Cover limits, versions and the OutaStory mark

This page collects the hard numbers behind
the cover designer, and
explains the one thing people are most often surprised by: when the
OutaStory mark shows up on a finished cover.

The caps

A few notes on those:

• The 40-layer cap counts everything in the stack together — text,
  shapes and images. In practice a strong cover uses a handful of
  layers, so this is a ceiling rather than a target.
• Image layers are capped at eight, and AI-generated image
  layers at three — so generation is the tighter of the two.
• The 256 KB document is the description of your design — the
  layers and their settings — not the pictures themselves. It is
  generous, but a design crammed with very long text layers can
  approach it. See
  Text on your cover for the
  500-character-per-layer limit.

Saved versions

The designer keeps up to 10 saved versions of a design. That
gives you a way back to something you liked before an experiment went
wrong. Once there are ten, saving another one pushes the oldest out,
so do not treat them as a permanent archive.

Undo is session-only — this catches people out

You get 50 undo steps while you are working, which is plenty for
normal editing.

Those steps are held in your current session and are lost when the
page reloads. Refresh the page, close the tab, restart the app, or
let a phone put the app to sleep long enough, and the undo history is
gone. Your last saved design is still there — but everything you did
since then can no longer be undone step by step.

The habit that avoids all pain here: save a version before you try
something drastic, rather than relying on undo to walk it back.

The OutaStory mark

When you finish a cover it is baked — the layers are flattened
into the single image readers see. During that step the OutaStory
mark is stamped on top of every layer. You cannot move it, cover it
or place a layer above it.

The mark is left off in exactly one situation: the author is
Premium and has ticked the box asking for the cover to be
produced without it. Both conditions, together. Ticking the box on a
non-Premium account does nothing.

If Premium lapses, the mark comes back

This is the part to read twice.

Your Premium status is re-read on the server at the moment the
cover is baked — not at the moment you ticked the box. And
restoring an older saved version bakes the cover again.

So if your Premium has ended since you made the cover:

• saving the design again bakes a cover with the mark, and
• restoring an earlier version bakes a cover with the mark,

even though that version was originally produced without one. The
previously baked image is not re-used. There is no setting that
changes this, and nothing warns you retroactively — the cover simply
comes out of the next bake with the mark on it.

If you want a cover to stay unmarked, leave it alone while Premium
is not active.