Internet? Wait until the moment your "promo" cost ends and your bill goes from $80 to $150, threaten to quit, oh wow magically you can have $80 again and a free mobile phone line.
Any subscription service is like this. I sometimes grab a Blue Apron when it's 65+% off which is anytime I want. My ex used to do this with clothing subscriptions, up to 80% off.
There are laws against things being "always on sale". But now they're just being used to punish lazy customers who don't keep up on their promos. Only lazy or ignorant people pay the "real" price.
Oh hey would you look at that, another billion dollar IPO with no plan for profitability went bankrupt. Weird.
After they introduced the Netflix included offer I inquired and they offered an "upgrade" that they swore up and down would not change my current service.
After agreeing, I was traveling and tried to tether and boom nothing. Their upgrade that would change nothing got me out of this grandfathered situation. Over time the cost of Netflix resulted in a higher fee for Netflix and ultimately I pay more for less.
Can't trust any company not to do anything in their power to squeeze another dime out of you.
Recording calls is always tricky because of party consent rules, although telling people you're recording probably puts some guardrails on behavior.
However, every single one of those call centers _also_ instructs their employees to hang up immediately if they are told (or have good reason to suspect) that the _customer_ is recording the conversation. It sounds hypocritical (and it is), but this rule comes from the company's legal department, whose sole job is to shield the company from legal liability.
Lenovo is great at this. Their absurd $3,000+ laptops are conveniently priced near market value after their perpetual 50% off LENOVOJUNE, LENOVOJULY, etc. coupons are applied. You don't even have to do work to use them, they're usually automatically applied at check out.
Talk about cheapening your brand and pandering to people who only buy things "on sale" out of principal. It almost feels insulting to the customer.
This is one thing Apple does right - there are no sales or discounts, it costs what it costs regardless of which US holiday is approaching.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadp/th...
As device registration and customer support still goes through Apple, it makes absolutely no difference wherever you buy it, and anyone looking for a lower price will wait for Prime day or any other bigger sales in the year.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/17/24104233/the-m1-macbook-a...
They appear to currently be 60 dollars cheaper and have been in a sort of perma sale of varying degrees for the last 6 months (not unlike the Lenovo example).
You know coupons in the newspaper? They serve exactly the same purpose. Some people take time and effort to cut them out every week. Others don’t and pay full price.
It’s a way to make customers who are willing to pay more pay more
Edit: referring to the “always on sale”, not to the cancellation promotions
Careful though. Companies are catching on to the "threaten to cancel" trick. Last time I tried this with Comcast, the support rep put me on hold, and then instead of sending me over to the "retention" specialist, just canceled my service and asked if I needed anything else. Oops..
As siblings comment, this only works if you're not a captive audience.
While there are ways to make alternatives more Photoshop-like, there's always going to be unreconcilable differences which bring unwelcome friction when the goal is to learn whatever the material is teaching rather than screw around with keybinds and UI configuration.
More projects that aim to adjust existing FOSS alternatives to more closely clone Photoshop would be of great help here. There used to be GIMPShop[0] that did this for GIMP but it's unfortunately been defunct for a long time now.
The issue though is this often only works for many subscribers for a small window each year, when the *annual* "renewal" occurs.
The problem with much of the Creative Suite subs, and what the FTC are also suing over, is that it looks and smells like a monthly sub you can cancel at any time, but you often can't - its “annual paid monthly” as the linked article describes.
The big problem is their ridiculous “annual paid monthly” plan - you often can't cancel, or it takes a ridiculous amount of effort to escape “annual paid monthly”. I know plenty of people who needed Creative Suite for one month who fell into the “annual paid monthly” trap assuming it was a typical subscription service.
> "Adobe pushes consumers to its “annual paid monthly” subscription plan, pre-selecting it as a default. Adobe prominently shows the plan’s “monthly” cost during enrollment, but it buries the early termination fee (ETF) and its amount, which is 50 percent of the remaining monthly payments when a consumer cancels in their first year."
I can't guarantee it still works but it worked for me and at least 3 others I know of
Adobe deserves to get slapped down for this practice and I hope they are forced to change it, but something to try in the meantime
I have found the same to be true with SiriusXM radio as well. You can ask the chat bot to cancel your account when a promo runs out and it will take you back down from $19/mo to like $6/mo. I setup a calendar item so I know when the promo is going to expire and do this. It's a PITA but it only takes 5 minutes.
I once called them to stop sending me mailers, and they said they'll stop for two years, I said no, stop forever.
I took my vehicle to a place that sold my information to SiriusXM and they resumed the mailers.
But this time... I just created an account on their website and changed my address to their headquarters and phone number to their phone number. They can spam themselves for all I care!
(I've done this with other businesses that don't respect their potential customers with great success! Often the people I speak with don't seem to recognize it when I give them their company's address or the 800-number that I'm called them at.)
1. Photoshop has a much better template and smart referencing system
2. Photoshop has better photo retouching tools in the form of healing or switching working spaces to tune filters.
3. Photoshop has better image manipulation tools like warping and perspective correction
I do really like Krita, and I’ve replaced Photoshop use for illustrative use cases for several studios and individuals with it. So it really depends what you do, but Photoshop just has a lot of little and big things that add up which prevents me switching myself.
Photoshop is a great painting app that rivals krita for painting. That it does other things well or originated for just photo editing doesn’t take away from that.
That used to be true at NYTimes and WaPo. But new WaPo management does the reverse:
- offer to keep at same price? No?
- offer to re-up at 50% more? No?
- offer to re-up at 100% more? No?
While After Effects does some compositing (and it’s decent at it but poor in comparison to Nuke/Fusion), its’ stronghold is motion graphics. There’s very little other than Cavalry to compete with it.
And with that comes the benefit of Premiere: live updates to my edit when using After Effects.
Of course it goes without saying, if you do this use a burner card. They dont ask for/check for a valid address or anything like that so when it comes to the stupidly complex to cancel renewal process you just walk away and let their threats go to an empty inbox.
I've got zero issue with anyone pirating their software at this point, Adobe deserves it for the crap they've pulled over the last few years.
I keep on thinking of ditching ~25y of specializing in Illustrator for TB lately but I really just do not feel like paying $1k/y for a subscription to it. They have cheaper subscriptions but one of the ways they differentiate them is by limiting the effects, and “constantly pushing the limits of Illustrator’s effect system” is one of the reasons I want to move on from it.
In Canada, you’ll find a lot of the larger shops use toon boom and the smaller shops use Flash/Animate.
When you move out to Asia, the balance changes quite a bit the other way but you also see a lot more players in the form of OpenToonz etc entering. Especially on the anime front.
I really gotta make some time to grind on tutorials for Toon Boom or this copy of Moho 14 I have on my computer and see if I actually want to animate again once I get over the hump of "how does this giant toolkit even work".
But if we’re limiting it to stuff like illustrations and texturing, it’s very capable. I’ve introduced it in several areas specifically for that.
however for other things like photo retouching and product design, Photoshop has a pretty wide moat at the moment
1. Get 50% off for 3 months
2. Get access to only Photoshop for the same price
I'm curious why certain categories of software receive little to no competition, while others see a lot. I feel that Silicon Valley's focus on social media oriented smartphone apps has drained a lot of the talent and capital that could have been working on alternatives to Microsoft Office, Adobe's suite, Maya's 3D, etc.
Procreate is an excellent example of a young team coming in and dominating the tablet art tool market. For a measly $12 you own procreate forever, and it is easily the most functional art tool on the iPad. I don't know why we haven't seen similar attempts at Adobe's dominance anywhere else.
I wish
Though, obviously as per the article, this is a pain to do.
It’s really a shame there’s nothing comparable to Adobe’s products on the really pro-artist end of things.
Companies like Serif have tried with Affinity but it’s lackluster when you really need to do some high end work. OSS stuff like Krita, Inkscape and Gimp have improved a lot but there’s still a huge gulf.
Photoshop is perhaps the easiest to replace, but the rest of the suite like Illustrator really has no competition when it comes to functionality.
Affinity Designer lacks so many of the gradient tools, shape repetition, and even certain alignment tools.
InDesign similarly has many QoL features that Affinity Publisher lack.
After Effects has some competition but nowhere near the ecosystem it provides.
I guess premiere and animate (previously flash) have a lot of competition but that’s about it?
For reference of where I’m coming from , I own licenses to the full Adobe suite and the full affinity suite. I have professionally done art and programmed for features in multiple domains for a decade and my work has shipped with major products from FAANG-like companies.
I totally think the alternatives can replace Adobe products at some level, but the level of tooling I need and that Adobe has provided, is currently unmatched.
It would be great to see better alternatives someday.