How to Use Kinsy: From Brief to Finished PowerPoint in Minutes

By the Kinsy team · Published 25 July 2026

This is how to use Kinsy from a blank page to a finished presentation. By the end of the walkthrough you'll have a researched, fact-checked deck with speaker notes on every slide, downloaded as a native PowerPoint file — and you'll know what it costs before it's built, because a typical deck runs 80 to 160 credits and every price is shown up front.

Step 1: Start free

A new account comes with 100 one-time credits — roughly one full deck, images included. No card is required, and nothing starts billing quietly later. Decks made on the free tier carry a small "Made with Kinsy" watermark; everything else about them is the real product, including the export. The sensible way to evaluate Kinsy is to spend those 100 credits on a deck you actually need this week, not a toy prompt.

Step 2: Write the brief

Kinsy starts from a single brief: what the deck is about, who it's for, and roughly how long it should be. You write it in plain sentences. The quality of what comes back tracks the quality of what you put in, so it's worth thirty seconds of honesty about the audience and the point you're making.

Here's a weak brief:

And the same brief, improved:

A second example, for a very different deck:

Whatever you write, Kinsy follows up with a few clarifying questions — the gaps a good analyst would ask about before building anything. What should the room do after the last slide? Is there a number you must not get wrong? Is anything off-limits? Answering these properly is where quality is won. A one-word answer gets you a generic deck; two thoughtful sentences get you one that sounds like you wrote it.

On length: either unit works. "About ten slides" and "a twenty-minute talk" are both briefs Kinsy can plan to — it will pace the narrative to the time or the count you give it. If you genuinely don't know, say who's in the room and let the clarifying questions settle it.

Step 3: Attach a source document if you have one

If the deck should be built from your material — a report, a proposal, meeting notes — attach it. Kinsy accepts PDF, markdown and plain text, and uploads cost nothing. The document does two jobs: it feeds the content, and it anchors the fact-check pass, which verifies what ends up on the slides against what your source actually says rather than letting an enthusiastic paraphrase drift into fiction. We've written a full guide to turning a document into a presentation with Kinsy, so this post won't repeat it. This step is optional — for a deck built on general knowledge or live research, skip it.

Step 4: Choose the depth

Before anything is built, you choose how deep the deck should go, and Kinsy shows the price in credits: 40 credits for a short deck, 60 for a detailed one, 90 for a deep dive, plus 10 credits per AI-generated image. The number you see is the number you spend — there's no meter running in the background and no surprise on the other side of the build. Match the depth to the meeting: a five-minute standup update does not need the 90-credit treatment.

Step 5: Watch it get built

Then the build happens in front of you, not behind a spinner. When the topic calls for it, Kinsy runs live web research first and pins claims to numbered, dated citations, so you can see where every figure came from. The narrative is planned by a frontier reasoning model, slide by slide — an argument with a beginning and an end, not ten disconnected headings. The deck is then designed on one of five curated themes, chosen to fit the content, with imagery generated where it earns its place. And every slide arrives with speaker notes: what to say, not a restatement of the bullets.

Watching the build is worth doing at least once. Seeing the research land before the slides exist tells you more about whether to trust the output than any marketing page — including this one.

Step 6: Refine it

The first draft is rarely the last. Refinement in Kinsy is conversational: tell it "make slide 4 punchier", "swap the order of the pricing and roadmap slides", "make the whole thing less formal". A single-slide edit costs 5 credits, a deck-wide pass costs 2 credits per slide, and a full polish pass — a considered once-over of the whole deck — costs 20. Every change creates a version you can restore, so an edit that made things worse is an undo, not a loss.

If the deck needs to look like your company rather than like Kinsy, set up a brand kit — your colours and logo carry into the design instead of the stock theme palette.

One honest limitation: there is no pixel-level manual editor in the app. You can't drag a text box three millimetres left. If a deck needs hand-tuning at that level, the intended path is to export it and finish in PowerPoint — which is exactly what the export guarantees exist to make safe. Nothing you get out of Kinsy fights back when you edit it there.

Step 7: Present, share or export

A finished deck can go three ways, and all three are free. Present it fullscreen straight from Kinsy. Send a view-only share link to anyone, no account needed on their end. Or export it — as a PDF, as per-slide PNGs, or as the main event: a native .pptx. That file comes with four testable guarantees — every text element is a real editable object rather than a flattened picture, the designed typefaces are embedded so they survive any machine, the export matches the preview to the line break, and it's a native PowerPoint file rather than a converted web export. The reasoning behind those guarantees, and why most tools can't make them, is in our deep dive on why AI deck tools break on export.

How many credits does a deck cost?

A typical deck costs 80 to 160 credits, depending on depth and how many AI images it uses. The build itself is 40, 60 or 90 credits; each generated image adds 10. Some worked examples:

Exports, viewing, sharing and uploads never cost credits — you pay to build and refine, not to use what you built. The full credit menu, plan sizes and top-up packs are on the Kinsy pricing page.

Keep reading

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• The best AI deck maker in 2026: we tested the field
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