Adobe Just Paid $150 Million to Learn What Every Great Service Brand Already Knows
Making It Hard to Leave Is Not the Same as Making Customers Want to Stay — and the Difference Will Cost You
A $150 Million Lesson in What Customer Loyalty Actually Means
In April 2026, a federal judge approved a $150 million settlement between Adobe and the U.S. Department of Justice, resolving FTC allegations that Adobe had “trapped customers into year-long subscriptions through hidden early termination fees and numerous cancellation hurdles.” As reported by Newsshooter, the settlement breaks down into $75 million in civil penalties paid to the DOJ and $75 million in free services provided to affected customers.
The specifics of what Adobe did are worth understanding, because they are not unusual. Customers who signed up for Adobe’s most popular “annual paid monthly” plan did not realize they owed up to 50% of remaining fees if they tried to cancel before the year was up. That fee was not disclosed clearly — it was buried in textboxes and hyperlinks rather than presented upfront. When customers tried to cancel online, they had to click through multiple pages. When they called customer service to cancel, they were passed between representatives and, according to the FTC, encountered “resistance and delay.”
Adobe denied wrongdoing as part of the settlement. But the core finding stands, and the business lesson it contains is one every leader should internalize whether or not they have a subscription product:
Designing your customer experience to make it hard to leave is not a retention strategy. It is a trap. And traps do not build loyalty — they build resentment.
The Difference Between Loyalty and Captivity
I have spent 25 years helping organizations build the kind of loyalty that makes customers choose to stay. The kind where a customer has options, knows they have options, and chooses you anyway — not because leaving is hard, but because the relationship is too valuable to walk away from.
What Adobe built — and what a significant portion of the subscription economy has built — is something different. It is captivity. A customer experience designed not to be so good that you stay, but so complicated to leave that you give up trying. The cancellation maze. The hidden fee. The phone rep trained to deflect rather than help. These are not service failures. They are service design choices. Someone decided that making it hard to leave was preferable to making it worth staying.
The problem with captivity as a strategy is that it has a ceiling — and that ceiling is the moment a customer decides the friction of leaving is worth the cost of their frustration. Adobe crossed that ceiling for enough customers that the FTC got involved. But the damage to trust and advocacy began long before the lawsuit. Every customer who sat on hold trying to cancel, every customer who discovered the hidden fee and felt deceived, every customer who told that story to colleagues and friends — that is the real cost of designing against your customer.
“A complaining client is giving us the opportunity to make things right; it’s the silent ones that hurt us. They don’t remain silent once they leave our business.” — John DiJulius, The Customer Service Revolution
Your Cancellation Process Is a Customer Experience Touchpoint
Here is the mindset shift that changes everything: every interaction a customer has with your organization — including the one where they want to leave — is an experience. And every experience is an opportunity to either deepen loyalty or confirm the decision to go.
In my work, I use a framework called the Day in the Life of a Customer — a stage-by-stage mapping of every touchpoint a customer has with your brand, from their first interaction through their last. Most organizations, when they do this work, spend their energy on acquisition touchpoints and service touchpoints. Very few think carefully about the exit touchpoint.
But the exit touchpoint is one of the most powerful in the entire journey. A customer who wants to leave and is treated with respect, clarity, and ease does two things that a trapped customer never does: they leave without bitterness, and they come back. I have seen this play out in industry after industry. The customer who was treated well on the way out becomes the customer who returns when their circumstances change. The customer who was made to feel deceived on the way out becomes the customer who warns everyone they know.
Adobe’s exit experience was designed to exhaust customers into staying. The result was not loyalty. It was a $150 million settlement and a reputational scar that will outlast the check.
What Zero Risk Actually Means for Your Worst Moments
One of the frameworks I apply most consistently across every organization I work with is what I call Zero Risk — a system for anticipating predictable failure points and building specific, trained protocols for handling them before they happen. Zero Risk does not mean your organization will never make mistakes or that customers will never want to leave. It means that when those moments arrive, your team has a clear, consistent, customer-first way of handling them.
Applied to a cancellation scenario, Zero Risk looks like this: when a customer contacts us to cancel, what exactly do we do? Not what do we do to retain them — what do we do to serve them? Do we acknowledge their reason? Do we make the process straightforward? Do we express genuine appreciation for their time as a customer? Do we leave the door open for their return in a way that feels sincere rather than scripted?
These are not customer service details. They are brand-defining moments. The customer who cancels and walks away feeling respected is qualitatively different from the customer who cancels and walks away feeling manipulated. Both are gone. Only one of them comes back. Only one of them says good things.
The Business Case for Letting Them Go Gracefully
The research on service recovery and exit experience is consistent and compelling. Customers who have a problem handled well are often more loyal than customers who never had a problem at all — a phenomenon called the service recovery paradox. The same principle applies to exits handled well.
Amazon Prime, notably, has one of the most frictionless cancellation processes in the subscription economy. You can cancel in three clicks, with no phone call, no hidden fees, and no guilt trip. Amazon has decided that a customer who can leave easily is a customer who will come back when they are ready — and that the goodwill generated by a clean exit is worth more than the revenue retained by a complicated one. Their Prime membership numbers suggest they are right.
Adobe made the opposite bet. And it cost them $150 million, a CEO transition, and years of brand equity built on creativity and innovation reduced to a headline about subscription traps.
The question for every leader reading this is not whether to make it easy to cancel. It is whether the loyalty you have built is real enough to survive the test of a customer who knows they can leave. If the honest answer is uncertain, that is the most important service culture work you can do right now.
“You don’t need satisfied Customers, you need loyal Customers.” — John DiJulius, The DiJulius Group
Ready to Build Loyalty That Doesn’t Require a Cancellation Trap to Survive?
If your organization’s retention strategy relies more on friction than on relationship, my team can help you build the experience infrastructure that creates genuine loyalty at every touchpoint — including the hardest ones.
→ Schedule a Complimentary Strategy Call — Let’s audit every touchpoint — including the ones customers use to leave
→ Read: Zero Risk — Anticipating Service Defects Before They Happen — Build a protocol for every predictable difficult moment, including the exit
→ Read: How to Create a Customer Experience Cycle — Map every touchpoint — especially the ones you’ve been afraid to look at
→ Read: Can You Really Make Price Irrelevant? — The alternative to captivity: loyalty so strong they choose to stay
→ Get The Customer Service Revolution — The book that reframes every customer interaction as a loyalty opportunity
→ Explore the X-Commandment Methodology — The full system for designing an experience that earns — not traps — loyalty
→ Book John as a Keynote Speaker — Bring the loyalty vs. captivity conversation to your next leadership event
