Canva, the online image creation service that started as the value proposition, is getting ready to burn its reputation in search of more money. How? By hiking its prices by around 300%, once you get past the ‘discounted’ first year.
You don’t have to panic if you’re a Canva Pro user (for now) but if your company pays for Teams, that annual subscription price is about to get considerably pricier. This is no Multichoice-sized incremental price increase, either.
Canva comes for your wallet
The company doesn’t offer anything you don’t already have for this increase either. Currently, South Africans pay R850 per user per year, or a minimum of R2,550 for access to Canva Teams. That’s because a Teams account has a minimum of three users. That price is about to skyrocket — international prices go from $120 a year (a little cheaper than the SA price) to $100 per user per year. But you still have a minimum of three users.
For those who are a little hard of mathematics, the price increase for three users goes from R2,550 to somewhere in the region of about R6,000/year. South Africa-specific pricing isn’t available yet and Canva’s website still lists the current costs for the SA region. Beyond the subscription increase notification (above), the service is remarkably cagey about why it’s being done.
It boils down to ‘We made you all this cool AI stuff, now you have to pay for it’. The service isn’t adding anything new, it’s just planning to start charging paid users more for all the AI features that were added and previously included in the subscription price. If your team doesn’t suck enough to have to make use of AI constantly, tough. You’re paying for it anyway. All those processor cycles are expensive.
As XDA Developers points out, Canva also has an IPO coming. The company is likely looking to increase its value before the whole thing goes public, which means that paid users can look forward to more enshittification from the service in short order. Just as an aside, Adobe Creative Cloud is now mostly cheaper.