If you've got anything in production calling api.remove.bg, you have a deadline now: December 1, 2026, 9:00 AM CET. That's when the standalone remove.bg site and API shut down for good.
Canva bought remove.bg back in 2021, and they've now announced they're folding it into the main Canva product. If you're a designer using remove.bg through canva.com, this is basically a non-event — the feature just moves into the editor you probably already use.
If you're a developer calling their API from code, it's a different story. The background-removal feature is going into Canva. The API is not. According to their own migration notes, api.remove.bg traffic is being redirected to Leonardo.Ai — a completely different company with its own auth, its own pricing, its own rate limits. This isn't a domain change or a version bump. It's "pick a new vendor, integrate it, test it, ship it" — with a hard date attached.
Who this actually affects
Not everyone. If you use remove.bg by hand through their website or through Canva's editor, you're fine — that flow keeps working, just inside Canva. This matters if you have code somewhere — a backend job, a Shopify app, an n8n workflow, a script that's been quietly working since 2019 — that POSTs an image to api.remove.bg/v1.0/removebg with an API key. That code stops working on December 1st. No grace period mentioned in what they've published so far.
What I'd actually do before the deadline
Not going to pretend there's one obvious answer here, because there isn't — it depends on volume, budget, and whether you want to keep depending on someone else's API at all.
- Leonardo.Ai — the "official" successor for API traffic. Probably the least code change if you're already deep in the remove.bg ecosystem, but it's a different pricing model and you should read the fine print before assuming it's a drop-in.
- PhotoRoom — built specifically around e-commerce product photos, has an API, has been around a while.
- Self-hosted (rembg, or similar open models) — if you're processing enough volume that per-image API costs bother you anyway, this is the moment to stop renting and just run the model yourself. No shutdown risk, because there's no vendor to shut anything down.
- Fottly — this is the thing I built, so take it with the appropriate grain of salt: it's a self-hosted image API (AGPL-3.0) with background removal and resizing/format conversion in the same call, plus a hosted version if you don't want to run a server. I'm not going to tell you it's the right fit for everyone reading this — if you're already happy with Leonardo or PhotoRoom, there's no reason to move twice. But if this shutdown is making you reconsider being dependent on a single vendor's roadmap at all, self-hosting the model is worth a look.
The actual lesson here
This is at least the second time in a couple of years that a widely-used image API has changed hands and reshuffled its terms on short notice (Cloudinary pulled free background removal for new accounts back in February). If your product depends on a hosted image API, it's worth asking now — not in November — what your fallback is if that vendor changes the deal again. Sometimes the answer is "switch to a different hosted API." Sometimes it's "just run the open-source model yourself and stop worrying about this."
Either way: if you have anything calling api.remove.bg, put December 1st on a calendar today.
Repo, if you want to see how the self-hosted route works end to end: https://github.com/Noah-1919/Fottly
Top comments (0)