So it's kind of sounding like you agree with me that the fee is a punitive measure designed to punish people who leave early?

Adobe is the one that wrote the contract, if they added cancellation fees that are honestly pretty unusual for the software service/subscription field, then that's on them. Their hands aren't tied by the contract, they wrote the contract. It's their choice to charge people money for a service they no longer have access to.

But whatever, I'll extend yet another olive branch. I'll pay for the remainder of the year as long as I can cancel auto-renew immediately and put down in writing that I will not be charged for the next year. Not too surprisingly, Adobe also doesn't allow its customers to do that, because of course it doesn't.

It's obtuse to argue that all of this is about fairness and not about taking advantage of customer mistakes to bleed them dry for a service they don't want anymore. But I suppose it's just in my contract that I have to argue with a representative at a specific date and time in order to signal that I don't want to renew for another year of service. Nothing Adobe can do about that. /s

You mean if you stay on long enough to be automatically resubscribed for another year you don't want?

Exactly. It’s a contract. If you cancel it early, the other contract partner has the right to get a compensation fee.

That’s perfectly normal and also practised by other companies.

It's unusual for B2C subscription services to charge a cancelation fee and withhold access for the remainder of the period.

It's another mental obstacle for the customer to overcome on the sunken cost fallacy, it's slimey at best.

You're equating contract terms with general reciprocity. Many, perhaps most other businesses pro-rate subscription services and understand that customers may need to cancel, if only because they don't want the sort of bad publicity Adobe is receiving right now. Tough contracts with significant breaching penalties are generally made between peers (two individuals or two businesses) rather than producers and consumers.

There is a doctrine of unconscionability in contract law that says just because you secure agreement to highly unfavorable terms doesn't mean the contract is beyond review of a court, if there is a significant asymmetry between the contract parties.

The issue is that it's not clear to consumers that the contract has a cancellation fee. See this screenshot, which alludes to a cancellation fee but doesn't explicitly say how large it is until you click into the fine print: https://i.imgur.com/5xTA7eC.png

Maybe businesses are savvy enough to read the fine print, but I think many normal consumers don't understand that there is a fee to cancel, given that it is not prominently shown. You can't just bury meaningful parts of a contract into terms and conditions.