Canva's new price hike will create a gap in the
market
Canva has tripled its prices. This creates opportunities for indie founders.
When a company increases their prices by 30%, people complain. But when a company increases their prices by 300%, people switch.
Canva, the world's most popular online design software, has announced that they will triple their prices. For better or worse, Canva's also saying that tripling its prices is totally justified.
Why Canva is doing this: three letters: IPO. Canva is getting ready to become a public company, and this price hike is one of their "preparation" steps.
Who will be affected by the price increase?
Mainly small businesses. This is the email that Canva sent to many of its users:
For now, there are no price increase announcements for individual plans, but people are already panicking.
People are already looking for alternatives
A quick search on X makes it obvious that people are already looking for cheaper alternatives. Also, when you search for the company's name, the sentiment is mostly negative.
This Reddit comment sums things up pretty well:
“New product appears, challenges the status quo. Becomes hugely popular. Turns into status quo and does the same s*** the other products were doing. Rinse and repeat.”
At the moment we seem to be between the "rinse" and "repeat" stages.
Opportunities for us, indie founders
Before I talk about the opportunities, let me tell you something blatantly obvious:
Canva was launched in 2013. Programming in 2013 was, let's say, way harder than what it is now.
Fast forward to 2024: we have better tools, more libraries, and AI to speed up the whole process. And we have SDKs to add photo-editing abilities to our web and mobile apps.
Today, it's totally possible to build a tool similar to Canva as a bootstrapped founder. In fact, bootstrappers are already building and selling tools like Canva without needing millions of dollars in funding.
As a result of the price hike, tens or even hundreds of thousands of people will be looking for Canva alternatives.
Will Adobe become the new Canva? Or will someone else (like you) appear on the scene and take a significant portion of Canva's small business users? Nobody knows.
The important thing is that a significant gap in the market has just appeared as a result of this change.
You don't have to create a new Canva to make use of this change, though. There are a few more opportunities as a result of this change.
Even more opportunities
Here are a few more software/non-software opportunities:
Monitor change in market share and build around the ecosystem.
Canva has an app marketplace. The next Canva will probably also have a marketplace. There's always an opportunity to build tools around a growing ecosystem.Create information around a rising competitor.
Say most people switch to competitor X as a result of this change. There'll be a need for courses/books/videos on how to use X. With content, recency matters. Something created in 2024 will be perceived as more valuable than something created in 2015.Add team features to the individual plan.
This is more of a temporary opportunity. If Canva does not raise the price of their "individual" plan (currently $15/mo), my guess is that there'll be tools/extensions that add team features to individual plans on Canva.
Slowly becoming Adobe. "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain."
Given the scope of Canvas' features, a full replication might not be feasible for an indie developer. A viable approach could be:
The 80/90 rule: Develop 80% of the features at 90% lower cost (remember, pricing battles are a downward spiral, and not ideal)
Cherry-pick profitable features and create a stripped-down, budget-friendly alternative.
Canva really seems ripe for unbundling. They do so many things, most of them poorly. I tried playing around with their templates, just to learn, and their website templates were horrible. I left assuming the same was true for so many of their other product categories.
Canva is a good starting point to get the ball rolling, if it's a basic landing page, logo for your passion project etc. you save a ton of money.
I use Canva on a daily basis for illustrations for my blogs which are not bad considering the cheap price tag (for Pro users). It took me a while to learn what Canva can actually do, their templates are OK but what makes Canva stand out is its editing tool, exporting formats, collaboration features etc. I even created Youtube videos and Instagram stories with Canva.
All these tools (from Adobe to Canva) are only as good as the user ;)
Just to make it clear, you'll be paying $45+/mo (they will prob hike their individual plans soon) for Canva. For creating 5-6 social media posts a month, I'm pretty sure many people will be open to switching/trying out a new service.
sure, depends on the actual new price (for individuals).
I see this as a good opporunity for vertical feature products, Canva tries to do a lot of things, from social media designs, logos, websites to business card and brouchors
It could be the future of single purpose tools, like logo making tool, landing page design tool etc..
We, at VideoDubber.ai, are making Canva free for everyone.
Our main product is video translation.
We are still beta testing the video/poster/audio combined editor, which is the canvas substitute.
We will launch it in a week.
the think is they don't do something so special it can't just exists outside of canva. so i'll predict a lot of alternatives to raise to power
What I don't get is that Adobe offers a similar product that's bundled with Photoshop and all of their other products. How have they not made a bigger dent in Canva?
I think Canva is more user friendly for non-tech savvy guys. It's also cheaper.
Nice! Definitely a gap worth looking for opportunities 👀
Canva was always one of those products which was massively underpriced in my opinion.
But this kind of price raise is not customer friendly.
Nice info
This will also make it easier for the rise of cheap or free alternatives to Canva in the market. To me, this is a win win scenario for us as other alternatives will grow and improve drastically creating a good competetion to the Canva Monopoly.
Canva's new price hike may push budget-conscious users to seek alternative design tools, creating a gap in the market for more affordable options. For Stardew Valley APK players, this is akin to finding cost-effective resources in-game, ensuring that you maximize productivity without breaking the bank.
There are a few free alternatives now to Canva, like Fluer (dot) com, Desygner, plus others. Fluer is new and just launched. I know the dev team, who are quite a small team. It's on iOS, Android and web, and has AI features. Not everyone is going to need the pro/AI/teams features that Canva asks people to pay for, some people just want to create something good for free, and I think that is the gap.
I guess you could create a new account now and lock in the current annual price (individual) for another year. 🤷♂️
this is so bad . I heavily rely on canva.
For most people, Canva is now the standard tool, and I can’t work without it.
Even if there were a price increase (for Pro subscribers), I think the majority of people would rather pay more than find something cheaper or build something new from scratch. Finding alternative solutions can also indirectly lead to higher costs in the long run.
Canva’s main users are people who don’t have design skills, don’t have time to learn other tools, and just need to get things done.
They’d rather pay more than deal with something complicated. Anyway, my two cents on the topic.
exactly you are saying right.
Building a Canva competitor isn't all that easy.. I've been building one for the past 1.5 years and it's nowhere near where I want it to be, even though it's much easier now.
But this is indeed a massive opportunity and I can't wait to see how everything plays out!
Hi Andrei,
Great to hear that you're actually working on something similar. I would love to connect and see if i contribute in some way possible :)
Same situation at Genolve, users said it was too hard to use. Added AI assisted design and users are not impressed because Canva and everyone else are also doing it.
Interesting. I can't see the image from the original tweet. Is not loading. I have canvas team and I just got a email saying that my plan (Small Teams) go from 125 to 150 per year. I don't think that is too crazy. Maybe those users has very old pricing and now, they are adjusting?
It's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out. Think we have to take into consideration Canva's main customer is someone without much experience, which makes it even more mind boggling why they would hike the Team plan instead of the Individual plan.