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 4mo agoI 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 4mo agoOk 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?
- exabrial 4mo ago[flagged]
- funimpoded 4mo agoChicago School jerks got their way in the '70s and we effectively decided to stop doing that. This was the first notable fruit yielded by the postwar pro-rich/business "think tank" and intellectualism-washing push which was quickly followed by that set dominating almost everything. Good luck reversing that and bringing back the "giant enterprises may be assumed harmful" standard (the one under which it was possible to win these cases more than once in a blue moon, without unreasonable costs) now that rich right-wingers just openly steer most news media.
- ktallett 4mo agoIf 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.
- runako 4mo ago> Shutterstock failed to get consent to charge consumers’ credit cards before charging them for subscriptions This sounds like it should carry criminal penalties?
- zurtri 4mo agoWell, if you or I did it - of course! But when Corporate does it, we just handwave it way.
- jjtheblunt 4mo agoConde 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.
- runako 4mo ago> 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.
- jjtheblunt 4mo agooh cool!
- raincole 4mo agoIt's a dead company walking anyway. It might be the final blow.
- bch 4mo agoPardon the pedantry, but I the current abbreviation of the price ("Shutterstock to pay $35M") should be "$35MM".
- zackify 4mo agoCan they please do this with at&t internet.
- level09 4mo ago+ and Adobe Creative Suite
- daveguy 4mo agoI'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.
- paulddraper 4mo agoThey stopped Shutterstock?
- daveguy 4mo agoI'd be willing to bet it was their consumer complaint system that informed the FTC. They have a interagency agreement for crossreferral. Hopefully they didn't have to cut that back with the 90% doge cut. But don't worry, we will restore funding and make it more powerful after we de-dumpty the federal govt.
- CM30 4mo agoGood. 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.
- 3vo-ai 4mo ago[flagged]
- ge96 4mo agoGyms
- HardwareLust 4mo agoThe law should be simple. It should take the same amount of effort, or less, to unsubscribe as it did to subscribe.
- weird-eye-issue 4mo agoOne 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.
- jaynate 4mo ago[flagged]
- weird-eye-issue 4mo agoI 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.
- margalabargala 4mo agoIt'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.
- weird-eye-issue 4mo agoYes exactly it's not like it's unlimited downloads we had a fixed amount of images per month