Often when you stop using a product or service, it seems like companies assume that you’re making a final decision for the rest of your life and treat you accordingly. Off the top of my head the ones I’ve recently run into, Adobe charges you the rest of your subscription fee as a cancellation fee and Square Space will make you wait a minimum of 24 hours if you want to move your domain off their site.

The assumption that I’ll never use a company’s product or service again seems incredibly faulty. Take Adobe Photoshop for example. I got a short subscription to try it out for editing some photos I had. It seemed like a decent enough piece of software and I didn’t have any major complaints. However, when I finished using it after a few weeks and went to cancel my subscription I was met with a hefty cancellation fee. That just leaves a terrible taste in my mouth. Canceling my subscription in no way means that I’ll never need to edit another photo or that if I did want to edit more photos in the future that I wouldn’t have used Adobe Photoshop again. However, screwing me over on the way out makes certain that I won’t ever use your product again.

Even if we were to assume that I really would never need to edit another photo in my life, that still ignores word-of-mouth advertising. Because not only will I never use Adobe Photoshop again, I have no interest in recommending Adobe Photoshop to any friends or family who need some editing software. This kind of behavior, milking the customer for every last penny you can squeeze from them on the way out, seems like it may be beneficial in the short term, but quite harmful in the long run. This may simply be a symptom of a bad corporate structure in these companies where execs are prioritizing quarterly results over a good name and long term growth.