How is it any different than renting a car, or a hotel, or any other various things one might rent? There's just this illusive concept people seem to have of owning software. This kind of model would have had me as a legit paying Adobe customer way back when I did "borrow" their software. I never had enough money to buy a >$1k bit of software for a couple of things, but I could have found $50 (maybe closer to $60 if not doing 12 months??) for a month's legit use of the software for a random freelance gig
But Adobe doesn't make it easy to pay for it one month and don't pay for it the next. Their site uses dark patterns which make you choose yearly subscriptions instead of monthly (happened to me even though I thought I had a monthly subscription) and terminating it is a whole ordeal with several steps.
> How is it any different than renting a car, or a hotel, or any other various things one might rent?
All of these other activities are far from being friction-less. But the problem is that you have to remember to disable the thing otherwise it's going to burn a hole in the pocket and they are counting on that.
