Shutterstock to pay $35M over hard-to-cancel subscriptions

One time for my small business I shared a login with one of my employees and they tried to get us to buy some sort of Enterprise subscription because they claimed that dozens of IP addresses were logging into the account and when we refused they simply closed our account. We were paying like over $300 per month and not even using the full subscription limits... We ended up finding a cheaper solution and now just use AI images so yeah it was pretty dumb on their part.

Good. There needs to be a US-wide law that any method used to sign up for a subscription has to be a valid way to unsubscribe too. If you allow users to sign up online, you should also be required to let them unsubscribe online too.

Basically, take the Californian setup, and apply it to the whole US. And pretty much every country in Europe.

Can they please do this with at&t internet.

Did Shutterstock come out money ahead?

Is 35 million and the potential for future punishment a sufficient deterrent?

A great idea of a product is some sort of unified system for companies to correctly manage subscriptions. There needs to be standards for what makes a user flow acceptable or not when it comes to cancellations.

If your business is only viable due to shady subscription practices then it doesn't deserve to be running, whether it's Adobe, gyms, or whatever.

Adobe needs to be next. I had to cancel a card because that was easier than cancelling Creative Cloud.

It's a dead company walking anyway. It might be the final blow.

> Shutterstock failed to get consent to charge consumers’ credit cards before charging them for subscriptions

This sounds like it should carry criminal penalties?

I'm old enough to remember when we had a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to push back against this kind of anti-consumer crap. It got doge'd by Dumpty/Musk.

Pardon the pedantry, but I the current abbreviation of the price ("Shutterstock to pay $35M") should be "$35MM".

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