Photopea teardown: 21.4M visits on free editing

Photopea is a free online photo editor that runs in the browser and opens PSD files. Semrush credits it with 21.4M visits in February 2026. It charges nothing to open, nothing to install, and it processes files on your own device. The price of its premium tier is not published on a public page, so this teardown prints no price for it.

What problem does Photopea solve, and for whom?

Professional image editing has a cost problem and a weight problem. The standard tool costs a subscription and a heavy install. The free alternatives usually fail on one specific file: the PSD a client, a colleague or a template site just sent you. Photopea exists for the moment that file arrives. Its homepage opens with the line "Free Online Photo Editor" and the subhead "Unlock your creativity with the best free photo editor", then promises professional-grade tools with no downloads and no hassle.

The audience is wider than working designers. A designer needs PSD compatibility for real work. A creator needs to resize, crop and retouch a photo once. An ordinary user needs to open a file someone else made and change one layer. All three share the same complaint about the incumbent: paying every month and installing heavy software for a job that takes ten minutes. Photopea answers with a browser tab. The positioning is not "a cheaper Photoshop". It is "Photoshop's file format, without Photoshop's price or install". That distinction matters, because it lets the site borrow the incumbent's entire vocabulary, layers, masks, smart objects, adjustment layers, channels, paths, while charging nothing to start.

The product and its first screen

The homepage we read on 16 November 2026 is a feature tour, not a sales letter. Its sections, in order, are: fully local processing, cost, convenience, runs everywhere, professional editing, full PSD support, format breadth, RAW support, AI features, essential features, adjustments and filters, and vector graphics. Each section is one claim and one sentence. The local processing claim comes first after the hero: "There are no uploads. Photopea runs on your device, using your CPU and your GPU. All files open instantly, and never leave your device." That is a privacy argument and a speed argument in the same sentence, and it answers the obvious objection to a free web editor, which is where your files go.

The format list is doing the heavy lifting. Photopea opens and edits PNG, JPG, GIF, BMP, WEBP, SVG, PDF, AI, AVIF, DDS, HEIC, TIFF, MP4, TGA, CDR, PDN, EPS, INDD and Figma files, plus more, and it opens RAW formats including DNG, CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, RW2, RAF, ORF and FFF. PSD is called the main format of Photopea, with full support for opening and saving. For a tool that lives or dies on compatibility, this list is the product page and the search strategy at once. Every format named is a kind of file someone searches for help with, and every one of them is a reason to land on Photopea instead of a single-format converter.

The AI section is short and concrete: remove a background with one click, or replace part of an image with new content described in text. The editing section lists the professional toolkit without apology: layers, masks, layer styles, smart objects, adjustment layers, channels and paths, plus levels and curves, Gaussian blur, Liquify and Puppet Warp. The homepage also promises vector graphics for logos, icons and illustrations. What the homepage does not do is show a price, a plan comparison or a signup wall before the editor. The call to action is the editor itself, and the cost section says only: "Enjoy all the premium features without spending a dime." That line sits in tension with the existence of a premium tier sold inside the editor, and the pricing section below treats that tension as an open question rather than resolving it with a guess.

Pricing: what is public, and what is not

Photopea publishes no public pricing page, and our database records its pricing as not publicly disclosed. The premium price appears inside the editor after sign-in. We checked the homepage and the product description, and neither states a price, a plan name or a free limit in numbers. So this section states the facts and stops.

Three things can still be said without inventing a number. First, the free tier is the product, not a demo of it. The homepage describes a full editor, layers through Puppet Warp, and calls it free. Second, a premium tier exists, since the master record for this site notes that the premium price is shown inside the editor after sign-in, and the homepage's own cost section refers to premium features. Third, the paywall position is unknown from public pages. We cannot say from outside whether premium removes ads, unlocks storage, raises limits or adds features, because the homepage does not say and we do not copy claims from third-party write-ups.

The open question is worth naming plainly. A homepage that says "enjoy all the premium features without spending a dime" while a premium tier is sold inside the product is either describing a generous free tier, or describing the free tier loosely, or both at different times. A teardown that picked one reading without evidence would be guessing. The honest record is that the price is undisclosed, the free editor is fully featured on its face, and the conversion point sits inside the editor where outside observers cannot see it.

How does Photopea get its users?

Not publicly disclosed. Photopea publishes no acquisition mix, and our database holds no verified channel data for it. This section is short on purpose, and the two observations below are about structure, not measured channel shares.

First, the traffic itself is large and old enough to be structural: 21.4M visits in February 2026 per Semrush, the second largest figure in our first batch of five, behind Sejda at 24.96M. A site does not reach that level on one campaign. Second, the product shape fits search the way Sejda's toolset does. PSD compatibility is a query with intent: someone searching for a way to open or edit a PSD file has a file in hand and a deadline, and Photopea is built to be the answer. The format list extends the same logic to dozens of file types, each a separate reason to arrive. The local processing claim adds a second door, for people searching for an editor that does not upload their files. None of this is a measured channel share. The measured share is not public, and we leave it there.

From visit to payment: what can be seen from outside

The conversion story we can defend is narrow, because the paywall sits inside the product. The top of the funnel costs the user nothing: no install, no upload, no account mentioned on the homepage before editing starts. That is a deliberate removal of friction, and it matches the traffic figure. A free editor that asked for a card first would not draw 21.4M visits in a month.

Beyond that, the funnel is not visible. We do not know the conversion rate, the share of visitors who ever see a premium offer, what triggers the offer, or whether premium is sold mainly to heavy users or to teams. The homepage gives no trial language and no plan comparison to quote. A teardown that invented a funnel from the shape of other freemium editors would read better and be worth less, so the conversion section ends here with the gap marked.

Retention: what keeps people coming back?

Not publicly disclosed. Photopea publishes no churn, renewal or cohort figures in the sources we checked. The structural point is still worth making, because it is the bet the whole category rests on: image editing is a recurring chore with irregular timing. The person who opens a PSD today opens a different one next month, from a different client, and the editor that handled the first file without an install is the obvious place to take the second one.

Two features of the product support return visits without any account system being visible on the homepage. The first is format memory: once you know a site opens your file type, you stop searching and go back. The second is zero setup: returning costs one click, not a download and a login. Whether that plays out as a loyal base of repeat free users, a premium subscriber base, or both, we cannot tell from public data. Both would fit a free editor with a premium tier inside it. Neither is proven by the homepage.

Why Photopea is still standing

Our read, stated as a position you can argue with: Photopea survives because it owns the one file format that locks people into expensive software, and it gives that format away for free in a browser tab. PSD compatibility is the moat. Everything else on the page, the RAW support, the format list, the AI tools, the vector graphics, is breadth that makes the moat wider. But the moat is PSD. A free editor that could not open a PSD would be one of many. A free editor that can is the answer to a specific, recurring, urgent search.

Three structural choices reinforce the position. Local processing removes the trust objection that kills most free web tools, because the file never leaves the device. Zero install removes the commitment objection, because trying it costs nothing. And the format list turns every file type into its own doorway, so the site does not depend on a single query staying popular. The traffic figure backs the position, with its label attached: an estimated 21.4M visits in a single month (Semrush, February 2026) is not a site hanging on. It is a site that has become part of how a file gets opened.

What you can copy, and what you cannot

Copyable this week

• Pick one locked file format in your category and support it properly, for free, in the browser. Compatibility with the incumbent's format is a stronger hook than a feature list.
• Process files locally where you can, and say so in one sentence on the homepage. Privacy is a conversion argument, not a footnote.
• Remove the install and the account step before the first use. Every step before value is a reason to leave, and your traffic figure will show it.
• List the formats, file types or inputs you support by name. Each one is a separate search query and a separate door into the same product.

Not copyable

• The engineering behind full PSD support in a browser. That is years of work on one hard problem, and a feature checklist cannot reproduce it.
• The search presence behind an estimated 21.4M monthly visits. That compounds over years of ranking for format queries. You can start the same flywheel; you cannot start where Photopea is on it.
• Brand recall for a file-opening chore. Being the name someone types when a PSD lands in their inbox is an asset that a pricing page cannot show and a budget cannot quickly buy.

Risks and gaps in this teardown

• The traffic figure comes from a single source, Semrush, and is a third-party estimate. Photopea publishes no official MAU or DAU, and we found no second estimator with a figure we could print for the same month, so no range is shown.
• The traffic month is February 2026, which is nine months older than the October 2026 figures for the other four sites in the batch. The figure is the latest our database holds for Photopea, and it should be read as older evidence, not current evidence.
• Pricing is not publicly disclosed. The premium price appears inside the editor after sign-in, and no price, plan name or free limit is printed in this teardown, because printing one would mean copying it from a third-party write-up.
• Acquisition mix, conversion rates and retention are not publicly disclosed. Sections above say so rather than estimating them.
• Country breakdown is not publicly disclosed in the sources checked.
• The homepage line "enjoy all the premium features without spending a dime" sits in tension with a premium tier sold inside the editor. This teardown records both facts and does not resolve the tension.

Similar sites in the database

Site	Category	Monthly visits	Source
Sejda	PDF tools	24.96M	Semrush, Oct 2026
SmallSEOTools	SEO tools	8.37M	Semrush, Oct 2026
TinyPNG (Tinify)	Image tools / developer tools	3.86M	Semrush, Oct 2026

Side-by-side comparison pages for Photopea against these sites are part of the paid plan and are not built yet. The full database, with working filters, is on the teardowns index.