Napkin AI
Napkin AI turns text you have already written into editable diagrams, flowcharts, mind maps, infographics and complete slide decks. No prompting required: paste or import your content, pick a generated visual, then export to PPT, PDF, PNG or SVG.
What is Napkin AI?
Napkin AI is a visual communication platform built by Second Layer, Inc., based in Los Altos, California. Its premise is unusual for a generative tool: you do not write a prompt, you bring text you have already written. Paste a paragraph, or import a PPT, DOC, PDF, HTML or Markdown file, select the passage that matters, click the Autospark icon, and the tool proposes several visuals that express it. You pick the one closest to your meaning.
The platform ships two products. Napkin Visuals produces individual graphics from any selected passage: infographics, diagrams, flowcharts, mind maps and data charts. Napkin Slides, still in beta, goes further. It asks a few questions about your goal and your audience, drafts an outline, waits for your approval, and only then builds a full deck around that outline rather than around a generic template. Both are available on every plan, including the free one.
Nothing generated is locked. Colours, fonts, layouts and icons can all be changed, individual elements can be pulled apart and reshaped, and a saved palette can be applied from Brand Studio. Finished work leaves as PPT, PDF, PNG or SVG, and PPT exports stay editable in PowerPoint, Google Slides and Keynote. Napkin therefore sits upstream of the tools people already use rather than trying to replace them.
Usage is metered in AI credits, roughly one credit per word selected for generation. Generation works in more than sixty languages whatever the input language, and the interface itself is published in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Korean and Portuguese. Teams share a Teamspace with real-time co-editing, commenting and highlighting. A documented REST API is available as a developer preview for programmatic generation.
The company grew out of Osmo, the AI education business founded by Pramod Sharma and Jerome Scholler, and a team of fourteen is spread across the United States, France and India. Two limits are worth knowing before you start: visual generation does not run on mobile, and all data is hosted in the United States, with no EU residency option.
What it does
- Turn a pasted or imported block of text into a diagram, flowchart, mind map, infographic or data chart, with no prompt to write
- Generate a complete, ready-to-present slide deck from an idea, after a short guided conversation about goal and audience
- Choose between several generated options per passage or per slide, from detailed to brief
- Edit everything after generation: colours, fonts, layouts, icons, and individual elements pulled apart and reshaped
- Apply your own brand colours and fonts from Brand Studio across a visual or a whole deck
- Export to PPT, PDF, PNG or SVG, with PPT files remaining editable in PowerPoint, Google Slides and Keynote
- Work as a team in a shared Teamspace with real-time co-editing, commenting and highlighting
When to use Napkin AI / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Napkin AI is the right fit.
When to use Napkin AI
- Writers of long documents, reports and blog posts who need to break up dense text with explanatory graphics
- Consultants, project managers and business analysts who explain processes and need flowcharts, mind maps and diagrams quickly
- Teachers, professors and instructional designers turning course material into visuals their students can actually follow
- Marketing and communications teams producing branded visuals for social posts, articles and campaigns at speed
- Founders and product teams who need a presentable deck for an investor update or a team review without a designer
When not to use Napkin AI
- Anyone who works mainly on a phone: presentations can be created and edited on mobile, but visual generation is desktop-only
- Users looking for photorealistic image generation or photo editing, which this tool does not do at all
- Organisations that require their data to stay in the European Union, since hosting is United States only
- Buyers who need a published security certification such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001 before they can sign
- Teams wanting deep two-way integrations with their existing stack, as interoperability here is limited to file import and export
How to use Napkin AI
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Open the tool in a browser and create an account, optionally through a Google sign-in. Nothing is installed
- Bring your text: type it, paste it, or import a PPT, DOC, PDF, HTML or Markdown file. File imports are unlimited on every plan
- Select the passage you want illustrated, then click the Autospark icon to generate
- Compare the visuals Napkin proposes and pick the one that best matches your meaning
- Adjust colours, fonts, layouts and icons, or take an element apart and reshape it until it reads the way you want
- Optionally save your brand colours and fonts in Brand Studio and apply them to the visual
- For a full deck, describe your idea or upload a file, answer the agent's questions on goal and audience, approve the outline, then let it generate
- Refine the deck slide by slide, or ask the agent to apply a change across the whole presentation at once
- Invite colleagues to a Teamspace to co-edit in real time, comment and highlight
- Export as PPT, PDF, PNG or SVG and drop the result into PowerPoint, Google Slides, Keynote or wherever you publish
Pros & Cons
Pros
- No prompt engineering to learn: the input is text you have already written, which removes the blank-page problem entirely
- A genuinely usable permanent free plan with 500 weekly AI credits, unlimited editing, unlimited imports and unlimited PNG and PDF export
- Everything stays editable after generation, and SVG and PPT exports let you keep working in your usual design or presentation tool
- Low entry price for the category at USD 9 per person per month, with a further 25% off on annual billing
- Unusual data transparency for a company this size: a dated public sub-processor list, ten-day change notice, and zero-data-retention agreements with OpenAI and Google Cloud AI
- A documented and actionable training opt-out, available from account settings or teamspace settings
- More than sixty generation languages regardless of input language, and a six-language interface
Cons
- Visual generation is unavailable on mobile, and there is no native iOS or Android app and no browser extension
- Data is hosted in the United States only, with no EU residency option and no Article 27 EU representative designated
- No published security certification: neither SOC 2 nor ISO 27001 is claimed anywhere on the site
- No named third-party integrations, so interoperability rests entirely on file import and export
- Credit-based billing makes the real cost depend on how much text you generate from, at roughly one credit per word, and the publisher warns the rate may change
- Napkin Slides is still in beta and the publisher openly expects rough edges
- No student or non-profit discount, no free trial of the paid tiers, and Enterprise pricing is not public
Pricing & Plans
A permanent free plan is available at no cost, offering 500 AI credits per week with unlimited editing, unlimited file imports and unlimited PNG and PDF exports. The lowest paid entry point is the Plus plan at USD 9.00 per person per month on monthly billing, with a 25% reduction on annual commitment. The Pro plan is priced at USD 22.00 per person per month, and Enterprise pricing is available on request only.
- 500 AI credits per week
- unlimited visual editing
- unlimited file import in PPT
- DOC
- HTML and MD
- unlimited PNG and PDF export
- built-in styles and fonts
- everything in Free
- plus 10
- 000 AI credits per month
- unlimited PPT and SVG export
- 3 Brand Styles
- Bold icons
- removal of Napkin branding
- team management and billing
- everything in Plus
- plus 30
- 000 AI credits per month
- exclusive designs
- unlimited custom branding
- font upload
- team management and billing
- optional credit top-ups
- available on request through the Contact Us route
- with no plan contents or pricing published
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Napkin AI handles your data.
GDPR overview
The site never writes the words GDPR compliant, but it does publish concrete machinery rather than a bare privacy policy. A Data Protection Officer is named in full, Erwan Martin, reachable at dpo@napkin.ai. A Data Processing Agreement exists and governs the eight sub-processors listed publicly, with a commitment to announce any addition or replacement ten days in advance. Section 18.3 of the terms states that nothing in the agreement limits the GDPR rights of users located in the European Union, and the privacy policy sets out access, correction, deletion, restriction, portability, objection and consent-withdrawal rights via privacy@napkin.ai. Two gaps are worth naming: no Article 27 EU representative is designated, and all data is hosted in the United States.
Who owns the data?
You keep your content. The terms state that work you create stays yours regardless of subscription status, and cancelling a paid plan removes access to paid features, not to what you already made. In exchange you grant Second Layer, Inc. a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence over your inputs, strictly limited to processing them and transmitting them to the third-party AI services that generate the results, and to operating the service. Generated results are supplied as is, with no warranty of accuracy, completeness or intellectual property rights attached to them. Sharing is under your control: teamspace members, link recipients and collaborators see only what you choose to share.
Reuse rights
You can reuse what you create freely and without asking permission. Exports in PPT, PDF, PNG and SVG are designed to be dropped into PowerPoint, Google Slides, Keynote, Notion or any other tool, and PPT files stay fully editable afterwards. The publisher sets no separate licence, royalty or attribution requirement on the visuals themselves, and the free plan's only restriction is a Napkin watermark, removed from the Plus tier upwards. What the terms do restrict is the service, not the output: you may not scrape the site, resell or redistribute the platform itself, reverse-engineer it, or use it for purposes barred by United States export control law.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Second Layer, Inc. is based in the United States and states that its data sits on cloud infrastructure located in the United States, so personal information from users elsewhere is transferred to and processed there. Google Cloud Platform provides hosting and infrastructure, and the public front end is served behind Cloudflare. Eight sub-processors are published, all located in the United States: OpenAI and Google Cloud AI for model inference, Intercom for support, Stripe for payments, Twilio SendGrid and Mailmodo for email, Google LLC (Looker) for analytics and Sentry for error monitoring. Zero-data-retention agreements are in place with the two AI inference providers. Declared security measures are HTTPS and TLS in transit, encryption at rest for sensitive stored data, role-based access limited to authorised staff, strong authentication for administrative access and regular review of access logs. No European data residency option is offered, and no third-party security certification is published.
Where Napkin AI works
Country-level availability.
Not available in
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Napkin AI.
- Interaction data is collected by default to improve the models: the opt-out exists and works, but you have to go and switch it on in account settings, and on a Teamspace only the administrator can set it for the space
- All data is hosted in the United States with no EU residency option, no Article 27 EU representative is designated, and no security certification such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001 is published, so the stated safeguards remain declarative
- The terms impose arbitration and waive class actions; opting out is possible only within thirty days of first accepting, and doing so requires you to stop using the service altogether
- Costs scale with volume at roughly one credit per word generated, and the publisher explicitly reserves the right to change that rate, so a heavy month can cost more than the headline price suggests
- Billing is per seat: every teamspace invitation someone accepts adds a paid seat, which makes team costs grow quietly if invitations are not managed
- After account deletion some data stays in backups for an unquantified period described only as a limited period and a standard retention window, so there is no firm date by which everything is gone
- Letting a tool draw the diagram can quietly replace the thinking that structuring an argument by hand normally forces: the visual will always look coherent, which is precisely why a weak underlying idea can pass unnoticed
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Very low for everyday use. Napkin runs in the browser with nothing to install, an account can be opened through a Google sign-in, and there is no prompt syntax to learn since the tool works from text you already have. Setting brand colours and fonts in Brand Studio is optional, and inviting colleagues to a Teamspace takes a moment. The only part requiring technical skill is the API, which needs a Bearer token and three calls: create a visual request, poll its status, then download the file.
Deployment
Supported languages
Behind Napkin AI
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to write a prompt to use Napkin AI?
Is there a free plan, and what does it include?
How much do the paid plans cost?
What is an AI credit and how fast do I use them?
In which formats can I export my work?
Can I use Napkin AI on my phone?
Is my content used to train AI models?
Where is my data hosted?
How many languages does Napkin AI support?
Is there an API, and what is the minimum age to use the service?
Should you pick Napkin AI?
Napkin AI does one thing and states it plainly: it converts text you have already written into visuals and decks, without asking you to learn prompting. That narrow scope is its strength. The free plan is substantial rather than decorative, the first paid tier is inexpensive for the category, and because SVG and PPT exports stay editable, the tool slots in front of PowerPoint, Google Slides or Keynote instead of demanding you abandon them.
It is also, unusually for a company of this size, transparent about data. The sub-processor list is public, dated and versioned, zero-data-retention agreements cover the AI inference providers, a Data Protection Officer is named, and the training opt-out is documented and reachable from account settings. Buyers who read privacy pages will find more here than the category average.
The reservations are practical rather than damning. Visual generation does not work on mobile. Hosting is United States only, no Article 27 EU representative is designated, and no security certification is published, which will matter to regulated or European buyers. There are no named third-party integrations, so everything moves through file export. Slides remains in beta, and credit-based pricing means your real monthly cost tracks how much text you generate from.
For a writer, teacher, consultant, marketer or product manager who produces documents and needs them to be understood, Napkin AI is an easy tool to try, since the free plan costs nothing and answers the only question that matters: do the generated visuals actually say what you meant. For an enterprise with data residency or certification requirements, the gaps above should be settled before adoption.
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