Canva cuts growth forecast by a third as AI costs soar

Canva's revenue growth cut represents a reckoning that is spreading across the software industry as companies confront a fundamental economic shift. For years, the SaaS business model rested on a critical advantage: once built, software could be delivered to millions of users at nearly zero marginal cost, making each additional customer almost pure profit. AI inference—the ongoing computational cost of running an AI model to answer a user request—breaks that assumption. Every time a Canva user asks the AI to generate a design, the company incurs a real, recurring expense that scales directly with usage.

Canva's situation is particularly telling because the company had achieved what few high-growth startups accomplish: sustained rapid growth alongside genuine profitability. The introduction of AI features validated massive user demand, but revealed that Canva's margins could not support the cost structure at scale. Rather than launch unprofitably and hope to improve economics later, Canva chose to slow its rollout—a decision that, as analyst Derek Hernandez notes, reflects concern about investor appetite for a company heading toward an IPO. Figma, Canva's closest public comparable, disclosed similar margin compression: its free-cash-flow margin fell from 27% to 14% in consecutive quarters. Both companies hit the same economic wall within days of each other, suggesting the problem is structural, not company-specific.