Can You Use Free Fonts, Canva Images and AI Images Commercially on a Business Website? Checking the Terms Source by Source (2026)

Picture the car park in front of a shopping mall. A big sign at the entrance says "Free Parking", so you drive in without a second thought. But walk over to the small sign beside the ticket machine and there is a second set of rules: free for the first two hours, only with a receipt from a shop inside, no overnight parking. People who read the small sign park for free every day. People who only read the big one eventually come back to find a fine tucked under the windscreen wiper.

Free fonts, free photos and images made by AI work exactly the same way. "Free" is the big sign at the entrance. Where you are actually allowed to use them is written on the small sign, which is called the licence, and every source writes theirs differently.

Lately I see a lot of people searching questions like these: can I use the Kanit font commercially, can I use Canva fonts commercially, can I use AI images commercially. These questions come from people who want to get it right from the start, which is great. So in this article I will walk through the small print of the sources Thai SMEs use most, looking at it from the point of view of a business website. I read every condition in this article on each source's own page in September 2026, and every provider can change its terms at any time, so open the page again before you rely on it.

One more thing before we start: I build websites, I am not a lawyer. What I can tell you is what each source's terms say and what we have seen in real projects. If your question is about the law itself, the people best placed to answer it are Thailand's Department of Intellectual Property.

Check your own website first, in under five minutes

If you already have a website, open your homepage in Google Chrome on a computer. Right-click the biggest heading on the page and choose Inspect. A developer panel opens; click the Computed tab and scroll to the very bottom. There you will find Rendered Fonts, which tells you the font the browser is really using to draw that text. Do the same with an ordinary paragraph. Most websites only use two or three fonts, so write the names down.

Then go through the big images on your homepage: the banner, the service photos, the team photo. For each one, ask where it came from. Did we shoot it ourselves, hire a photographer, buy it from a stock site, download it from a free photo site, make it in Canva, or have AI generate it? If you cannot answer, right-click the image and search it with Google Lens. Sometimes you will find the exact same photo for sale on a stock site.

You usually end up with three piles. The first is things whose origin you know clearly. The second is things you roughly remember downloading from somewhere but whose terms you never read. The third is things you have no idea about, because a previous web developer put them there. The rest of this article helps you deal with piles two and three.

"Free" and "allowed for commercial use" are two different questions

Every font and every photo has an owner, even when it is given away for free. What the owner does is write down what other people are allowed to do with it. Those conditions are the licence. Some owners allow almost anything, some only allow personal use, some allow commercial use as long as you give credit, and some only let you use their work inside their own software.

Almost every business website counts as commercial use, because it exists to sell or to find customers. So the question for each font or image cannot stop at "is it free?". You also need to ask whether this source's licence allows use on a business website, what conditions come with it, and whether you have proof if someone asks.

Checking the conditions source by source

Google Fonts and Thai fonts such as Kanit, Prompt and Sarabun

Good news first. The Google Fonts FAQ says plainly that every font in the library is open source and free of charge, can be used commercially, can be used in a logo, and can be used on websites, apps, print and shop fronts. The Thai fonts people ask about most, including Kanit, Prompt, Sarabun, Mitr, Itim, Mali, Sriracha, Chonburi, Anuphan, Noto Sans Thai and IBM Plex Sans Thai, are all in the Google Fonts file repository under the SIL Open Font License version 1.1, for example the Kanit licence file from its designers at Cadson Demak.

The one thing the SIL Open Font License clearly forbids is selling the font files on their own. Work you create with the font, such as a web page, a flyer or a logo, does not have to follow the font's licence. If you want a Thai font for a business website without overthinking it, this library is the safest place to start.

There is one small exception worth knowing. Not every font with Google in its name is in this library. Google states on the same page that Product Sans may only be used in Google's own products, while Google Sans only moved to the SIL Open Font License in November 2025 and could not be used by the public before that. If you find a font name on your site and you are not sure, search for it on fonts.google.com first.

Thailand's 13 national standard fonts

Many Thai websites use TH Sarabun New or other fonts from the same set, because they are familiar from government documents. This set has a clear origin. NSTDA's summary of the Cabinet resolution of 7 September 2010 explains that all 13 fonts are owned by SIPA together with the Department of Intellectual Property and are distributed for free use without copyright problems.

The finer details, such as whether you may modify the fonts or what you must include when you pass them on, sit in the licence file that ships with the font set. I have not opened that file myself, so I will not summarise it for you. If your website uses these fonts, read the licence file in the set you downloaded and keep it alongside the font files.

Canva

This is the source people misunderstand most. Canva is very easy to use, and designs that come out of Canva really can be used commercially in many cases. But if you read the Canva Content License Agreement from start to finish, you find three small signs that matter for websites.

The first is about fonts. Section 9A says Canva's fonts may only be used within Canva, or as part of a design exported from Canva, and must not be installed or used outside Canva. So a banner made in Canva with nice lettering inside the image is fine on your website. But if you love that font so much that you want your developer to use it for all the text on your site, Canva's terms do not cover that. You need a licence for that font from its owner.

The second is about size. Section 5A says unedited Pro content used in web pages is limited to 480,000 pixels per file, roughly 600 by 800 pixels, unless the site is published through Canva's own website feature or the Canva design is embedded on the page. A large full-width banner that uses a Pro photo as it is deserves a second look.

The third is about logos. Section 9 forbids using Canva content as part of a trademark or business name, with an exception for fonts. If your shop's logo is built from Canva icons or graphics, you should know the terms do not allow it. On top of that, content labelled Branded Content or Education Content cannot be used commercially at all, and Canva Education accounts may only use Pro content for educational purposes. If someone has been using a child's student account to make things for the shop, that needs a separate account.

Freepik, now renamed Magnific

If you open Freepik's terms today, you are taken to the Magnific Terms of Use, last updated in June 2026, which state that Freepik is now Magnific. Two conditions matter most for a website owner. First, free users may use the content, but every use must credit the website, while paying users do not need to give credit. Second, the content may not be used, in whole or in part, in a trademark.

The situation we see most often is a site using images downloaded with a free Freepik account and no credit anywhere on the page. If that is you, either add the credit or switch to a paid plan.

Unsplash and Pexels

These two are the friendliest free photo sites in this group. The Unsplash License allows free use for commercial and non-commercial purposes, with no permission needed and no credit required. What it forbids is selling the photos without significant modification, and compiling photos to build a similar or competing service.

The Pexels License is similar. You can use the photos on websites, online shops and ads without giving credit, but there are three points a business site should notice. You may not use the photos as part of a trademark or business name, you may not imply that the people or brands in the photo endorse your product, and you may not show identifiable people in a bad light. The middle one matters for clinic and health product websites: a smiling person from a free photo site placed next to a review can make readers think that person is a real customer.

Images made by AI

This area is the newest and is still changing fastest. There are two sources worth holding on to. In Thailand, Thansettakij reported on 30 May 2023 that the Department of Intellectual Property stated on its page that works created entirely by AI cannot be registered for copyright, and that works made jointly by people and AI must say so clearly when registered. In the United States, the US Copyright Office report of January 2025 concludes that, with current technology, prompts alone do not make the user the author of the output.

For a website owner, there is one practical point I would like you to remember. If you have AI generate an image and use it as it is, you may not own that image in a way that lets you stop others from using it. It is perfectly fine as an illustration or background, but think carefully before making it your logo or your brand's main visual. Also, every AI tool has its own terms for using its output. I tried to open the terms pages of some popular tools and could not, so I will not summarise them. If you use one, open its Terms page and read it yourself.

"Who is going to check a small website like ours?"

I understand that feeling, and to be honest, many business websites use fonts or images outside their terms for years without anyone saying a word. I do not want this article to keep anyone awake at night.

But Thai font owners really do enforce their rights. The clearest case in the news came in August 2022, when Komchadluek reported that the designer who owns the "Thailand" font filed a police complaint against the Pencak Silat Association of Thailand for using the font without permission on the national team's competition uniforms at the 31st SEA Games. The two sides had already tried mediation through the Department of Intellectual Property without reaching an agreement. The font owner claimed one million baht in damages, the association offered between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand baht, and it issued an apology saying the use was a misunderstanding by the team that made the uniforms.

This case did not happen on a website, and the report does not say how it ended. I mention it for one reason: look at the association's explanation. A misunderstanding by the team that made the uniforms. The people who chose the font were not the executives, but the organisation was the one that had to deal with it. Websites work the same way. Fonts and images are mostly chosen by the web developer or designer, but the name on the website is your business.

Fixing it now is far easier than fixing it later

Fonts and images have a habit of spreading the longer you use them. A font that starts in the headings of your website can, a year or two later, be on your shop sign, business cards, menu, packaging and hundreds of old posts. A banner image can end up on flyers and in ads too.

While your website is only a few pages, changing a font might take a few hours. Once that font is on everything your brand touches, changing it becomes a full rebrand. I do not have an average cost figure to give you, because every business is very different, but the direction is always the same: the sooner you know, the more cleanly you can fix it.

If you are about to build a new website, this is the best moment to talk about it. I wrote about what to prepare before speaking to a web team in What to Prepare Before Building a Website, so add questions about where your fonts and images come from to that list. And if you are weighing up whether to improve your current site or start again, read New Website vs Fix Existing alongside it.

The minimum every website should have: a record of where fonts and images come from

What I would like every website to have is not a lawyer or special software. One table in Google Sheets is enough. One row per font or image, with columns for the file or font name, the page where it is used, the source, the licence name, whether credit is required, and a link to the proof, such as the licence page, the purchase receipt or the email granting permission.

A table like this looks boring, but it works like the parking receipt you keep in your wallet. On a normal day nobody asks to see it. On the day someone does, you can pull it out straight away. And on the day you change web developers, the new team knows immediately what can stay and what needs care.

For AI images, add one more column: which tool made it and when, and if you edited it afterwards, what you changed. This matters more and more as copyright offices start separating the parts made by people from the parts made by AI.

A five-step plan you can start this week

1. Check your website using the method above, write down every font, and sort the images into the three piles by origin.

2. For any font whose origin or licence you cannot find, pick a similar-looking font from Google Fonts to replace it. The Thai fonts in that library cover almost every kind of business website.

3. Replace images whose origin you cannot find with photos you took yourself or images from a source whose terms you have read. Add credit for images from a free Freepik account, and resize or replace Canva Pro images that exceed the size limit.

4. Create the record of fonts and images, and keep every piece of proof in one folder.

5. Agree with your web developer that from now on, every new font or image going onto the site needs a row in that table first.

How do you know the check is finished?

The measure I use is simple. Count how many fonts and images your website has in total, then count how many have a row in the table with proof. The goal is for those two numbers to match. If your website only has a few pages, the first check usually takes less time than you expect.

After that you do not need to check the whole site often. Just keep the rule that every new item goes into the table before it goes onto the site, and once a year open the licence pages of the sources you use most to see whether anything has changed. Freepik becoming Magnific this year is a good example of how the small print really does change.

Back to the car park

The people who park for free every day without ever being fined are not luckier than everyone else. They read the small sign once and keep their receipt every time. Fonts and images on your website are the same. There are plenty of good free resources out there; you just need to know what each source's terms say and keep the proof where you can find it.

If you have checked your website and found so much in the third pile that you do not know where to start, or you are about to build a new website and want to get this right from day one, tell the TumWebSME team about it. We can help you see which fonts and images can stay, which should be replaced, and what kind of website suits your business. You can see our packages and prices on the website development packages page.

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