There is a specific moment when an AI presentation tool stops being free, and it is not when you run out of slides.
It is when you try to hand the deck to someone.
Every tool I checked gives away the generation. What they charge for is the badge on the corner, the PowerPoint export, and the control over fonts and branding. Those are exactly the three things that separate a deck you made from a deck you can send a client.
The pattern, in one table
Reading vendor pricing pages, these are the things sitting on the wrong side of the paywall.
| What you need for client work | Where it sits |
|---|---|
| No vendor badge on the deck | Gamma: Plus plan, badge removal is the first thing it adds |
| PowerPoint export | Pitch: Plus plan, listed after custom fonts and video uploads |
| Custom fonts and brand control | Pitch: Plus plan |
| Working natively inside PowerPoint | Plus AI or SlidesAI, neither of which has a free tier |
| Slide generation itself | Free almost everywhere |
The last row is the interesting one. The expensive part to run is given away, and the cheap part is sold, because the cheap part is what you actually need.
Pitch, and the credits that do not renew
Pitch has the most generous free tier here for building, and the most instructive one for understanding the model.
Free costs nothing, covers one to five people, and includes unlimited presentations, custom templates, basic sharing links, engagement analytics and two external guests. That is a real product.
Then the AI line: 100 credits, and directly beneath it, in their own words, this amount does not renew once used.
So the AI is a sample, not an allowance. You get one hundred credits to see whether you like it, and when they are gone the only route to more is a subscription.
The paid ladder, all quoted at the yearly rate: Plus at 10 euros a month with 500 credits monthly, Team at 15 euros, Business at 20 euros with 750 credits monthly, and Enterprise on request with SSO and SCIM.
PowerPoint export appears on Plus. So does uploading custom fonts. If you are producing a deck that a client will open in PowerPoint and that needs to carry their typeface, you are on the paid plan from the first job.
This is the fourth time I have found this exact pattern
Worth stepping back, because I did not go looking for this.
| Tool | Category | What free actually gives you |
|---|---|---|
| Runway | Video | 125 one-time credits, about ten seconds of video, ever |
| Gamma | Presentations | Credits that never refresh, plus a badge on your deck |
| Suno | Music | About 300 songs a month and zero downloads |
| Pitch | Presentations | 100 credits that do not renew once used |
Four tools, four categories, checked separately over about three weeks, and all four run the same structure: a one-time grant presented in the position where a monthly allowance normally sits.
None of this is hidden. Every one of those facts came off the vendor's own page. It is just never the number that gets quoted, because the quoted number is the generous-sounding one.
I have written the full arithmetic for each of these in free AI video generators, the best AI tool for PPT and free AI music generators.
Gamma's badge is the one that costs you a client
For consulting and client work specifically, the badge matters more than the credits.
Gamma's own plan documentation lists removing the Made with Gamma badge from shared and exported content as the first thing the Plus plan adds, ahead of the extra credits and the better image models. That placement tells you what people upgrade for.
A badge on a personal deck is nothing. A badge on a proposal you are charging four figures for reads as though you did not care enough to spend ten dollars, which is an unfair judgment and one your client will make anyway.
If you take one thing from this post: build free, then look at the deck exactly as the recipient will receive it, badge included, before you decide whether to pay.
What client-ready actually means
Worth defining, because it is not about the slides looking good. Design quality is the thing these tools solved first and it is rarely the problem.
Nothing on the deck names the tool. A vendor badge tells the recipient which product you used and, by implication, how much you spent. It is the fastest thing to notice and the cheapest thing to fix.
It opens in whatever they use. If your client edits in PowerPoint and your deck lives in a web tool, someone is doing a conversion, and conversions lose things. Fonts substitute, spacing shifts, animations vanish.
It carries their brand or yours, deliberately. Consulting decks usually need a specific typeface and a specific palette. Custom fonts are a paid feature on Pitch, and template controls sit alongside them.
You can send it without giving away access. Sharing a live editable link is fine for a colleague and wrong for a prospect. This is where the sharing and guest limits on free tiers start to bite.
Notice that three of those four are about delivery rather than creation. That is the whole reason the paywall sits where it does.
The export problem nobody warns you about
This is the one that catches people on the day of the meeting.
Every web-based deck tool has to translate its layout into PowerPoint's model when you export, and PowerPoint's model is older and stricter. Text boxes that auto-fit in the browser do not auto-fit the same way. A font you used that the recipient does not have gets substituted, and the substitution changes line breaks, which changes where text overflows.
None of that is a bug. It is what happens when you move between two layout engines.
The practical consequence is that you cannot check the export at the end. You have to check it early, because if the fidelity is bad you need a different tool, not a different deck.
That is also the strongest argument for the two tools that work inside PowerPoint rather than exporting to it. Plus AI and SlidesAI generate into the file format directly, so there is no translation step to lose anything. Neither has a free tier, which is the trade.
The consulting case specifically
Consulting decks have a shape that general presentation tools handle awkwardly.
They are dense. A client slide often carries a chart, a table of assumptions, a recommendation and a footnote, and AI generators are tuned for the opposite, which is one idea per slide with generous whitespace. You will spend real time fighting the layout back into something that holds an argument.
They are iterative. A consulting deck goes through versions with comments, and the collaboration and guest limits on free plans are built around a small team rather than a client relationship. Pitch's free tier allows two external guests, which is enough for one client contact and nobody else.
And they are confidential. Free tiers are consumer products with consumer terms, and the enterprise controls, SSO and admin management and the rest, sit on the top plans. Pitch puts SAML-based SSO and SCIM on Enterprise. If your engagement carries confidentiality obligations, that is a terms question to answer before you paste anything into a prompt, not after.
My honest read for consulting work: use these to produce the first draft structure and the visual scaffolding, then do the substance yourself. The generation saves you the blank page rather than the thinking.
The pitch deck specialists
Two tools are built for this job rather than adapted to it.
Slidebean is the most focused thing I found. It advertises an AI pitch deck builder, more than a hundred startup pitch deck templates, an AI pitch deck reviewer that scores your deck, and a cap table template. That is a product designed around fundraising rather than around slides in general. I could not read its prices, because the pricing page renders them in JavaScript, so check that yourself.
Storydoc takes a different approach, building decks as interactive web documents with engagement tracking rather than as slides. The two figures I could read were $237.60 and $432, which look like annual totals rather than monthly rates, so treat them as such until you confirm.
For most consulting work neither is necessary. They earn their place when the deck is the product, which is true for fundraising and rarely true for a client update.
What has no free tier at all
Two tools appear constantly on free AI presentation lists and do not belong there.
Beautiful.ai has a fourteen day trial of Pro or Team, and a free year for students with a valid .edu address. There is no ongoing free plan otherwise. Pro is $12 a month.
Plus AI runs a seven day trial including 1,000 AI credits, then starts at $10 per user a month billed annually. It is one of only two tools I found that work natively inside PowerPoint rather than exporting to it, which for client work is a genuine advantage worth paying for if your clients live in PowerPoint.
Neither is a bad product. They are just not free, and being told they are wastes a week.
Does the AI actually help with a business deck
Setting expectations, because the answer differs from the personal-use case.
Structure is where it earns its money. Give one of these a topic and it produces a sequence of slides with a beginning, a middle and a close. For anyone who stares at an empty file, that alone justifies the tool, and it is free everywhere.
Design is genuinely solved. The old complaint that AI decks look generic has mostly stopped being true. Spacing, hierarchy and colour come out competent, which for most business decks is all they needed to be.
Content is where it stops. These tools write plausible slide text, and plausible is the problem in client work. A recommendation slide that sounds right and says nothing is worse than an ugly slide that makes an argument, because the client will read it and ask you about it.
Charts and data are the weakest part. If your deck depends on numbers, expect to build those separately and place them yourself. This is the single biggest gap between a personal deck and a consulting one, and no tool I checked closes it.
So the realistic workflow is: generate the skeleton, keep the design, replace the words, bring your own numbers. That is a real saving on the parts that are tedious, and no saving at all on the parts that are hard.
What I could not verify
Half of what a buyer wants to compare, so this matters.
Pitch and Slidebean render their prices in JavaScript. I have Pitch's tiers because the plan structure is in the static page even though I could only read the euro figures, and I have none of Slidebean's.
Gamma and Canva return a 403 to automated requests, as they have every time this site has tried across five months. Gamma's help centre is open, which is where its credit and badge details come from, but its pricing page is not.
Where I could not read a number, there is no number here. My status tracker explains the method and lists which vendors block it.
How to actually buy this
A sequence that costs nothing until it has to.
Build the deck on a free plan. All of these will let you, and the generation quality is not the thing being withheld.
Then export it, or share it the way your client will actually receive it, and look at what arrives. That is where you find the badge, the missing font, the export that mangles your layout.
Then pay for the one month you need, for the one tool that fixed the specific problem you hit. Ten to fifteen a month, in the month you land the work rather than in advance.
That sequencing is unusual and it is available here because these vendors give away the expensive half. Most software makes the free tier useless to force the decision early. These do the opposite, and you can use that.
If you are pricing a wider stack rather than one tool, what an AI stack actually costs a small business does the arithmetic across categories, and AI tools for freelancers covers the solo version.
Sourcing
Read directly from vendor pages on September 8, 2026. Pitch's free tier at 0 euros for one to five people with 100 AI credits and the stated line that the amount does not renew once used, its Plus, Team and Business tiers at 10, 15 and 20 euros a month at the yearly rate, its 500 and 750 monthly credit allowances, and PowerPoint exports and custom fonts appearing on Plus. Slidebean's pitch deck builder, template count, AI reviewer and cap table template. Storydoc's $237.60 and $432 figures. Beautiful.ai's fourteen day trial, student offer and $12 Pro tier, and Plus AI's seven day trial and $10 starting price, both re-confirmed from earlier checks.
Gamma's credit behaviour and the Made with Gamma badge come from Gamma's own help documentation, since its pricing page blocks automated access. Not verified, and deliberately not quoted: Canva, and the exact prices for Pitch and Slidebean, which render in JavaScript. For the dated record of what AI pricing did this year, what AI pricing did in 2026 is sourced throughout.
