remove.bg closes on 1 December 2026. What to do before then

remove.bg has announced that its standalone website closes on 1 December 2026 at 9:00 CET. It was bought by Canva in 2021, and its background removal now lives inside Canva’s editor. If remove.bg is part of how you work, there are two jobs: get what you are owed out of your account before the date, and move each thing you used it for somewhere that suits that job. This page takes them in that order. Everything about remove.bg here comes from its own FAQ, read on 17 September 2026.

What stops on 1 December

• The website and accounts. From 9:00 CET the site and your account are no longer accessible.
• Pay-as-you-go credits. Unused credits expire on the same date. There is no transfer to Canva mentioned, so plan to spend them.
• Subscriptions. Monthly and annual plans keep working until the date and then end on their own. An annual plan gets a pro-rata refund for the time left, to the original payment method, without you asking. A monthly renewal that falls on or after 1 November is free.
• The self-service API. It stops accepting requests on 1 December. Enterprise API contracts are not affected and continue as normal.
• The desktop app, the Photoshop plugin and other integrations. All are discontinued on the same day.

Before the date: a short checklist

1. Download your invoices and your credit usage report from the Account page. remove.bg says you will not be able to download them afterwards, and an accountant may want them at year end.
2. Spend your credits on the images you know you will need at full resolution. A credit left over on 2 December is gone.
3. Find every place a key is used. Search your code, your automation tools and your shop plugins for the remove.bg API key. Anything still calling the self-service API after the date will start failing, and a failing background step often fails quietly, for example by publishing a product photo with its original backdrop.
4. Keep your originals. If your only copy of a product shot is a cutout, you lose the chance to redo it with a better model later.
5. Decide per job, not per tool. Occasional cutouts, batch catalogue work and automated pipelines have different best answers.

Where to go next, by how you used it

You make designs and already pay for Canva. This is the path remove.bg recommends. Its FAQ says Canva’s Background Remover uses the same technology, removes backgrounds inside a design, and has bulk removal in both the web app and the desktop app. Check Canva’s current plan details for which tier includes it before relying on it.

You call the API from your own software. remove.bg points self-service developers to Leonardo.ai’s API, also part of Canva, which it says offers the same background removal plus upscaling and scene generation, and it publishes a migration guide. Budget time to change the endpoint, the authentication and the error handling, and test on your hardest images, because a migration is the moment to catch a regression.

You used the Photoshop plugin. remove.bg suggests Affinity, which Canva also owns and which is free to use; its background removal runs on Canva AI and needs a Canva Pro subscription. If you stay in Photoshop, its own selection tools remain available.

You remove backgrounds now and then, or you would rather not upload photos. A browser tool that runs the model on your device is a good fit. FileGizmo’s background remover downloads a segmentation model once and then works on the photo inside the tab: nothing is uploaded, there are no credits, and the download is at the photo’s own resolution. You can see this for yourself in the browser’s Network panel while it works.

Doing a remove.bg job in FileGizmo

1. Open Remove Image Background and pick the model: Best edges for most photos, People only for portraits on a slow connection, or Flat colour for a logo or signature on a plain background, which needs no download at all.
2. Drop, paste or choose up to 20 images. They start as soon as they arrive.
3. Check the edges. The editor beside the result has an Edges tab with Erase and Restore brushes and a slider that compares the cutout with the original.
4. On the Background tab, keep transparency or choose white, a colour, a gradient, a blurred copy of the photo, or your own image.
5. On the Size tab, keep the photo’s size or choose a marketplace preset such as Amazon main image, which gives a 2000 pixel white square with the product filling 85% of it.
6. Download PNG, WebP or JPG. For a batch, the settings of one image can be applied to all of them, and the whole set downloads as a ZIP.

What it does not do: it has no hosted API, no service-level agreement, and no cloud storage of your work. The speed depends on your device, and the first run of the Best edges model is a download of up to 132 MB. For an automated pipeline, an API is still the right tool.

Check quality on your own photos

No two background removers fail in the same places. Hair against a similar colour, glass, motion blur, thin straps and busy backgrounds are where they differ. Before you commit, take five of your hardest images, run them through the replacement you are considering, and look at the edges on both a white and a dark background, because a halo that disappears on white shows clearly on black. Keep the one that fails least on the pictures you actually sell or publish.