A free remove.bg alternative, and what changes on 1 December
remove.bg is not being switched off and replaced with nothing. It is being folded into Canva, which has owned it since 2021. That still breaks things for anyone who uses the standalone site, holds credits, or calls the API from code, and the date is now on remove.bg’s own pages rather than only in press coverage.
What the company itself says
Two statements, both read on 14 September 2026 from pages remove.bg serves publicly. Their FAQ: “remove.bg became part of Canva in 2021. We’re now migrating remove.bg’s background removal functionality into the Canva platform, where it’ll sit alongside everything else Canva has to offer.” And their API documentation page, which carries the date: “Starting December 1, 2026, background removal moves to Leonardo.Ai, also part of Canva.”
Reporting adds a detail those two pages do not spell out: that the standalone site closes and unused pay-as-you-go credits expire at 09:00 CET on the same date. That part is consistent across outlets and matches the API notice, and it is still secondhand, so check your own account before you plan around the hour.
What changes, by what you use
| If you | What to do before 1 December |
|---|---|
| Drop the odd photo on the free site | Nothing, until it stops answering. Then you need somewhere else, which is the rest of this page. |
| Hold unused credits | Spend them. Credits you paid for do not survive the date, and a refund is not the advertised outcome. |
| Already pay for Canva | Use it there. This is the intended path and for a Canva user it is a feature arriving rather than a tool leaving. |
| Call the API from code | Migrate to Leonardo.Ai, and read the storage default before you ship it: it changed from nothing kept to kept. |
The part worth thinking about for a minute
A background remover is a tool you hand photographs to. Passport photos for a visa form. A child’s school portrait. Product shots under embargo. ID scans. People upload those to a free web tool without much thought, because the tool asks for a file and gives one back, and the whole exchange takes four seconds.
Nothing about this migration is sinister, and the point is not that Canva will do something with your photos. The point is that the arrangement you agreed to is not the one you have any more. It changed because two companies merged product lines, which is a thing that happens on a schedule you do not control, and the same is true of every hosted tool you use.
A version with nothing to migrate
filetity’s background remover runs the model in your browser. The photo is decoded in the tab, a segmentation network produces the mask there, and the PNG is written there. Nothing is posted anywhere, because there is no server to post it to.
Which means there is no account, no credit balance to burn down, no retention policy to read and nothing to expire on 1 December. The first use downloads the model, 57 MB, once; after that the page works with the network off entirely.
How close it gets, said honestly
The model is BiRefNet lite, MIT licensed, exported at 512 by 512 and quantised to 8-bit so it fits in a browser tab. On a person against a plain background, individual flyaway hairs survive. On a cat, the whiskers and the fur on the ear edges survive. The mask is then refined against the photograph itself with a guided filter, which is what moves the cut line onto the actual edge of the hair rather than a rounded approximation of it.
Where it loses, and it does lose: glass, smoke, motion blur and anything see-through come out as an opaque shape. That is not a bug to be fixed later. A cut-out is one opacity number per pixel, and a wine glass is simultaneously itself and what is behind it, so the format cannot express the answer. Thin structures like bicycle spokes, wires and antennae break up, because 512 by 512 is not enough pixels to hold them; measured against a 1024 export, our agreement on a photo of a bike drops to 0.92 where a portrait stays above 0.99.
It is also a page rather than an endpoint. If you were calling remove.bg from a build script or a batch job, this does not replace that and Leonardo is where you are going.
The other options
Canva is the official destination and the right answer if you already pay for it. Adobe Express, Photopea and PhotoRoom all remove backgrounds free at some tier, and all of them upload the photo, which is the trade you are making. Photoshop does it locally and costs a subscription. If you write Python, rembg runs the same family of models on your own machine and is the right tool for a folder of ten thousand images.
The honest summary is that there is no shortage of background removers. What is scarce is one that does not ask you for an account, does not meter you, and does not have a copy of the photo afterwards.
The tool this is about
Cut the subject out of a photo into a transparent PNG, on your own device, with no account and nothing uploaded.
filetity is built by Adarsh Mishra. Everything quoted above was read from remove.bg’s own pages on 14 September 2026, and a migration in progress changes its own notices. If one of them now says something different from what is quoted here, that is worth knowing: support@filetity.com.