Via canva.com
Two of the biggest design platforms are learning the same lesson: shipping AI features is easy, paying for them at scale is a different story
The AI gold rush has a bill, and design software companies are starting to open the envelope.
Canva, the Australian design platform valued at roughly $42 billion, is deliberately pumping the brakes on its AI feature rollout to keep costs from spiraling. Meanwhile, Figma has taken a different but equally revealing approach: absorbing the full inference costs of its new AI tools rather than passing them along to users.
Canva’s growth forecast takes a hit #
Canva’s annual revenue growth forecast has reportedly been revised downward from around 30% to roughly 20%. The company posted Q2 revenue of $921.9 million, which represents a 25.2% year-over-year increase but still fell short of earlier expectations.
Canva has reportedly achieved close to a 90% reduction in average AI task costs through architectural improvements. But even with those gains, leadership apparently concluded that the pace of AI deployment needed to slow down to match economic reality.
CEO Melanie Perkins has framed the deceleration as a strategic choice rather than a retreat, positioning it as a way to make critical technical advancements that set up sustainable AI scaling for the long term.
Figma’s absorb-now, monetize-later gamble #
Figma, which has been rolling out AI features including a new agent system as part of its 2026 product roadmap, has chosen to eat the inference costs itself. Users get AI-powered tools without seeing a price increase, at least for now.
Figma’s valuation has faced pressure as investors scrutinize the profit margins of AI-powered design software more closely, with the company’s stock price dipping as the market reacts to the costs of this approach.
The broader AI cost reckoning #
Traditional SaaS products have near-zero marginal costs per user. AI features have meaningful per-query expenses that compound with usage. The more successful your AI features are, the more they cost you.
Both companies are also navigating competitive pressure from general-purpose AI tools like ChatGPT, which can handle many basic design and content creation tasks. Canva and Figma have to invest in AI features to stay relevant, but that investment comes with costs that don’t scale the way traditional software features do.
Canva’s 90% cost reduction in AI tasks through architectural improvements suggests there’s still significant room for optimization across the industry. For investors evaluating the design software sector, the key metric to watch isn’t just revenue growth or user acquisition. It’s the ratio of AI feature costs to the revenue those features generate.
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