Then everything came crumbling down.
In April 2026, Canva held its annual Canva Create event in California and Kim Ellis, a daily user for everything from social media posts to presentations to client proposals to website thumbnails, was very excited about the possibilities. Here’s her take on why the excitement faded so quickly.
The hype was real
I love a bit of AI, I think there’s far too much shaming going on nowadays. If I want to use it then I’m going to use it – to create, to inspire and to analyse. So when I watched the replay of the Canva Create event I was so excited to get my hands on Canva AI 2.0.
When I saw a clip from one of the Canvasadors with the secret code to get early access… it felt like Christmas. I’m a little bit impatient and love to fiddle with technology and find my way with it.
Two days later I’d built a year’s worth of content for Instagram!
I know the purists out there, the shamers, will be saying it’s all just AI drivel – but honestly I was impressed with what it gave me. Sure, I had to tweak, but I have to tweak the stuff that comes out of my brain anyway. So what’s the difference?
I just asked it for 10 tips using my Free Spirits brand kit as reference, a little bit of jiggery pokery later and the layout was set. So I asked for 10 more, then 10 more, and before I knew it I was on my way to 365 tips – all customised for freelancers and micro businesses in L&D or the people development space.
And even better, it was analysing the tips as I went, looking for duplications and gaps in content. We were working in tandem – me tweaking earlier slides while it was already thinking ahead. People talk about having a true copilot, but that’s exactly how it felt.
I was properly obsessed
To give you an idea of how obsessed I was: I started fiddling on the Saturday night while watching a movie. Dad came round on Sunday for lunch and I spent most of the day sneaking back to the laptop, or continuing on the mobile app when I thought no one was looking.
The secret code gave me seven days of unlimited creation potential… then it all came crashing down.
The limits hit…hard
Once the seven-day access ended, the limits kicked in hard. Within 30 minutes of working on a presentation for a webinar, I hit my limit – and I hadn’t even done that much. Just threw in a few ideas, got some slide layouts (which I then changed because I didn’t like them anyway).
I’m a Canva Pro user, so I upgraded to Canva Business thinking that would sort it. It didn’t take long to hit the limit again, with weeks to wait before it reset (I ended up downgrading back to Pro the same evening).
Some bits of the AI will still work with a short waits in-between but that not how I work – I’m a both feet in kind of designer, I have an idea and it has to get out of my head there and then. I don’t like to have limitations enforced.
This is not how a launch should work
I love Canva and use it daily, but this is not how a launch should be handled. Don’t give me full access so I’m completely addicted, then take it away or make it super expensive. It’s massively frustrating.
And yes, I know I can create everything from scratch. But the whole point of an AI buddy is to make my life easier, my job quicker – to be the other person in the room I can bounce ideas off. I don’t want to wait to speak to it. I don’t want to be rationing my creativity around a credits reset date.
Still excited. Still frustrated.
So here I am, back where I started – excited about what’s possible, frustrated by what’s permitted. The technology is genuinely brilliant. I just wish the people deciding how much of it we’re allowed to use would actually try using it the way we do. Because once you’ve had that full, unrestricted, flowing experience? Nothing else even comes close.
