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The Adobe Settlement: What Happened

Facts checked October 2026

Why we're here

In June 2024, the United States Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission sued Adobe. The case was brought under the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act. The government said Adobe hid its early termination fee — 50% of the remaining payments on annual plans paid monthly — and made cancellation hard to find and hard to complete.

On March 13, 2026, Adobe settled the case for $150 million: $75 million in civil penalties and $75 million in free services. The settlement requires clearer fee disclosures and simpler cancellation. Adobe denied wrongdoing.

What it means for you

If you pay for an annual plan by the month, read the terms before you sign up, and again before you cancel. The fee at issue was half of whatever payments remained on the annual plan. Clearer disclosures should make that figure easier to find than it was, and cancellation should be simpler to complete than the process the case described.

Your options now

You have more than one way to handle everyday PDF work. Full subscription suites remain one option, and suit people who work with documents daily. For scattered jobs — a form, a signature, a merged packet — there is another way: tools that run in your browser, paid for once or used free, with no plan to cancel in the first place.

Start with the free bench on this site: merge, split, fill, sign, and more, with no account and no upload. If the fuller set earns its place, the Toolkit is $39, paid once.