Kapa99 Review: Is This Unlimited Graphic Design Service For You? (The Answer May Surprise You!)

Ask for file formats you need right away

If you plan to get source files of the work, ask for the source files right away in your task description.

If you have the latest Adobe Illustrator, AI format would be what you want.

However, if you don’t have it, ask for a PSD file with preserved layers.

I could not find a way to open AI files for free while preserving all the info. With PSD, I did find a way: Use photopea.com and edit it online.

Do not ask for TIFF files since they cannot do export to TIFF with layers preserved and will give you a flat file.

After getting a version of your design

Double check everything: Text, design, all the requirements.

Verify your copy (text) because it’s possible may contain errors or be adjusted.

Also, it is very possible that if you asked for the source file, you won’t get it right away.

If you did get the source file, open it to verify that all the layers and info are indeed preserved.

If you are not satisfied with the design

If you are not satisfied with the design they gave you, ask them to redo it.

Take a screenshot of the design and drawn on it to highlight all the places that need to be changed.

Now, let’s look at Kapa99 pros and cons.

Pros of Kapa99

Certainly, the service has quite some pros:

👍🏻 a true free 15-day trial (and not just 14-day money back guarantee)
👍🏻 unlimited number of tasks and brands to do in parallel
👍🏻 unlimited number of revisions
👍🏻 seems to be almost 24-48h turnout

While the speed with which they work is quite impressive, still, the delays between their emails may sometimes exceed 48h. It happened to me a couple of times without any explanation from their side.

And often, these replies were “We are still working on it!” rather than providing actual versions of the designs.

Cons of Kapa99

However, the service leans heavily on the cons side:

👎🏻 poor design quality
👎🏻 miss-or-even-more-miss, you have to verify everything they give you (including the copy in the design)
👎🏻 fast but not reliable; for example, power outages can slow them down or stuff can stop providing updates on your tasks for unknown some reason and you have to remind them about you
👎🏻 support often makes mistakes and may send you a wrong file
👎🏻 designers may often misunderstand your requirements
👎🏻 very hard to get fixes that require some major changes (like the color scheme) even if it is their fault they did not follow the brief from the beginning

While no cons look good, the first one (poor design) outweighs everything else. I included two examples of their work below so you can judge for yourself.

When the result is not great, there is no reason to continue.

The rest is just a bitter icing on the cake.

It’s not a stress-free service and pushing and pushing them to do my fixes eventually wore me out.

I eventually gave up on asking for some changes and took what they were giving to me because it was producing a net negative.

My examples of Kappa99 work

You can see examples of their work on the website.

However, based on my experience, I am not sure how representable these samples are.

I will show you a couple of infographics I got from them.

Unfortunately, I cannot present you more because I do not want to reveal my websites. That’s why I show only what I got for this blog and the one I won’t use.

Tree care infographic

This infographic was re-done 3 times and they still did not manage to do it right!

I dunno maybe I do not explain well what I want? 🤔

Here’s the first brief; it came along with a spreadsheet with 4 columns and 4 rows:

And here’s the result I got. The info is presented clearly; however, the design is totally not what I asked for!

It helped and the result seemed to be much better… until you try to read what’s written on it 😱

What I got after that was this 😱🤦🏻‍♀️

That was my breaking point.

After that, I asked for a source file of the previous design and got it after sending two emails. It was not enough to ask only once 🤦🏻‍♀️

The next example of their work is actually better.

Get your first U.S. credit card in Canada infographic

This design was made for this post.

I have to say that this particular infographic is not that bad (compared to the others).

It was done at the very end of the trial and by that time, I learned I should simplify my data and make very clear instructions instead of relying on the flow of the creative juices of the designers. I sent it for the review only once because I noticed a typo in my own copy.

Here’s the design layout I prepared for this task.

and the text was presented in a spreadsheet:

For me, this design is much better than the first one but still, it looks a bit too simplistic and unprofessional.

My experience with Kappa99

Ok, here comes the surprise part that is probably already not so surprising 🤣

I did not like the service.

You might think that if I write a review with an affiliate link in it, it always means I would recommend the service and will try hard to sell it to you.

Nope.

I want my blog to be useful to you guys and that’s why I also write about services I did not like.

Also, who said my opinion is 100% correct and matches yours? Maybe, you will like them.

Preps before starting

I heard of Kapa99 in one of the closed affiliate marketing FB groups a while ago and always wanted to try it out. The free trial looked really appealing and I am always in a need of new images.

I just needed to accumulate a lot of stuff and send them all at once.

Recently, I started creating a few Skyscraper in-depth posts for two websites and saw an opportunity to try out Kapa99 for infographic design.

For me, the most difficult part was to actually organize the information in such a way that it can be easily presented.

If it’s a simple table with two columns (title + description), it’s easy.

But if the info is a bit more complicated, I have a hard time.

I hoped Kapa99 designers would use their creative thinking and help me with presenting the information in a nice way.

Well, I was mistaken.

Getting the first task done

As I mentioned above, when you submit a task, you fill some kind of questionnaire to provide info about your project, your vision, color scheme, examples of how your design should look like, etc.

I decided to first submit only one task to see how the designer interprets my requests and adjust the rest of the tasks based on that.

Well, it was a waste of time.

It quickly became clear that there are multiple designers working with the same client (me) so “training” them or “adjusting” to their way of working is useless.

When I got the first version of my first infographic back, I could not believe my eyes.

The design quality was not good. It seemed to me the designer just wanted to fit it all my info on one single vertical image without putting any designer thoughts into it.

The infographic looked basically like a spreadsheet table with colorful background placed on top of a vector drawing of houses and trees (it was about landscaping) under a huge title.

The table was taking only 30% of the available space and the font was very small and unreadable. The result did not look at all like the example I sent them with the task. The colors from the mood board I sent over were completely ignored as well 🤦🏻‍♀️

Getting the rest done

And that’s how my three intense and stressful weeks of the trial (I will explain later why 3 weeks) started.

I wanted to make at least 10 infographics during the trial period. However, I ended up getting only 9 with half of them still need to be redone to make them somehow usable.

In the end, I just burned out and wanted to wrap it all up as quickly as possible.

Some designs had typos or my copies (text) got changed. Fortunately, these kinds of fixes were easy to get done.

However, everything that would come to design adjustments was much much harder to obtain. I often had to request the same fix more than once and in a few cases, I just gave up.

During these 3 weeks, I learned how to create precise well-designed instructions that seemingly explained well my ideas.

However, it was not always enough.

In particular, with the first infographic from the examples above, I never managed to get a design I wanted. For this one, the Kapa99 team even went as far as redoing the whole design from scratch 3 times! But the way how they laid out my info stayed the same (not how I wanted it). I just gave up. It started having a negative impact on my life hehehehe.

Why 3 weeks of trial?

I got “lucky” and the beginning of my trial happened at the same time as their offices in Venezuela experienced a massive blackout.

Because of that, their response timing was much longer than claimed 24-48h.

I complained and had no problems extending my trial by one extra week.

Final words

As you can see, I did not like Kapa99 and do not recommend using it.

However, if you feel adventurous and want to give them a try anyway, you can sign in using my affiliate link.

Maybe, it will be right up your alley.

Good luck with your designs!

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Disclaimer: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. I will receive a small fee if you choose to buy after clicking on any of these links. Thank you if you do! 🤗