What is Canvas?
Canvas is a blank page attached to each of your paychecks. Open it and you can draw, write, and annotate freely — but it isn't a general-purpose sketchpad. It arrives already knowing what that paycheck has to cover.
It's tied to a paycheck
This is the thing to understand first. Canvas isn't a separate notebook you keep alongside the app. Each pay period has its own canvas, and opening it from the home screen opens that period's page — pre-loaded with the paycheck's amount, its savings figure, and its bills across housing, debts, and expenses.
Move to a different paycheck and you move to a different canvas. Notes you make for one period stay with it.
What it's for
Some financial thinking doesn't fit into fields. You're looking at a tight pay period and want to work out what happens if you move one bill, skip a discretionary purchase, and put the difference against a card. That's not a calculation the app can offer you a form for — it's you working something out.
Canvas is space to do that with the actual numbers already in front of you.
Typical uses:
- ›Sketching how to cover a period where bills bunched up
- ›Working out a "what if I moved this" scenario before rebuilding
- ›Circling the bills you intend to cut and doing the arithmetic in the margin
- ›Annotating a period you want to remember something about
- ›Jotting notes during a conversation with a partner about the month ahead
Where it's best
Canvas is at its most natural on a tablet with a stylus, where writing is as fast as thinking. It works with a finger on a phone and with a mouse or trackpad on the web, though drawing precision suffers.
If you're mostly on a phone, the text tool tends to be more useful than freehand.
What it isn't
It isn't connected to your plan. Nothing you write on a canvas changes your budget, your bills, or your projections. It's a scratch surface. If you work something out here and want to act on it, make the change in the Builder — see Editing & Rebuilding a Budget.
It isn't a document manager. There's no library of canvases to browse. You reach a canvas through its paycheck.
It's a Thrive feature
Canvas is locked on the Free plan — you'll see the canvas area covered with an upgrade prompt telling you it requires a subscription.
Sharing is gated separately on top of that, so a lapsed subscription locks both. See What's Included with Thrive and Sharing & Exporting.
Saving
You don't save manually. Canvas saves on its own shortly after you stop drawing, and again when you leave the screen. Your work is stored against that paycheck and will be there when you return to it.