Transcription
Adobe products used to feel like a safe pair of hands that always worked. You'd really struggle to complain with anything. But now they're just something else entirely and everyone's sick of them. The software you used to buy once and own forever, you now rent by month at a price that climbs every year. We lost the tools we could trust and own. And in exchange, we got rising subscriptions, mandatory AI nobody asked for, and a fee for the privilege of leaving.
But Adobe is finally getting what they deserve. Caught in a death spiral where all of their greed and cynical corporate strategy are catching up with them. And even then, their CEO still claims it's never been better.
"I actually believe that there's going to be more opportunity for creative companies than ever before. We are a extremely profitable company and we're growing uh this year double digit."
And somehow he's exactly right. Their figures are shooting through the roof. It's actually been their best year ever. A record $23.8 billion in revenue. So then why have their stocks crashed magnificently by around 65% from their peak, which goes against the entire tech market boom right now? Even with record profits, the market hates them.
Well, this is because there's something much stranger going on with the company that redefined creativity for a generation. It's all just the end point of a process they've been orchestrating deliberately for years. You see, Adobe used to be one of those companies whose products had everyone creating tutorials on how to do cool things in Photoshop, Illustrator, or After Effects. But now, you'll just find hundreds of tutorials and how to cancel those subscriptions. It looks easy, but it isn't. That's why these videos exist.
Here's how the trap worked. When you signed up, Adobe steered you towards a plan called Annual Paid Monthly. It was pre-selected for you, and it looked like a simple month-to-month deal. Except it wasn't. What you'd agreed to was a year-long contract. And if you tried to leave before that year was up, Adobe charged you an early termination fee worth half of everything you had left to pay. On a basic plan, that was a surprise bill of hundreds of dollars just for the crime of wanting to stop. And the best part, that fee was hidden in fine print, tucked behind tiny icons you had to hover over to even know it existed.
Then there was the cancellation itself. You didn't just click a button. You got funneled through page after page of menus, discounts, and prompts. Every step was built to wear you down until you just gave up and kept on paying. The kind of thing the industry politely calls a dark pattern, meaning a user interface designed to trick you into doing things. If you look on those how to cancel Adobe tutorials, you'll find thousands of comments from those who aren't able to, maybe because of an error or a missing button. It got so horrendous that in 2024, the government sued Adobe. The Department of Justice and the FTC accused them of trapping customers with hidden fees and a deliberately painful cancellation process. And they named two executives personally. So Adobe finally paid up a $150 million settlement all while denying any wrongdoing.
But the other story is that users had something to cancel in the first place. And why? Until this, Adobe had honored one simple rule. You bought the software and it was yours. The full creative suite wasn't cheap, but you owned it. You could use it for a decade and you only paid again when a new version was truly worth it. Then in 2013, Adobe killed that rule. It announced that Creative Suite 6 would be the last version anyone could ever buy outright. From now on, you didn't own Photoshop. You rented it every month forever. And the day you stopped paying was the day you lost the tools your career was built on. They gave it a warm weightless name as if it were a gift. Behold the Creative Cloud.
Overnight, a customer who paid once every few years became one who paid every single month. And once your life's work lived inside Adobe's files and formats, leaving meant incinerating all of it. The payoff was obscene. In its last year selling box software, Adobe made around $4 billion. A decade later, it pulls in over $23 billion a year. And most people badly underestimate how much more they hand over by renting it. The old master collection cost around $2,600, but you paid once and it was yours. The full Creative Cloud suite today costs up to $70 a month, a little over $840 a year, which means every 3 years of renting now cost you what the entire box suite used to cost to own outright. So, a designer who's now paid every month since Creative Cloud landed in 2013 has actually handed Adobe well over $8,000. Or take a 40-year career. Even on the kindest possible assumption that Adobe would never raise prices again, even though this is something they've never once managed, the full suite at around $840 a year comes to over $33,000 in rent before you retire. But Adobe does raise the price. So you're probably looking at $60,000 ranging up to a grand total of $100,000 for one subscription. $100,000 just to do your job. $100,000 you could spend on a holiday or food or buying a house or raising a family.
That single move became the most copied decision in modern business. Every executive in tech watched Adobe swap ownership for rent and get rich, then did the same to their own customers, one industry at a time. Now, we're just used to it. But just remind yourself, it never used to be like this. You don't own your music anymore. You rent it from Spotify. You don't own the films you buy on a streaming service. Amazon once reached into people's Kindles and deleted books they'd already paid for. And the book it deleted of all things was 1984. Your car insurance monitors your every move so it can price you correctly. Home ownership is at an all-time low. The list just goes on and on and on. The majority of people now have 5 to eight subscriptions as slowly all ownership is ground into dust. The subscription world you live in now where almost nothing is truly yours was built on what Adobe proved in 2013.
You might have heard of technofudalism. The Greek economist Januz Varu Fakis' idea that the biggest tech companies own the land while everyone else works on it and pays for the privilege. Most people never even notice the arrangement they're living under. That's the world Janice says we've drifted into is to create enclosures in which we are like sheep enclosed within them and extract rent from from us. The worst slavery is one that you volunteer to.
"And obviously your technofudal lords don't have your best interests at heart. Uh do not fall into the trap of thinking that there is, you know, a good technopedal lord."
Janice isn't the only one noticing this and shouting it into the void. Slovenian philosopher Slavage Deve has been making the same argument and two of them agreed fully on what's happening. The key of this new cooperative capitalism, digital and tron is that it's a new form of the privatization of commons. The very space in which even capitalists and workers and so on exchange stuff is controlled by them. That's the federal moment. And there's a more specific name for a company that behaves like this by colonizing aspects of our digital lives and then using it as a method of control. The big tech critic and political economist Brett Christophers calls it Arenia. The idea is that sometimes businesses earn their money by actually doing something. They make a product, they sell it, and they have to win you over all over again every time. A rentier doesn't work like that. You're not really a customer in that arrangement. You're a tenant, and if we're being honest, closer to a surf.
You can take it from the World Economic Forum itself. On one of their own stages, two economists ironically laid out the exact racket.
"The biggest topic here at Davos and the biggest topic around the world, and that is inequality. And in particular, we're going to be talking about rentier capitalism."
"Rentier capitalism is about the existence of a system in which the return to private property rights exceeds the return uh to production. A lot of it gets captured by things that are in very short supply or inelastic supply and where you have property rights on that."
And the way you keep that supply scarce is simple. You make sure no rival is ever allowed to compete. Thus making products a necessity like needing somewhere to live.
"Those five platform corporations have bought up over 500 other corporations. So as soon as they become potentially competitive, they buy it up. These are powerful robber baronss of the 21st century."
All of that set on a stage at the one event on the calendar most likely to be full of them. And let's not forget, these are the ones who invented that 2030 prediction for what they considered a utopia.
Adobe is exactly what the Rentia and Technofudal models predict. When your customers can walk away, you have to keep the product well-maintained. Quality sells, but when you rent a product because you need to, you don't get the joy and pleasure of ownership. And the product quality and features become an afterthought. But a company doesn't get this brazen by accident. It's a calculated decadesl long strategy. And so to understand how Adobe ended up treating their own customers like hostages, you have to go back to how they got this powerful in the first place.
Like Microsoft, Google, and the others, Adobe built its empire on a monopoly. It was one of the great digital empires to emerge from the dotcom era. And like the other tech titans, it got there through a mix of true genius and ruthless dealmaking. It started in 1982 when two engineers John Waro and Charles GK left a company called Xerox and founded Adobe, named after the creek that ran behind Waro's house. Their first product was Postcript, the invisible language that tells a printer exactly how to draw a page. Apple built it into the laser writer. And for the first time, anyone with a computer and a printer could produce professional quality documents. So that was the start of Adobe's good reputation among consumers and the tech industry.
Then came something just about everyone in the world knows, the humble PDF. It worked so well that it became the default format of the entire planet. By the mid-200s, Adobe believed that up to a billion computers were running it. And then came the crown jewel in the Adobe Empire, Photoshop. Adobe didn't even invent it. Two brothers, Thomas and John Null, did. Adobe simply bought the license in 1988 and turned it into the default tool for every photographer, designer, and artist alive. Photoshop, which Adobe again did not even make, became so dominant that its own name turned into a verb. To Photoshop something is just what you call editing images now.
But like any empire, Adobe wasn't entirely built on good faith. They made sure you'd never have an alternative. Whenever a strong competitor stepped into the light, Adobe either bought it or buried it. The clearest example was a program called Freehand. In 1994, Adobe bought the company that sold it, being the main rival to Illustrator. The FTC was pretty militant back then and forced Adobe to sell Freehand back and banned it from buying the product again for an entire decade. So Adobe simply waited like a predator stalking its prey. Freehand eventually landed with a company called Macromedia. And in 2005, one year after that ban expired, they bought them outright for $3.4 billion and shut Freehand down for good. Its last serious rival in illustration was simply erased from existence. That same deal also handed Adobe Flash and Dreamweaver, the tools the early internet was practically built on, extending its grip from design onto the web itself. If you remember the internet games you'd play on a browser in the CD and floppy disc era, that was all Adobe Flash. One by one, the rivals vanished and Adobe became the standard. It was taught in every school and demanded on every job listing. You've used Adobe's tools because of what they did back then. That's the whole game and all the tech giants did it in their own ways.
Then once they transitioned to a subscription model like your landlord charging higher and higher rents, Adobe started cranking the handle. Year after year, the cost jumps upward. Adobe took its flagship plan, the $59.99 a month Creative Cloud that included nearly everything and started trying to move people onto pricier new tiers and raising some plans by as much as 50%. The photography plan that cost $9.99 per month increased to $14.99. Their justification though made it even worse. They'd stuffed their apps full of the AI called Firefly, and now everyone would pay for them. A massively upvoted Reddit post described it as Adobe's AI tax. Then, if you made it through the dark pattern and demoted to the standard plan to save money, Adobe cut your monthly AI credits from 1,000 to 25, a 97.5% reduction. Pay more for AI you never asked for, or pay less for a crippled version of the software you already had.
Then there's the initification of the software itself. Just like the scrappy newbuilt houses in your neighborhood, the clothes you wear, and the other things that you love, the big 2025 releases of Photoshop fell well short of the line. Premier Pro was especially a buggy mess. But this isn't the end of Adobe's grueling story. Now comes its incredibly satisfying reckoning. Because in 2024, they went one step too far and put users' work on the table. A mandatory update to its terms granted the company permission to access your content through both automated systems and human review. The reaction was seismic. A single post breaking down the new terms has 12 million views to date, and Adobe went back on its words, saying it wouldn't now use personal work to train AI. Creators remained up in arms for months. Last week, Adobe updated their Creative Cloud terms of service, and boy did it not go well. They changed the terms of service of their stock photo service by rolling out Firefly retroactively to make it okay for them to use that content in their training data because the trust is gone and you can't just get it back.
Truth be told, it didn't affect Adobe much immediately because they owned the land. But like every single empire on this planet that has fallen, the cracks began to form. It started with a strong new challenger in Figma. Adobe reached for the usual tactic and agreed to buy it for $20 billion in 2022. One of the biggest software takeovers ever attempted. The CEO then went on CNBC to make the case that there was nothing here to worry about.
"And I don't see any overlap. I I don't see anything that's that would make it so that the myriad competitors would be disenfranchised if you merged. Don't you have to say look the market is so big that this would not hurt it."
He gave that question a buzzword stuffed answer. "What we are seeing is really this confluence of creativity and productivity. And when you think about it like that, it's like every tech company, whether you have a platform, and it's companies like Microsoft or Google or Apple or Meta, every surface that exists, whether that's a web browser, whether that's a mobile device, whether that's a desktop, we want to take the ability for what Figma has done with respect to creative collaborative uh software on the web, uh combine that with what Adobe has done uh in our creative and make it even more accessible for others."
But it wasn't to be. This time Adobe failed.
"So that deal was scrapped as regulators. They raised concerns about it eliminating competition, removing Figma as a threat to Adobe."
Regulators in the US, UK, and EU lined up to block it. The deal then collapsed at the end of 2023, and Adobe had to hand Figma $1 billion for nothing at all. Figma actually used that money to help itself go public. It was like when Rome marched into Gerania, lost three entire legions in the trees, and then just gave up conquering it for good.
The second blow was Canva, who bought Affinity, which is like Photoshop, and made it free. More than a million people signed up in under a week. Blackmagic's Da Vinci Resolve had already done the same thing to Premiere on the video side. But the third blow would be bigger than Adobe. Think about what Adobe really does. They make difficult things like editing images or making movies possible, but not easy. And to their credit, before they started ill treating their users, they supported genuine creativity. But now, generative AI has started to drain that skill scarcity away. When you can create media with the click of a button software that makes hard stuff easier, but still requires skill to operate is just a dying breed. Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, and Meta didn't have that issue because they didn't depend on the creative industries that Adobe does. And with some poetic justice, Adobe's own AI pretty much started killing Adobe's own business. Firefly let people generate images from Adobe stock images instead of buying them. And they can be really, really expensive. So, customers did exactly that. They started cannibalizing themselves by joining the AI race and being one of the only companies not to make money out of it. By plugging their AI like mad, they effectively contributed to their own redundancy.
And that's exactly what the market has worked out. Adobe shares had peaked near $700 at the end of 2021. But by the spring of 2026, they had fallen roughly 65% from that high, trading near $200. It's down this year. It's down over the last 5 years. And even some big asset managers who used to support it have now abandoned ship. Adobe posted record revenue of 23.8 $8 billion in 2025. But the stock was being walked to the gallows anyway because no one sees its future.
And finally, even if Adobe survives all of this, it may have already lost the one thing it could always count on. Its tools have become so expensive, so bloated, so openly contemptuous of the people using them that these people are actually just starting to leave altogether. Now, for years, this was unthinkable. There was nowhere to go. Now there's everywhere. And here's the part that should scare every company watching their downfall. When Microsoft and Meta hit trouble, AI was their bailout. Whether it's a bubble or not, AI has been like a magnet for money in tech. For Adobe, AI is the opposite. It's the angry guy kicking the door in. There is no AI bailout coming this time because AI is the one holding the axe. So, while they're bigger today than at any point in the history, it's also closer to the edge than it has been in decades. And if it does go over, it'll teach every other company the same lesson. You can squeeze your customers as hard as you'd like. You can let the product rot, hike the price, rent people back the things they used to own. Whether you're selling software or streaming or printers or cars or chocolate bars, you can get away with all of it for years. But the moment real competition comes back and there's no AI bailout to save you, you can lose everything. But Adobe is in the minority. And when you look around you, the same thing is happening everywhere.