If you have been looking for a remove.bg alternative, the reason is no longer taste. remove.bg has announced that its standalone website stops working at 9:00 am CET on December 1, 2026. Canva has owned it since 2021 and is folding the background remover into canva.com, while the developer API moves to Leonardo.ai, another Canva company.
Which alternative is right depends on what you were actually doing there. A one-off cutout for a slide, product photos for a shop, an automated pipeline, or the same kind of photo every single day each has a different best answer. For the first, the honest answer is that your phone or computer can probably already do it for free. The seven below are all real and all still working after December 1. The first is ours, OOTD Pal, and it leads for one specific habit, explained below. It is not trying to be a general replacement.
What changes on December 1, 2026
From remove.bg's own FAQ:
- The website and accounts stop at 9:00 am CET. Export your credit usage reports and invoices from the Account page before then; they cannot be downloaded afterwards.
- Annual subscriptions end automatically and unused time after December 1 is refunded pro rata to the original payment method, with nothing for you to do.
- Monthly subscriptions run until the cutoff, and the last renewal on or after November 1 is free.
- Pay-as-you-go credits expire on December 1. Use them before then.
- The self-serve API stops accepting requests. Enterprise API contracts continue as normal.
- The Photoshop plugin and other integrations end. remove.bg suggests Affinity, which is free and has the same background removal built in, though using that feature requires Canva Pro.
One practical step: download any transparent PNGs you still need, and keep your original photos somewhere you control.
1. OOTD Pal — when you cut out the same kind of photo every day
Plenty of people used remove.bg for one repeating job: cutting themselves out of an outfit photo to post, collage or keep. OOTD Pal is an outfit diary for iPhone that does that step for you. Snap or import the look you wore and on-device AI cuts the outfit out of its background automatically. You can then pin it to an Outfit Wall, copy it as a sticker straight into a chat, or find it as today's cover on the app's Home, with the date and the weather.
The cutting happens on the phone, so the photo is never uploaded to anyone's server. There is no account, and your outfits stay on your device and in your own iCloud. The cutouts are included on every plan: OOTD Pal is free for up to 10 outfits, and an optional Premium (weekly, yearly or lifetime) adds unlimited outfits, sharing the wall without a watermark, and the Apple Watch app. If your daily cutout is food rather than clothes, our YumPal food journal does the same for meals and latte art.
Skip it if you need a general-purpose tool: product shots, logos, a folder of 200 images, or a transparent PNG at full resolution for print. OOTD Pal is built around outfits, not batch export.
2. Canva — the official home of remove.bg's technology
Canva is where remove.bg's background removal is going, so it is the most direct like-for-like move. You remove the background inside a design, then keep editing: resize, add text, drop the cutout onto a template. remove.bg's FAQ says Canva handles bulk removal too, uploading a batch and clearing every background at once, on the web or in the desktop app. That makes it the stand-in for the old desktop app.
Canva's own page says you can try the background remover free, with a limited number of high-resolution downloads, and that unlimited downloads need a paid plan.
Skip it if you only ever needed the cutout and nothing else. A full design platform is a lot of interface for one PNG.
3. Your iPhone — the free one-off with no app at all
Since iOS 16 the iPhone can lift the subject out of a photo by itself. Open a photo full screen (or pause a video), touch and hold the subject until an outline appears, then tap Copy, Add Sticker or Share. You can also keep holding and drag the subject straight into another app with a second finger. Apple's guide notes it works in Photos, Safari and Quick Look.
It is free and private, and it is fast enough for most "I just need this one person out of this one picture" moments.
Skip it if you need to control what is kept. There is no brush to fix an edge, and it works one photo at a time.
4. Preview on Mac and Paint on Windows — free on the computer you already have
On a Mac, open the image in Preview and click the Remove Background button in the markup toolbar. Preview may offer to convert the file to PNG so the transparency survives. Choose Convert, or duplicate the file first if you want to keep the original. Apple's Preview guide covers both this and tracing a shape by hand when the automatic cut misses.
On Windows 11, Paint has a remove background button in its toolbar that leaves "a smooth cutout of the subject" in one click. You can draw a rectangle selection first to limit it to part of the image, as described in Microsoft's announcement.
Skip it if your images have hair, fur or glass against a busy background. Both are good everyday tools, not retouching software.
5. Photoroom — when the photos are products you sell
Photoroom (4.8 across 230,000+ ratings on iPhone) is built for people photographing things to sell. It removes the background and then helps you put the product on a clean studio backdrop, which is what a marketplace listing needs. Its site says you can start removing backgrounds for free and upgrade for high-resolution exports and its other AI editing tools. On every paid plan (Pro, Max and Ultra), background removal costs no credits, within fair use.
Skip it if you are not selling anything; most of what you would pay for is the e-commerce layer.
6. Adobe Firefly — free daily removals with an Adobe account
Adobe Firefly removes backgrounds for free once you sign in with an Adobe ID. Free use comes out of a daily generation allowance, and a paid Firefly plan unlocks unlimited use. It takes JPG, PNG or WEBP files up to 50 MB and downloads the result as a PNG with a transparent background.
Skip it if you do not want another account; this is the only option on the list that requires one before your first cutout.
7. rembg — when you were using the API
If remove.bg was a step in a script, you have two routes. The official one is Leonardo.ai: remove.bg says its background removal API is now served there, with a migration guide. The independent one is rembg, an MIT-licensed open-source tool that runs as a command line, a Python library, a local HTTP server or a Docker container. It processes whole folders, needs no GPU, and offers a long list of models, from small fast ones to the high-detail BiRefNet family.
The trade-off is that you host it, and the model weights carry their own licences, separate from rembg's MIT one. Read the licence of the model you pick before using it commercially.
Skip it if you have never opened a terminal. Every other option on this page is point and click.
How they compare
| Option | Cost to remove a background | Account needed | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| OOTD Pal | Free for up to 10 outfits; Premium for unlimited | No | Cutting out your outfit every day, automatically and on-device |
| Canva | Free to try with limited high-res downloads; unlimited on a paid plan | Yes | Cutouts that go straight into a design, and batches |
| iPhone (built in) | Free | No | One-off cutouts from Photos, Safari or a paused video |
| Preview / Paint | Free | No | Quick cutouts on a Mac or Windows 11 PC |
| Photoroom | Free to start; high-res exports on paid plans | — | Product photos for online listings |
| Adobe Firefly | Free daily allowance; unlimited on a paid plan | Yes (Adobe ID) | Occasional cutouts if you already use Adobe |
| rembg / Leonardo.ai | rembg free (you host it); Leonardo.ai is a hosted API | rembg: no | Replacing remove.bg inside a script or app |
Which one should you pick?
Start with the thing you already own. For the occasional cutout, the free tool built into your iPhone, Mac or Windows PC is good enough most of the time, and it never uploads your photo. If you need the result inside a poster or a social post, go to Canva, where remove.bg's own technology now lives. Selling products points to Photoroom, and a script points to rembg or Leonardo.ai.
The case for an app is repetition. When you cut out the same kind of photo every day, the tapping is the real cost, not the cutout. That is why OOTD Pal does it the moment you add an outfit. If that is your habit, our roundup of wardrobe apps and OOTD vs Whering show where it fits among outfit apps.
Frequently asked questions
When does remove.bg shut down?
remove.bg's standalone website stops working at 9:00 am Central European Time on December 1, 2026. The same date ends the self-serve API, the Photoshop plugin and the other integrations, and your account and its invoices become inaccessible, so export them first. Background removal itself moves into Canva, which has owned remove.bg since 2021, and the API moves to Leonardo.ai. Enterprise API contracts continue as normal.
Is there a free remove.bg alternative?
Yes, and you may already have it. An iPhone lifts the subject out of any photo when you touch and hold it, a Mac's Preview app has a Remove Background button, and Windows 11's Paint removes a background in one click. None needs an account. Online, Canva, Photoroom and Adobe Firefly all let you start free with limits, and rembg is a free open-source tool you run on your own computer.
What replaces the remove.bg API?
remove.bg points developers to Leonardo.ai, another Canva company, which now serves the same background removal API alongside upscaling and scene generation, and publishes a migration guide. The self-serve remove.bg API stops accepting requests on December 1, 2026; enterprise contracts are unaffected. If you would rather not depend on a hosted API at all, rembg is an MIT-licensed tool that runs as a command line, a Python library or a local HTTP server, with no GPU required.
Can I remove a background on iPhone without an app?
Yes. Open a photo full screen in Photos, or pause a video, then touch and hold the subject until an outline appears. Tap Copy to paste it into a message, mail or a note, Add Sticker to keep it as a sticker, or Share to send it on. It also works in Safari and Quick Look. It handles one photo at a time, so for a daily habit such as cutting out every outfit you wear, an app that does it automatically saves the tapping.
Your outfit, cut out automatically
Snap today's look and OOTD Pal lifts it off the background on your iPhone. No upload, no account, nothing to tap.
Download OOTD Pal on the App Store →Related: the best wardrobe apps, Whering alternatives, and what local-first actually means. Questions? Email us.
