Photopea puts no editing feature behind a paywall, and sells you silence instead

81 puts Photopea in our Strong band, level with Penpot and behind only Inkscape at 91 and draw.io at 87 in this category. Feature depth is the standout pillar at 90, because for raster editing nothing else free here is close, and Canva free does not do layered photo editing at all.

The score and the category rank disagree slightly and we are leaving that alone. Photopea holds rank 4 on our design list while scoring above the two tools ranked above it, because rank weighs the whole job a tool does and this category is dominated by UI design and whiteboarding work that Photopea does not attempt. On the narrow question this page asks, how far zero dollars gets you, it is one of the best answers in the category.

Sentiment at 62 rests on G2 4.7 and Capterra 4.5 (checked 24 July 2026). Because every editing feature is free and Premium only removes ads, a reviewer here is likelier to be a free user than at most tools we score, but we hold no free-tier reports to prove that, so it sits only just above the middle.

The free tier has three ceilings and none of them is an editing tool (as of July 2026):

• Ads beside the canvas. Fine for a ten-minute job. Wearing over a two-hour retouch session, and they take screen space you would rather give the image.
• 0.5GB of PeaDrive storage. This is Photopea's own cloud, and it is small. Most people work from local files and never touch it, which is the easy way around.
• About one AI action per day. The AI background remover lives here, so the free answer to Canva's paywalled background remover is itself rationed to roughly one use daily.

Two more limits sit outside the pricing question. Very large files push against browser memory, so a 2GB PSD is genuinely better handled by a native application than by a tab. And Photopea cannot be self-hosted, which matters because of the last point.

We will name the dependency plainly rather than bury it: one developer, Ivan Kutskir in Prague, has built and maintained the entire product since 2012. Fourteen years of reliability is a real track record and it is still a single point of failure, with no open source fork to inherit it. That is not a reason to avoid Photopea. It is a reason to keep your source files on your own disk, which you should be doing anyway.

Premium starts at $5 a month and buys you no editing capability whatsoever. It removes the ads, doubles the undo history, raises PeaDrive from 0.5GB to 5GB, and includes 3,000 AI credits a month. That is the entire ladder. There is no second paid tier and no enterprise quote.

The billing model deserves more credit than it gets. Premium is sold as 30, 90 and 365-day passes that do not auto-renew, with 90 days at $15. You buy time and it runs out, rather than a subscription you forget to cancel. In a category where the default is annual billing with a monthly penalty attached, this is the rarer and fairer arrangement.

One practical note: there is no separate pricing page. Premium is shown inside the app under Account, which is why our pricing link points at photopea.com itself.

Who upgrades, in practice, is anyone who edits daily. If Photopea is open for two hours a day, $5 to reclaim the sidebar is easy arithmetic. If you open it twice a month to fix a client's PSD, the free tier costs you nothing but patience.

Yes. Every editing feature is on the free tier with no watermark, no account requirement and no export restriction, so the job Photopea exists for is fully doable at zero cost indefinitely.

Who this genuinely covers: someone who needs Photoshop occasionally and cannot justify Creative Cloud, anyone opening a PSD a designer sent them, people on Chromebooks or locked-down work machines where installing software is not an option, and anyone hitting Canva's Pro wall on photo edits. Who should look elsewhere: professionals working on very large files daily, where browser memory becomes the constraint and a native app wins, and anyone who needs an open source guarantee, because Photopea is closed source and cannot be self-hosted.

For vector work rather than raster, Inkscape's free plan is the free tool with the same "no paid tier" character. Free Photopea alternatives covers the swaps, and best free design and whiteboarding tools ranks the category.