Worth keeping an eye on ArtCraft (https://getartcraft.com/apps).

They're building a free, open-source Adobe Creative Suite alternative entirely in Rust. It runs super fast with minimal overhead, works completely offline, and aims for near 1:1 feature parity with Adobe products like Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and After Effects. It also supports command-based actions, making it easy to integrate into AI agents and automated workflows. They have Microsoft Office alternatives too.

Their Photoshop clone, PhotoCraft (https://github.com/storytold/photocraft), has around 47k GitHub stars right now.

Btw its likely still possible to change subscription with Adobe to different one and then cancel it free of charge due to new 14-days window. Not sure if it works right now, but worked like charm before.

That falls under deceptive advertising.

> you received a significant discount for committing to a year, so you still owe them for the remaining months if you cancel early. I didn't even realize I had signed up for a one-year commitment

Does this law apply retroactively?

You wouldn't have a claim under the "straightforward cancellation process" part–same way this law doesn't enable one to walk away from a long-term lease for shits and giggles. But you may under the "clearly explain subscription terms to you" bit.

If you actually ask them and push a little they’ll forgo that fee. Disclaimer: Adobe is the worst and can’t wait to see them crumble. If Intuit could also go…

If you buy an annual subscription of course you have to pay for the whole year. They offer a monthly subscription for people who don't want to lock in for such a long time.

> discount for committing to a year

It's worse than that. They don't even offer a monthly subscription contract - it's purely annual, but they advertise and promote monthly with fine print.

I mean, if you sign up for a year yes you’re on the hook for a year. What’s the problem here?

I hate to defend Adobe but it literally says "Annually, paid monthly" right under the price.

They should for sure list the annual price and the monthly price but it's not "burried".

With LLMs in the picture there’s no excuse for signing a contract without reading it because it was too long or hard to understand. Adobe makes its terms pretty clear. You are entering a one year commitment.

NYPD parking on sidewalks is more of a "who watches the watchmen" problem unfortunately.

> the discontinuity between the city’s eagerness to legislate and its recalcitrance around enforcement

For consumer-corporate disputes, learning to leverage New York's regulatory state is a bit of a superpower. Basically, sending in a written complaint with the regulator copied and then having them open a regulatory-investigatory file is real leverage because even if you're full of shit, it's going to burn legal dollars on the other side. That, in turn, makes a letter to the company threatening regulatory escalation as the next step land seriously.

Not a NYC-only problem though. There are tons of federal, state, and local laws that go under-enforced or unenforced. Legislators love the performance art of writing these kinds of popular laws, but law enforcement often doesn't care enough to enforce most of them. In this case, the website says the penalty is "starting at $525" which is basically nothing to a corporation, and nothing to the police/government. So you can file a complaint but it will probably go to /dev/null. After a year of this people will give up on even filing complaints.

What needs to happen for rules like this is: 1. the complaint should be easy/automatic to validate and rule on, 2. hard for the company to appeal and stonewall, and 3. the fine money should go to the person who filed the complaint as a bounty to motivate people to look for violators.

I've also been disappointed by the lack of enforcement, and it's not necessarily for violations with little harm.

Failing to provide salary transparency in job postings is another common one with zero enforcement.

It's not clear why enforcement would be needed necessarily.

Assuming that you pay with a credit card, I would assume you could dispute the charge on the basis that they're violating the law and win any faceoff immediately on that basis.

In the US, tabled means something is not going forward. Am I correct that it means the opposite there?

This looks really great, thank you for your work! However, "Entry into force" really is expected only around 2030? I'm not even sure most people will be consuming the internet using a browser then. It's sad to see that a process like this, which is very much needed, starts at 2020 and ends 10 years later. Clearly not your fault, but I'm just a little shocked.

According to https://digitalfairnessact.com/what-is-the-digital-fairness-... fucking cookie banners will be a lot better. OMG

The right is making him out to be the literal anti-Christ. Which is a strong signal that he will actually be effective at making positive change.

> start to wonder what the prior mayors was even doing

The last productive mayor New York had was Bloomberg. Then we had a leftist idiot (who did, granted, pass universal pre-K). Then we had a reactionary centrist muppet (who did, granted, pass some decent pro-development policies). So over a decade of bad executives coming to power with one or two good ideas that they implemented in their first year and then became pests.

Why stop at mayors? How about legislators... city, state, and federal, hell, what about governors and presidents?

It might seem this way because he is showing off his wins on different channels. In terms of passing policy its not different than other mayors. Maybe you think the policy is good and the other mayors policy was bad and thats the gap.

I'm old enough to remember that everyone said the same thing about Giuliani when he was mayor. Now everyone hates him

This was actually started federally under Biden, but thrown out as soon as Trump came in

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/10/...

So many other similar examples, like Bank Overdraft Fee Caps, Credit card late fees, personal data safeguards, and so much more.

It’s incredible how much virtue signaling this is. He has no power to enforce it - I’d just ignore him anyway, nothing he can do about it.

There's a funny thing when people don't like something where they can intentionally misunderstand it or impart artificial complexity onto it painting a picture like the rule is hard to comply with. I suppose to variation of a straw man argument. I honestly don't think this is one is hard to understand at all. If you can sign up through the web you should be able to cancel through the web. If you can sign up through the phone you should be able to cancel through the phone. Companies knowingly an intentionally make it harder to cancel than to sign up for obvious reasons that have nothing to do with doing right by the consumer. This is a very good law and it should be adopted everywhere.

Maybe those people who’ve spent so much time A/B testing where to put the signup buttons can use those skills to figure out where to put the cancel buttons so that they are as easy to find.

I think the point of the law is - the same medium. If you signed up online, you should be able to cancel subscription also online.

Heres what you should do to be safe. On the user's settings/profile/whatever user page you have, add a cancel button. When the user clicks it say "are you sure? Yes/no". If the user clicks yes, cancel the account.

No extra hoops at all.

> ...and possibly declining various offers to stay

Unless there were several efforts to get you to think twice before subscribing, clearly trying to get you to think twice before unsubscribing is not as easy to use.

I suspect that something as simple as 2-3 emails prior to renewal, each with a one-click (no auth needed) clear, unobscured "unsubscribe" button would be sufficient.

I don’t think anyone will have trouble figuring out a good way to comply with this. It’s not clear exactly where the line is, so just don’t go near it. Make it easy to cancel, job done. If a company wants to push the boundaries by making it as difficult to cancel as the rule allows, they’re running the risk of being on the wrong side of the line and suffering the consequences, and that’s their choice.

The only reason any company would have trouble complying with this rule is if they want to abuse customers to keep them from canceling when they want to cancel. The amount of sympathy I have towards such companies requires advanced scientific notation to quantify.

But where is the line exactly?

This is what courts are for. There is no exact line because many situations are different.

Surely you don't have to have a big red cancel button on every page of your platform

Why not?

Some examples would be helpful

The text you quoted is clear enough to me, and it's probably clear to any reasonable person (most rules are written this way). If you're worried about gaming the system to find the exact process that just on the "legal" side of things, you probably aren't reasonable.

In my country the rule is "unsubscribe the same way you subscribed". So no bullshit with having to write a literal physical letter through the mail (yes really this happened) or having to call a callcenter in India and having to explain why you want to your stop subscription.

To avoid the overhead, we could simply adopt pro-consumer practices across the board? Easier than segmenting users and deciding which cancellation mechanisms are available to them based on region.

Nothing from stopping them from making it this easy to cancel for everyone. We all see cookie banners due to the EU's rules.

Alternatively, let people cancel easily everywhere. If you think it’s worth the extra revenue to geofence easy cancellations, then—well, you do you, but you are making a business judgment that the additional development cost is justified. This is different from VAT/sales tax etc., where it is in fact impossible to comply everywhere without discriminating by jurisdiction.

As far as added complexity goes, a rule for a city the size of NYC doesn’t seem like that far of a bridge to cross.

You managed to find something to complain about this story?

It’s an easy rule to comply with and nothing stops you from complying with it everywhere.

We will see a patchwork regime, where companies make it easy to cancel if you’re in NYC or another jurisdiction with similar rules, but difficult otherwise. When you see this, you must remember that the easiest thing would have been to make it easy for everyone to cancel regardless of location. That would be perfectly legal and it would be the cheapest option to build. If a company didn’t do that it’s because they made a deliberate choice to spend more money just so they could continue screwing some people over.

its hard being a dick

> While I think this is a good idea, we already have so many different regions to comply with, now we're adding cities....

Lina Khan's FTC passed a rule to make click-to-cancel nationwide in 2024.

It was killed on procedural grounds by the highly conservative Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The take-away from how it was killed boils down to "we (companies) know that we'd lose more than $100 million dollars if people could reasonably unsubscribe rather than deal with our dark patterns".

The old FTC would have been able to fix the procedural problem, but then Trump took office and gutted the FTC and destroyed all the good work it was doing.

Since the federal government is failing us, I support local governments doing the right thing. If enough do, companies will eventually be forced into compliance nationally because it won't be worth the complexity to have hundreds of regional carve-outs.

You can't seriously think this makes you sound like a sympathetic party, right? "Oh no, we have to maintain two codepaths now: the pro-social one for places with functional governments, and the slimy anti-consumer fuck-you one for everywhere else. Won't anyone think of our plight?"

just remember, any amount of churn rate reduction your dark patterns earn you will be paid for many times over in the afterlife

cvs.com doesn't allow me to delete my account unless I provide an address in certain states.

So I provided a fake address in California, and it was done.

Unfortunately that's how things work these days sometimes.

But now, as a New Yorker, I can complain. And we love to complain.

The rule is mostly, although not entirely, a restatement of existing New York State law requiring cancellation to be easy (https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/GBS/527-A).

There's a big blue button on the homepage that says "File a complaint" - I presume that goes through the web.

Wait but you can right? I've definitely stop paying services in the past like that. They usually send you to collection, and then one day they just stop sending you mail.

What's the justification for the phone or chat cancellation anyway? I get why they do it to make more money but it seems like it would be kind of nakedly extractive to explain the policy to anyone.

I imagine both states would end up with single-payer healthcare pretty quickly, and both already have GDP greater than all but 3 EU countries... what exactly would the EU bring to the table?