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

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/05/shutterstock-pay-35-million-settle-ftc-allegations-over-illegal-subscription-cancellation-practices

by Lihh27 • 2 months ago

187 85 2 months ago

ftc.gov

chancek• 2 months ago

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.

t-writescode• 2 months ago

Paddle? https://www.paddle.com/billing/subscriptions

Stripe? https://stripe.com/billing/subscriptions

Paypal? https://www.paypal.com/us/digital-wallet/manage-money/manage...

f001• 2 months ago

To add to this, Apple has the subscriptions panel on iOS in the settings app showing you everything on your account including third party apps as long as you subscribed through apps instead of websites.

Modified3019• 2 months ago

I use privacy.com virtual cards. I make a card for each vendor, and define a limit for it. I can kill the cards anytime.

x86hacker10102• 2 months ago

Same. Apparently their privacy policy is sketchy as hell but the product has been consistent for over 12 years of using it

echoangle• 2 months ago

Just because you revoke payment doesn’t mean you cancelled (at least in Europe). If you just stop paying, they will sue you to get the money.

recursive• 2 months ago

Why would a company participate in this? Most don't seem interested in making cancellation easier.

dawnerd• 2 months ago

Because they like money and having different choices for consumers to give them money wins out.

neallindsay• 2 months ago

You have to participate in order to get access to most iPhone users.

rectang• 2 months ago

Did Shutterstock come out money ahead?

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

bpodgursky• 2 months ago

Look at the stock history. The company is on life support. This is basically an entire year of earnings.

altrum• 2 months ago

regardless, still likely came out ahead

josh_p• 2 months ago

Getty’s trying to acquire them pending approval from UK’s regulatory body.

whh2• 2 months ago

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

sanswork15• 2 months ago

Adobe isn't hard to cancel if you sign up for monthly subscriptions. I do it fairly regularly because I need PS in short bursts.

A lot of people sign up for discounted annual commitments though then complain when they can't cancel before the year is up.

IneffablePigeon• 2 months ago

I had been paying monthly for 13 years straight and they still demanded a cancellation fee because it turned out I was on an annual commitment (which by the way they hiked the price of by 50% with a month’s notice and by the time you notice the larger payment go out you are in a whole new 12 months).

So yes, I complained about that.

cryzinger2• 2 months ago

If you only need PS in short bursts, may I recommend https://www.photopea.com/?

It's not at 100% feature parity with PS but it's pretty darn close.

chatmasta• 2 months ago

No, the complaint with Adobe is that if you cancel, they terminate access immediately rather than at the end of the billing period. There is no explanation for this other than a predatory one; they’re betting you’ll forget to cancel by the time your bill comes around. The immediate termination is effectively depriving you of the next N months of access for which you already paid.

nih567• 2 months ago

I hope freelancer.com will be the next one. I canceled and renewed my credit card because of them. Even though I deleted my account, they continued to withdraw money.

x86hacker10102• 2 months ago

Don’t they charge you to cancel or something? I also remember their suite being absolutely fucking dumb I never used it again

sanswork15• 2 months ago

They let you sign up for an annual discount but still pay monthly. The cancelation fee is if you try to end the annual commitment early. If you just sign up monthly(seriously always do this when you see these offers) there is no cancellation fee.

charcircuit4• 2 months ago

Canceling a card isn't the same thing as canceling a subscription. Most businesses will have you still pay via a different payment method to resolve your debt.

dheera• 2 months ago

They'll invoice you but don't actually pay. They aren't going to take you to court over a $50/month subscription; the easier route for them is to just disable your account, which is what you wanted anyway.

Never give them your actual residential address (they don't need to know it), birth day, or SSN, or be tricked into giving them such. If they ask on any customer service chat or phone, the answer is they don't need to know it.

Without these things they can't exactly put it on your credit report, either. They may send it to collectors, but don't talk to them. Let them cry. They still won't serve you a court summons over $50.

Keep businesses in check from this money-grabbing behavior. Any kind of subscription should be easily cancellable.

hank9• 2 months ago

Figma isn't much better these days

level092• 2 months ago

+1. They doubled my fee, treated silence as consent for a yearly renewal, then tried to charge a cancellation fee based on that inflated price.

Daylight robbery.

ktallett• 2 months ago

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.

runako2• 2 months ago

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

This sounds like it should carry criminal penalties?

zurtri• 2 months ago

Well, if you or I did it - of course!

But when Corporate does it, we just handwave it way.

jjtheblunt2• 2 months ago

Conde Nast is _horrible_ this way, tried for a second year in a row to charge me for Wired, which i do not subscribe to, could not explain where they got the idea i did, evidently had access through some dark pattern from years earlier to charge for something i must have bought as a magazine on iOS.

It took hours of online chat argument with the unfortunate real employee fielding such pissed customers, and threats of legal action, eventually citing their legal counsel by email address and full name (from the Conde Nast site), before they agreed to _not_ charge me whatever obscene yearly subscription would be.

They can burn in crooked hell after that nonsense. I wonder if the Reddit people are bothered by their owner, as I had a personally signed generally cheery note from maybe Alexis back when i first subscribed and bought a tshirt, going on 20 years ago i guess.

runako2• 2 months ago

I wonder if the Reddit people are bothered by their owner

Quick note -- Reddit went public in 2024, so Condé Nast is no longer their owner.

raincole• 2 months ago

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

bch• 2 months ago

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

zackify• 2 months ago

Can they please do this with at&t internet.

level092• 2 months ago

+ and Adobe Creative Suite

daveguy2• 2 months ago

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.

paulddraper3• 2 months ago

They stopped Shutterstock?

daveguy2• 2 months ago

I'd be willing to bet it was their consumer complaint system that informed the FTC. They have a interagency agreement for crossreferral. Hopefully they didn't have to cut that back with the 90% doge cut. But don't worry, we will restore funding and make it more powerful after we de-dumpty the federal govt.

CM30• 2 months ago

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.

ge96• 2 months ago

Gyms

HardwareLust• 2 months ago

The law should be simple. It should take the same amount of effort, or less, to unsubscribe as it did to subscribe.

weird-eye-issue• 2 months ago

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.

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

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