Gamma focuses on generating polished, mostly read-only decks. Snapdeck’s main difference is that everything stays fully editable — layouts, visuals, and charts can be dragged, restyled, or updated with natural-language commands. We also built an orchestration layer on top of open-source and commercial models to handle structured inputs like Notion pages or websites.
Good question. At the time I was building alone as a student, and starting with a Figma plugin was simply the fastest way to test the core idea: can AI actually generate slides people want to use?
The plugin gave us quick feedback from a smaller but design-savvy community, which helped validate the concept before investing in a full standalone app. We learned where it fell short (limited reach, constrained workflows), and that feedback directly pushed us to build the standalone version you see now.
In hindsight, going standalone earlier might have reached more users, but starting small made it possible to iterate quickly and not overbuild.