Canceling paid plugin subscriptions = The worst user experience of all time?

I offer a paid monthly plugin on the Creative Cloud marketplace. I was under the assumption that when a user uninstalled the plugin, it would automatically cancel their recurring payments as well.

Not only is that not the case, but the only way for them to apparently cancel these payments is to find some several-month-old “payment confirmed” e-mail from the third-party company FastSpring (assuming they haven’t deleted it), scroll to the bottom to find some tiny “View/Edit Subscription” link, and THEN go in to manually cancel the subscription after they’ve already uninstalled the plugin.

See below from an Adobe support e-mail on this:

MY QUESTION:

"Adobe Team, My Photoshop plugin is available for install using a monthly paid subscription. If a user uninstalls the plugin, will that automatically also cancel the recurring monthly payments? OR do they need to take some additional step to ensure they won’t continue being charged after uninstalling?"

THEIR ANSWER:

“The user is required to cancel the recurring payment. FastSpring will send an email to the user containing a “View/Edit Subscription” link. The user must click on this link to halt the monthly payment. Screenshot attached for reference”

That is quite literally one of the single worst user experiences I have ever seen in all of my years of web development. I’m going to get so many complaints, over the long run, that it’s tempting me to flat out remove my plugin from the marketplace and completely change my business model.

Is there seriously no way for users to cancel the subscription via the Adobe website, or the Creative Cloud dashboard? The ONLY method is to find some old potentially-deleted e-mail from a third-party payment provider like that?

Thanks…

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Good to know. I will avoid Marketplace subscriptions for sure until this is improved.

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I am just implementing a non-Adobe subscription system into one of the plugin and it can do all that you named here.

Maybe you could check Gumroad or Patreon. They have some API.

I think the marketplace should recognize it itself and block. If installed in a non-developer way. But I can’t confirm that yet.