Why we built Cleanr instead of another Canva
Last year, a customer emailed us asking why her phone's photo app was easier to use than every editor she'd tried. She wasn't wrong. I'd spent months watching people juggle five separate apps to do one job: clean up a photo, remove something unwanted, swap the sky, add text. Then they'd hunt for an editor that didn't slap a watermark on the result unless they paid £4.99 per export.
The problem we kept hearing about
When you talk to enough people about photo editing, you notice a pattern. Users don't want design superpowers. They want to fix what's broken in a photo, not learn Photoshop. Canva is brilliant at one thing: layouts, templates, graphic design on a grid. It's a canvas-first tool. But if you've got a portrait with a messy background, a blemish on someone's face, or a photo from 1987 that needs colour brought back to life, Canva makes you jump through menus and paywalls.
What frustrated us most was the psychology. Free tiers exist, but they're designed to feel incomplete. Download an image and you're met with a watermark. Use a few features and suddenly there's a credit system you don't understand. The experience is built to make you feel trapped.
We wanted something different. Not a design studio dressed up as a photo editor. An actual photo editor.
What 22 tools means in practice
The moment we settled on what Cleanr would be, we stopped thinking in features and started thinking in problems. A user with a product photo for their Etsy shop needs to: remove the shadow beside the item, brighten the image, maybe adjust the background. That's object removal, auto-enhance, and background replacement in under two minutes on Cleanr. On Canva, you're starting from scratch with a template.
We included old photo restoration because we got a message from someone who wanted to colourize a black and white photo of their grandparents. One tool, one tap, naturalistic colour brought back via our CIColorCube approach. Sky replacement with six presets because photographers kept saying they loved the moment but hated the grey sky. Night denoise because iPhone 11s produce noisy photos in low light. Text overlays and watermark grids because creators need to add their handle or branding without opening another app.
Every tool is either solving a specific editing job or removing friction. None of them exist to make the app feel premium.
The faith creator story
Three months in, we noticed something unexpected. A significant number of downloads came from church staff, worship leaders, and Christian content creators. They were using Cleanr to clean up photos for sermon graphics, social posts, newsletters. One user sent us a message asking if we could add scripture overlays because she was manually typing Bible verses into text fields.
We built Faith Mode. Warm, inviting presets paired with curated scripture overlays. Not as an add-on or premium tier. Part of the free app. We made this choice because we realized that a worship leader on a church budget shouldn't have to choose between a paid design tool and making content that represents her community well.
It's not a feature that sells subscriptions. But it's why some users open Cleanr first instead of reaching for something else.
The actual economics of free
Here's something Canva does brilliantly: free tier that works, then premium that feels worth it. We learned from that. Our free version isn't a handicapped demo. Three enhancements per day, three background removals, unlimited frames, no watermark on exports. If you're cleaning up one or two photos a week, you might never need to pay. Honest pricing follows.
The people who upgrade to Plus (£3.99 a month or £29.99 a year) are usually small business owners shooting product photos regularly or creators who batch process ten photos at a time. Pro tier adds a commercial licence and generative fill for when you need to remove something more complex. AI Pro unlocks selective adjustments, tone curves, and face retouch.
We don't hide pricing behind a login. We don't use a credit system. We don't make the free tier feel like a trap. That was non-negotiable from day one.
Speed versus flexibility
Here's where Canva and Cleanr serve genuinely different people. Canva is for anyone who wants to design something from a blank canvas. Social post template, poster, branded graphic. You're making something new. Cleanr is for anyone who has a photo and wants to make it better without learning software. Auto-enhance does in one tap what takes ten minutes in Lightroom. Smart crop gives you six aspect ratios and suggests the best framing. Object removal uses content-aware fill, not some clunky brush tool.
If you're designing a campaign, Canva wins. If you're taking a selfie before a date and want to clear up a blemish without opening a second app, Cleanr wins. If you're a small business owner with 50 product photos that need to be brightened and have their backgrounds changed to white, Cleanr's batch process gets it done in minutes.
That's the distinction we keep in mind when we're deciding what to build next.
What we're not trying to be
We're not building the Swiss Army knife of design. We're not chasing Photoshop's feature set. We're not adding filters and presets just to pad a spec sheet. And we're very much not interested in dark patterns. No surprise subscriptions. No artificial limits designed to frustrate you into paying.
Our roadmap is shaped by actual messages from people using Cleanr to do real work. A photographer asking for better JPEG artifact removal. A content creator wanting HSL colour controls. Someone restoring old family photos asking for better noise reduction.
The comparison to Canva will always exist. Both sit on the phone next to Photos and Snapseed. But we're solving for different moments in someone's day. Canva for when you're creating. Cleanr for when you're fixing.
If you've been using multiple apps to do one job, wondering why photo editing feels either oversimplified or overcomplicated, you might be exactly who Cleanr was made for. What's the last photo you gave up on because editing it felt like more work than it was worth?