The remove.bg standalone website and its self-service background-removal API stop working; the tool moves into Canva and the API to Leonardo.ai

remove.bg — the one-click background remover that a lot of design tools, e-commerce pipelines and hobby scripts quietly depend on — is being folded into Canva, which has owned it since 2021. The company’s own FAQ puts a hard date on it: “The standalone website will no longer be available from 1 December 2026 at 9:00am CET.”

For most people that is a bookmark that stops working and a workflow that moves into Canva instead. For developers it is more pointed. The FAQ is equally plain about the API: “The self-service API will stop accepting requests from 1 December 2026.” If you have a script, a Photoshop panel, a Shopify job or a side project hitting https://api.remove.bg/v1.0/removebg on a pay-as-you-go or credit plan, that call has an expiry date now — and any credits sitting on the account expire with it, so there is no grace balance to run down afterwards.

There is one carve-out worth reading carefully before you panic: enterprise API contracts are not affected and continue as normal. The shutdown is specifically the self-service tier — the individual, credit-based accounts most one-person integrations run on.

The migration splits by how you use it. Browser users get pushed into Canva. Developers get pointed at Leonardo.ai, another Canva-owned service, which does background removal plus some extras like upscaling. That is a genuine destination, but it is a different API — different base URL, different auth, different response shape — so treat it as a rewrite, not a config change. Whichever way you go, the useful move is to do it before 1 December while the old endpoint is still there to test against, rather than finding out from a wave of failed jobs on the day the requests start bouncing.