The questions that come up most. If yours isn't here, email us — we answer every message.
Two things stop it, and it's usually the first:
The project is empty. There's nothing to export until you've imported or drawn some artwork.
Your email address isn't confirmed yet. Check your inbox for the link we sent when you signed up — the app can send another if you need it. Your plan isn't the problem: every plan exports, and a free export carries a small watermark rather than being refused.
Yes — Awesome Lottie runs in the browser, so editing, saving and exporting all need a connection. The animation file itself is built on our servers, which is what lets a plan apply consistently wherever you sign in.
MP4 is the exception worth knowing about: the video is encoded on your own machine from the animation we return, so a long render uses your CPU rather than waiting in a queue. Keep the tab open while it runs.
Lottie JSON is the animation itself, ready for web and
app Lottie players — this is what you hand to a developer. For a
website, this guide has the code.
.lottie is the same animation in a
compressed package, useful when file size matters and your player
supports it.
MP4 is for the places a Lottie player can't go — social posts, slide decks, video editors.
Everything under Image in the export menu is a single frame — the one at the playhead, not the animation. PNG and WebP can be transparent; JPG can't. SVG is the one that stays sharp at any size, because it's vector rather than pixels — reach for it when the frame needs to be scaled or printed, or when you want a still of the artwork to drop into a design tool.
.lep is your editable project — layers,
poses, everything — saved as a file on your computer via
Local ▸ Save. Your projects are already saved to
your account automatically, so this is for keeping an offline copy or
moving work between accounts.
Yes — Import ▸ Lottie takes both Lottie JSON and
.lottie files and brings them back in as an editable
project. Import ▸ SVG takes artwork, and
Import ▸ Image takes PNG, JPG and WebP.
Include background at the bottom of the export menu decides whether the canvas background color is baked into the export as a solid layer. It's off by default, so exports are transparent — if you're seeing a background you didn't want, that setting is ticked.
It's remembered between sessions, so a box you ticked last week is still ticked today. That's the usual reason an export comes out unexpectedly opaque long after anyone changed the setting.
It has no effect on JPG or MP4, neither of which can store transparency — those always get a background whether you ask or not.
Awesome Lottie never puts a script in an exported file.
The SVG exporter builds the file from shapes, gradients and masks and
emits nothing executable, and every export is scanned on the way out —
scripts, <foreignObject>, on* event
handlers and javascript: URLs are stripped before the file
reaches you. That check is covered by our test suite.
If you find one anyway, it was almost certainly added after the
download, by a browser extension. The usual route is opening the
.svg in a browser tab to look at it and then saving from
that tab: saving a page writes out what's currently in the document,
including anything your extensions injected into it. The download itself
can't be modified this way — only the copy you re-save.
Two things tell them apart. Open the file you originally downloaded in a text editor rather than a browser — that's the file we produced. And try the same export in a browser with no extensions, or a private window with extensions disabled; if the script disappears, it was an extension, not the export.
We've seen this with extensions that spoof geolocation, which inject a script into every page they can reach. If you find one in a file, tell us — we'd rather look and be sure.
A click selects whatever is on top, so a background shape or a full-width illustration covers everything beneath it. Hold Alt — or Ctrl/Cmd, whichever you're used to — and click to reach past it. Each such click steps one layer deeper and wraps back to the top when it runs out, and it crosses between groups, so a layer in a different group is reachable this way too.
It steps through shapes rather than groups. To select a group, click one of its children and then pick the group in the Layers panel — which is also the better route whenever you know the layer by name.
Something in the editor failed in a way it couldn't carry on from. The
screen that appears has a
Download a copy of the project button —
use it before reloading. Reloading discards anything
that hadn't been saved yet, and the download writes a
.lep file you can open again with
Local ▸ Open.
Then hit Copy error details and send it to us with a note of what you were doing. That text says exactly which line failed, which is usually the difference between a fix and a guess.
Reload the page first — the app reads your plan when it loads, so a payment that completed a moment ago may not have reached the tab you're looking at.
If it's still wrong after a reload, tell us and include the receipt. We can see the payment from our side and attach it to your account; nobody who has paid stays unentitled.
That's fine and it's expected — work cards and shared PayPal accounts are common. The subscription is stamped with your account at the moment checkout is created, not matched up by email afterwards, so it reaches the right account whichever address is on the receipt.
The limit is how many animations you own at once, not a lifetime total. Delete one you no longer need and you can create another straight away.
Animations other people have shared with you don't count toward your limit, and neither do files you've already exported. Storage is a separate allowance, so deleting an animation frees up space there too.
If you want to keep something you're not working on, use
Local ▸ Save to write it to your computer as a
.lep file. A file on your own disk isn't one of your
projects, so it doesn't count; open it again whenever you like, and
save it to your account when there's room.
The account returns to the free plan at the end of the period you've already paid for — not on the day you cancel. Export keeps working; new exports carry the free plan's watermark again. Nothing is deleted: your projects stay where they are, and files you've already exported are on your disk, unmarked, and keep working regardless.
If you end up over the free plan's project or storage limits, you can still open and save your work. A save that doesn't make things bigger is always allowed, so you're never locked out of the edit that would bring you back under.
Lemon Squeezy retries over several days before anything changes, so a temporary problem won't cut you off mid-project. Update the card from Manage subscription and the retry will pick it up.
Billing runs through Lemon Squeezy. Open Manage subscription in your account — or the customer-portal link in your receipt email, which goes to the same place — to update payment details or cancel. Cancelling stops future renewals; export keeps working until the period you've paid for ends.
For a refund, see the refund terms in our Terms of Service and get in touch — we'd rather sort out whatever went wrong first, so tell us what happened.
Check spam first, then sign in and use Send it again on the confirmation screen. You can always sign in with an unconfirmed account — you just can't save or export until the address is confirmed, so there's nothing to lose by waiting for the email.
Typed the wrong address? Sign in, then use Wrong address? on that same screen to correct it — we'll send the confirmation to the new one. You don't need to start another account, and you shouldn't: the first one keeps the name.
Password reset emails work the same way, and those links are single-use and expire after an hour — if you've clicked an old one, request a fresh reset rather than reusing the link.
Not yet, and we'd rather say so than let you assume otherwise. Changing your password signs out the session you changed it from; other browsers you're still signed in on stay signed in. If that matters — a shared or lost machine — tell us and we'll end the other sessions for you while we build the self-service version.
The storyboard is scoped to one layer or group at a time — that's what lets each part of your artwork move independently. Click a single layer in the Layers panel and its poses appear.
A new pose carries the layer's current look forward but pins nothing until you actually change something at it — that's deliberate, so adding poses never invents motion on its own. Move, scale, rotate, or recolor the layer while sitting on that pose and the animation appears.
It shouldn't — a pose only pins the properties you edited there, and everything else glides through untouched. If you see a property snap back unexpectedly, Ctrl/Cmd + Z undoes it, and we'd genuinely like to hear about it: tell us what you did and we'll fix it.
Text is converted to shapes at export so the animation doesn't depend on the viewer having your font. That conversion happens on your machine using the fonts installed on it, so a family you don't actually have can't be converted — the export tells you which one rather than dropping the text silently.
Install the font and export again, or outline the text in your design tool before importing the SVG. If the warning says font access was refused instead, the browser blocked the editor from reading your installed fonts — allow it when prompted and export again.
A mask source has to be a sibling of the layer it masks — same level, same group. Lottie expresses a mask as "the layer directly above" within one layer list, so a source sitting in a different group cannot be written to the file at all.
New masks only offer siblings, so this can only happen to a project made before that restriction, or one where a layer has since been moved. The picker marks such a source won't export. Moving the two layers into the same group fixes it.
You entered point editing — the shape's outline now shows its individual vertices, and dragging one reshapes the path rather than moving the layer. A and the Edit Vertices button do the same thing.
Esc leaves it, as does Done. Nothing is changed by entering or leaving, so if you got there by accident just press Esc — and Ctrl/Cmd + Z undoes anything you did while in there.
Yes. Edit keyframes directly on the storyboard freezes the selected layer's animation as ordinary keyframes and takes it out of pose-based authoring. It's one-way for that layer, so save first if you might want to go back.
Your projects are stored on our servers, under your account. That is what makes them autosave, open on another machine, and be shareable — the Saved to cloud chip in the toolbar tells you where the current one stands.
Exporting also runs on the server: the editor sends the project and gets
the finished Lottie back. Local ▸ Save writes a
.lep file to your own disk whenever you want a copy that
doesn't depend on us, and every export downloads to your machine as
normal.
What we store, how long, and what happens when you delete your account is set out in the Privacy Policy.