Microsoft Designer

You need to consider one thing: whether the image is for personal use or work. Everything else in Designer is free.

Who it is for. For anyone who needs a ready-made post, greeting card, or invitation rather than a bare image: describe it in words, get a layout with text, then change the font and size for the right social network. Fifteen free credits a month are enough for a greeting card for Grandma and a channel cover.

Who else. For those who already have a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription: since 01.16.2025, it includes 60 credits per month for images, shared with Copilot in Word and Excel, so there is nothing extra to pay for.

Who it is not for. Not for people creating layouts for work: according to the help center and terms, the service is licensed only for personal, non-commercial use, and Microsoft gives no guarantee that an image won't infringe someone else's rights.

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Three modes on the first screen: create with AI, edit a photo with AI, and make a layout from scratch. Generation here is the first step, not the result, and each one spends a credit from the shared wallet.

Create with AI. Type into the "What do you want to design?" field and choose a template type; there are sixteen on display, from posts and invitations to stickers, wallpapers, and coloring pages. As of Jun 9, 2026, the "new" tag appears on invitations and banners. A collage takes up to ten of your photos, an invitation offers up to five options, and the service adds a caption and hashtags to a post. Then the layout opens in the editor, where fonts, colors, and sizes are adjusted manually, and one layout is adapted for several formats at once.

Edit a photo. The second mode works with your photo: remove or replace the background, erase an unwanted object, add a frame, redraw it in another style, or upscale to 4K. Editing spends credits just like generation, as the help line "image generation and editing in Designer" puts it. The image below shows this 2024-era editor with a credit counter in the header.

Layout from scratch. The third mode has no AI: 42 canvas formats, from an Instagram square and LinkedIn post to an A4 sheet, an email signature, and a PowerPoint cover. A performance marketer who reviewed the service on vc.ru on Feb 8, 2024 counted six to eight fonts per layout, found no letter-spacing or line-spacing controls, and called background removal clumsy. The testimony is two years old, and the editor has changed since then.

Credits. One generation of an image set spends one credit, and image editing does too. A free account gets 15 credits per month, Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers get 60, and this is one shared wallet with Copilot in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Slow mode is gone: since January 2025, every image is created at full speed, and at zero the service stops until the next month.

Three names. The generator inside is called Image Creator and lives as a second door on the Bing site. A third name nearby is Copilot: in Teams the Designer bot was replaced by it as of Feb 27, 2026, in PowerPoint the same tools live as the "Designer editor", and the product has had no news of its own since 17.07.2024. Meanwhile the site was updated on Sep 2, 2026 and the iPhone build on Sep 4, 2026, and leaving Teams does not touch personal use.

What the vendor itself shows. The animation above the card comes from the designer.microsoft.com homepage, file dated 08.21.2026: it types the prompt "a post about launching my clothing line," with eight layouts arranged around it. It contains no product window, and the vendor does not publish images of the current interface; the newest images of the window date to 2023 and 2024. We did not test Designer for this task ourselves.

Four doors: website, iPhone, Android and Windows.

Step 1. Sign in with a Microsoft account, no subscription is needed to sign in. Designer has no official list of countries, the server decides by your address.

Step 2. Open designer.microsoft.com, type what you want to create in the field, or switch to the Image Creator tab for a bare image. Credits are shown in the header; the phone screenshots below show nine.

Apps. iPhone: App Store, iOS 17 required, build 1.0.35 from 04.09.2026. Android: Google Play, the build has not been updated since 11.02.2026. Windows: an app from the Microsoft Store, 2.4 MB, a wrapper around the site. In Word and PowerPoint the same tools open through Copilot with a subscription.

Files. Projects are stored in the Microsoft cloud and count toward the shared storage quota, which is 5 GB for a free account. There is no trash; a deleted project cannot be restored.

Steps verified on Sep 6, 2026 against the live designer.microsoft.com storefront, the Designer help pages and the app store listings

There is nothing to measure: there are no rankings for layout editors, and Microsoft's large figures relate to other products.

What this means. Designer has no numbers of its own: Microsoft has never once said how many people use it, and the billion images and 84 million subscribers belong to other products. The only honest number about the product itself is 5 million installs on Android.

Demand. Its place among image tools is shown under the card title, the full tool ranking lives on the shared page.

Designer itself is free; Microsoft 365 subscription is paid.

Free. A free Microsoft account is enough to sign in. A free account gets 15 credits per month for generating and editing images, a number from Microsoft's 11/18/2025 notice to administrators that the vendor does not state on public pages. Once they run out, the service creates nothing until the next month and offers a subscription.

Subscription. Microsoft 365 Personal costs $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year, Family $12.99 or $129.99, and both provide 60 credits per month for everything at once, with Family only for the owner. Premium for $19.99 promises usage beyond limits. Basic provides no images at all. The first month is free for all three.

Copilot Pro is discontinued. The $20 plan with a hundred boosts per day stopped being sold on 10/01/2025, support for old subscriptions ended on 08/01/2026, and its storefront leads to Premium. Designer help still directs users to it for access in Word and PowerPoint.

What changed in 2025. Previously, 15 boosts per day were free, and a boost only sped up generation rather than limiting it. From 01/16/2025, a boost became a credit; a credit permits generation, and 15 per day became 15 per month. A Google Play review about this change received 1,067 “helpful” marks (01/20/2025).

Three questions: can you use images in your work, what Microsoft does with your prompts, and how it labels things made by AI.

Whose images. Microsoft does not claim rights to images, and you determine yourself what rights you have to the result under the Services Agreement. The limitation applies not to the image but to the tool itself: help twice states that Designer is licensed for personal, non-commercial use, while the 05/31/2024 terms prohibit using it in the course of trade or commerce. In return, you grant Microsoft a royalty-free license to prompts and results, with the right to sublicense it.

Who is responsible. Microsoft gives no guarantee that an image does not infringe others’ rights and advises consulting a lawyer; you will be responsible for responding to a third-party claim. The promise to defend the user in court, available for enterprise Copilot, does not apply to consumer Designer. The vendor reserves the right to shut down the service entirely at any time.

Data. Microsoft collects and stores prompts and their responses, as stated in help; the purposes are named directly: fighting abuse and improving the service. Designer pages make no promise not to train models on your data; that promise exists only for enterprise Copilot. The documents live in the US, and the governing rules are the Microsoft Services Agreement, where Image Creator from Designer is listed separately.

Labels and filters. The service attaches Content Credentials under the C2PA standard to everything created or edited by AI; the label can be checked on the standard's website, and Copilot terms dated 08/18/2026 prohibit removing it. The vendor itself calls its content filter imperfect. In January 2024, explicit deepfakes of a famous singer were made through Designer by bypassing the filter through the spelling of her name. Microsoft closed the bypass on 01/29/2024 and described its consumer AI services safety framework on 02/13/2024.

Age and reviews. Generative features are age-gated, the threshold depends on the region and is not published, and the stores put labels on it from 3+ to 12+. Ratings differ across storefronts: 4.53 in the US App Store on 554 ratings and 3.8 in the US Google Play as of 06.09.2026.

Over four years, PowerPoint's layout-suggestion feature became a standalone app, gained DALL·E, lost boosts and brand kits, and began dissolving into Copilot.