Before You Pick an AI Pitch Deck Generator, Decide How Much of the Deck It Has to Build

There is a public board that grades exactly that job (background material in, finished deck out), over 238 real generation instances, and it publishes a per-domain breakdown alongside the total. On the 18 August 2026 reading its rows ran from 35.9 to 70.8 with the middle of the field at 53.6, and Gamma's row on it reads 49.2. Those figures are pass rates over instance-specific checklist items written by hand, so roughly half of what a human rubric asked for was present. Read that as how much editing is left rather than as a verdict on the finished deck; the board's own authors name visual design and layout as a primary bottleneck, scoring low across the systems they ran. A product the board never ran has no row and no figure, and the card for it publishes a different measurement under its own name rather than estimating one, and says which.

The same board reports an education column, built from 60 of its 238 instances (lecture and course material rather than sales decks) and the numbers there are not the same as the totals. Gamma's row reads 47.8 on education against 49.2 overall, both from the 18 August 2026 reading. What that tells a teacher is narrow but real: the graded job is generation grounded in material you supply, so the row transfers to a set of course notes better than it transfers to a pitch. It says nothing about accessibility, about what your institution's licensing allows, or about whether the output will sit inside a departmental template. Where a card carries no board row it carries no education column either, and the honest answer for that product is that nobody independent has measured it.

Read the export line on the card rather than the landing page, because export to PowerPoint can mean a native .pptx you can edit or a picture of a deck inside a .pptx wrapper. Gamma's free plan names export to PDF, PPTX, PNG and Google Slides in its own feature list, read 18 August 2026; Decktopus's Pro plan names PDF, PPT and PNG, read 19 August 2026. Neither feature list says which of the two kinds of .pptx it writes, and that is the thing to check before a deadline depends on it. Beautiful.ai's own help centre does say, in an article titled "How do I export as a PowerPoint?" read 21 August 2026, that the export "will not be editable"; a separate article covers exporting a single slide to PPT. Read those two together before you plan on handing a finished file to somebody who needs to change it. Gamma's own help centre carries an article about exported files not matching what the editor shows, which is worth more than a user complaint precisely because the vendor published it; no equivalent article was read for Decktopus, which is a gap in what this desk read rather than a finding about the product.

The value row converts the entry paid price from the vendor's own page and names the billing view beside the figure, because the same plan routinely carries more than one number. Gamma's Plus is $12 a seat a month on monthly billing against $9 a seat a month when a year is paid up front, read 18 August 2026, and that pricing page opens on the annual view, so a price copied without touching the toggle records the cheaper number while looking like a plain price list. Decktopus prints its billing views together instead: $24.99 a month, $19.99 a month billed $59.97 per three months, and $9.99 a month billed $119.88 a year, read 19 August 2026. Each figure quoted here is the monthly one, and each card names the basis it was scored on. Generation is metered in credits on both, so what a plan buys is a number of generations rather than a number of decks.

Check the vendor's own pricing page before assuming a free plan is on offer, and then check whether the allowance refills. Gamma publishes one: 400 credits granted at signup with up to ten slides per prompt, and the vendor's own credits article states that those signup credits do not renew: once they are spent, a free user earns more through referrals or upgrades. That is a trial without a clock rather than an allowance that returns each month. Decktopus's pricing page, read 19 August 2026, shows no free plan at all: Pro in its three billing views and an Enterprise contact, and a search of the rendered page for the word free returns no plan. That is what the pricing page showed on that date, and the signup flow was not read. A no-sign-up option is a different question again: a generator that stores your deck and reopens it later needs an account to store it against.

Cancelling and refunding are different promises, and a vendor can offer one without the other, so read both documents rather than the headline on the pricing page. Decktopus's pricing page prints "Cancel any time", while section 3.4 of its terms, headed "No Refunds", states that "refunds are not available for both monthly and annual subscriptions". Both read 19 August 2026. Cancelling stops the next charge; it does not return money already paid, and on an annual plan the distance between those two facts is up to twelve months of prepaid subscription. The gap is not one vendor's habit: Gamma's binding agreement says at section 9.2 that "all Fees for the Service are non-refundable" except as set forth in that agreement, and the window a buyer would actually use is published somewhere else: a help-centre article offering a refund within the first three days of subscribing, on both billing options, on published per-plan credit-usage conditions, read 18 August 2026. Find the document that binds before you find the one that reassures.