A few months ago, we moved roughly 30 users—mostly engineers—from Adobe Acrobat to Bluebeam and removed their Adobe licenses. Around the same time, our renewal was coming up, so we also canceled about 30 Acrobat subscriptions, leaving only a month of overlap.
Adobe's licensing team has now asked me to review our account and delete users who don't have licenses assigned. I assume they may suspect we're rotating licenses between employees to avoid buying enough seats, but that isn't happening—we simply switched to a different product. I asked whether removing unlicensed users is now required and whether Adobe plans to charge for accounts that have no license, but I haven't received a response yet.
Has anyone else dealt with this? Can Adobe not distinguish inactive or unlicensed users from accounts that are actually being reassigned?
3 Answers
I’d ask them to identify the exact policy or contract clause that requires deleting unlicensed users, and whether there is any charge associated with retaining them. Keep the request in writing and don’t delete legitimate historical accounts until you know whether they’re needed for document access, audit records, or identity management. It could simply be someone trying to make their licensing report look cleaner.
Adobe may be trying to prevent users from creating or reactivating individual subscriptions outside the company account. If someone with an unlicensed company profile starts a trial or signs up for a paid feature, Adobe can then contact the organization about merging that account and assigning a corporate license. Removing obsolete users can reduce that confusion, although it shouldn’t mean you’re being charged for them.
This may just be an account-cleanup or compliance process rather than a billing issue. We had old, inactive accounts left behind after moving to federated identities, and Adobe repeatedly asked us to remove the unlicensed users even though they weren’t consuming seats. They never clearly explained why it mattered, but deleting stale accounts resolved the follow-up requests.
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