You know the drill. A product photo needs a clean background, so you open remove.bg, drop the image in, and thirty seconds later you have a cut-out ready for your listing. It has been that easy for years. That bookmark is about to stop working.
So is remove.bg shutting down? Yes, the standalone site closes on 1 December 2026. Not the technology, and not background removal itself. The website, the accounts, the self-service API, the Photoshop plugin and the desktop app all stop on the same morning. If you use remove.bg for anything, even once a month, you have three weeks to sort out what happens next.
Yes, it is really closing
remove.bg became part of Canva in 2021, and Canva is now folding the standalone product into its own platform. remove.bg's own FAQ puts it plainly: from 1 December 2026 at 9:00am CET, the standalone website will no longer be available. After that morning, the site and your account simply will not open.
Background removal itself moves to Canva. Canva's Background Remover uses the same technology remove.bg did, and you use it inside a Canva design rather than on a separate site. The self-service API moves to Leonardo.Ai, another Canva company, where it comes with upscaling and scene generation alongside it. Enterprise API contracts are the one exception: those continue as normal.
So the capability survives. The habit doesn't. If your workflow is "open remove.bg, upload, download", that workflow ends on 1 December, and the replacement lives somewhere else.
What closes, and what survives
| What | After 1 December 2026, 9:00am CET |
|---|---|
| Standalone website | Unavailable. The site and accounts will not open. |
| Self-service API | Stops accepting requests. Moves to Leonardo.Ai. |
| Pay-as-you-go credits | Unused credits expire. Use them before the date. |
| Subscriptions | End automatically. Annual plans get a pro-rata refund; the final monthly renewal on or after 1 November is free. |
| Photoshop plugin | Discontinued. remove.bg points Photoshop users to Affinity, though its background removal needs a Canva Pro subscription. |
| Desktop app and other integrations | Discontinued. Bulk removal moves into Canva. |
| Background removal itself | Continues inside Canva, with the same technology. |
Do these three things before 1 December
None of this takes long, but the deadline is a hard one. The site doesn't wind down gradually: at 9:00am CET on 1 December, the account page goes with it.
1. Spend your credits. Any pay-as-you-go credits you have left expire on 1 December, and remove.bg's own advice is to use them before the migration date. Say you bought a 40-credit pack in September and have 13 left: use those 13 on the photos sitting in your backlog, because after the cutoff they're worth nothing.
2. Download your invoices and credit usage report. Your account data stays accessible until 1 December at 9:00am CET. After that, the website and accounts won't be accessible at all, and remove.bg is explicit that you won't be able to download invoices or the usage report afterwards. Pull those files now. It takes two minutes and you can't do it later.
3. Check your subscription, then leave it alone. If you pay monthly, your plan ends automatically on 1 December and any final renewal on or after 1 November is free, so there's nothing to cancel unless you want out sooner. If you pay annually, the plan also ends automatically and unused time beyond 1 December comes back as a pro-rata refund to your original payment method, with no action needed from you. Don't cancel in a panic. Just confirm which plan you're on.
Where to remove backgrounds after 1 December
Canva is the official answer, and for most people it's the right one. If you already design in Canva, background removal is now one step inside the design you're already making, using the same technology remove.bg used. There's nothing new to learn and nothing new to install.
But Canva is a design platform, and that's not what everyone wants. If your whole job is "take the background off this photo and give me the file", opening a design tool to do it is a detour. That's the case for a free, in-browser replacement, and it's the one worth knowing about before the cutoff rather than after it.
Our own Background Remover does the same job without an account, without an upload and without credits. It runs in your browser using an open-source model, so your photo never leaves your device. The photos people cut out are often of their own products, their kids, or an unreleased design, and with most online removers those photos travel to a server first. Here they don't.
The honest verdict: if you live in Canva, stay in Canva. If you just need cut-outs, take the tool that asks for nothing. Canva wins on convenience for designers; the in-browser tool wins on privacy and on never asking you to sign up, pay, or count credits.
Switching takes about a minute
There's no migration to run and nothing to import. You just need a tool that works the day after remove.bg stops, and the sooner you try it, the less you'll be scrambling on 30 November.
Open the Background Remover, drop your photo in, or paste it straight from your clipboard with Ctrl+V. You can queue up to 10 images in one batch, which covers a set of listing photos in a single pass. Click Remove Background. The first time, your browser downloads the AI model, about 56 MB, with a progress bar; after that it's cached, and later images take roughly 5 to 20 seconds depending on your device.
Before you download anything, drag the comparison slider and zoom in. Check the hairline, the glasses frames, the hands. If those look right, the rest of the photo will be fine. Then download the transparent PNG, or pick a solid colour and download a JPG instead. Very large photos are handled at up to 4096 pixels on the long side. If the PNG comes out bigger than your shop wants, run it through an image compressor before you upload it.
Two limits worth knowing before you rely on it. Fine, wispy detail is the weak spot for every automatic remover, including this one: flyaway hair, fur, lace and glass can leave rough edges, because the boundary is genuinely ambiguous even to a human looking closely. And a clean original photo helps more than any setting. Daylight from a window and a plain backdrop will do more for your cut-out than fiddling with the result afterwards.
Questions people keep asking
Is remove.bg shutting down completely? The standalone website is. From 1 December 2026 at 9:00am CET it will no longer be available, and neither will the accounts, the self-service API, the Photoshop plugin or the desktop app. The background-removal technology continues inside Canva, and the API continues at Leonardo.Ai.
What happens to my remove.bg credits? Unused pay-as-you-go credits expire on 1 December 2026. remove.bg recommends using them before the migration date, so run any photos you've been putting off now. The remove.bg closing date is the same for everyone: 1 December, 9:00am CET.
Do I need to cancel my subscription? No. Monthly plans end automatically on 1 December, and the final renewal on or after 1 November is free. Annual plans also end automatically, and unused time beyond 1 December is refunded pro-rata to your original payment method. You only need to act if you want to cancel earlier, which you can do from the remove.bg dashboard.
What is the best free remove.bg alternative? It depends what you did with remove.bg. For design work inside Canva, use Canva's own Background Remover. For quick cut-outs with no account and no upload, a free in-browser tool like the one on this site does the job, and our guide to removing backgrounds for product photos walks through the whole listing-photo workflow, from shooting to choosing white or transparent.
One last thing. Don't leave this to 30 November. The cutoff is 9:00am CET on 1 December, which is 8:00am in London and 3:00am in New York, and the account page goes dark with it. Spend the credits, download the invoices, and try your replacement tool while remove.bg still works, so you're comparing it against something real instead of guessing under pressure.