Two design giants, two philosophies, two very different AWS invoices.
Last month, Figma’s public filings revealed something that made every developer’s wallet hurt: $545 million over five years in AWS costs. That’s $300,000 every single day flowing from Figma’s bank account to Amazon.
Figma reports 13 million monthly active users (MAUs), meanwhile, Canva with 100M+ monthly active users spends 20-40% less on AWS with a 9x larger user base.
Both have built billion-dollar businesses, but their architectures are opposites. One optimizes for real-time precision, the other for content at scale.
🔑 Figma vs Canva: Key Differences
| Aspect | 🎨 Figma | 🖌️ Canva |
|---|---|---|
| Total AWS Cost | $545M over 5 yrs (~$109M/yr) | Est. $50–80M/yr |
| Primary Cost Driver | Compute (real-time sync) | Storage (230 PB+) |
| Architecture | Real-time, compute-intensive | Template-based, storage-intensive |
| User Interaction | Continuous collaboration | Individual sessions |
🌍 Two Worlds of Design
👥 The Figma Universe: Professional Collaboration
- UI/UX designers, product teams, developers
- Real-time editing with live cursors & instant updates
- Sub-100ms sync required for 50+ concurrent editors
💡 Figma isn’t just a tool, it’s a multiplayer design engine.
🚀 The Canva Ecosystem: Democratized Design
- Marketers, teachers, small business owners
- Template-based workflows, asynchronous edits
- Content exported more than it’s co-edited
💡 Canva scales by serving “good enough” design to millions.
🏗️ Architectural Philosophy
⚡ Figma: Built for Microsecond Precision
- Frontend: C++ → WebAssembly, WebGL, React bindings
- Backend: Ruby/Sinatra APIs, Rust multiplayer engine, custom GraphQL (“LiveGraph”), sharded Postgres + Redis
- Goal: Make distributed teams feel co-located
📦 Canva: Optimized for Content Delivery
- Frontend: React + HTML5 Canvas
- Backend: PHP/Java services, RDS, DynamoDB, CloudFront CDN
- Storage: 230+ PB in S3, 75M+ stock photos, 300B+ objects
- Goal: Global template serving at scale
💰 AWS Bill Breakdown
🖥️ Figma – $300K/day
- Compute (60%): real-time engine, session management
- Storage (20%): files, versioning, assets
- Networking (20%): WebSockets, CDN, inter-region sync
📂 Canva – ~$150–200K/day
- Storage (70–80%): templates, user uploads, stock libraries
- Networking (10–15%): 22M+ daily image requests via CDN
- Compute (10–15%): template customization & web servers
⏱️ The “Real-Time Tax”
- Traditional app: Request → Response (200–500ms) → Cheap
- Figma: Continuous microsecond sync (<100ms) → Expensive
👉 Figma spends more on compute alone ($180K/day) than many unicorns spend on their entire cloud footprint.
🎯 Business Strategy Shaped by Architecture
💼 Figma = High-Value Enterprise
- Premium contracts, network effects, developer integrations
- Fewer users, higher revenue per seat
🌐 Canva = Mass-Market Consumer
- Freemium funnel, economies of scale in storage
- Huge user base, lower ARPU
🔧 The Optimization Paradox
- Canva: Saves millions by shifting PBs to cheaper S3 tiers
- Figma: Can’t cut latency without breaking the product
🧭 Lessons for Builders
- 🚀 Product vision drives your AWS bill
- 🏗️ Architecture choices create long-term financial commitments
- 📊 Success metrics differ: quality of sync vs volume of content
- ☁️ The cloud is powerful, but custom workloads = custom costs
🔮 The Future of Design Infra
- Higher infra costs as more tools add real-time features
- AWS/others may launch “multiplayer-as-a-service” offerings
- Edge compute adoption to reduce sync latency
✅ Conclusion: Different Problems, Different Prices
- Figma’s $300K/day = the cost of real-time magic for teams.
- Canva’s lower bill = content-at-scale efficiency.
- Both reflect perfect alignment between user needs and technical architecture.
💡 The real lesson: your cloud bill is a mirror of your product philosophy.
