Flipbooks AI vs Tome: What Should You Use Now That Tome Has Shut Down?

The Short Answer

Choose Flipbooks AI if you have a finished document and want it online as a page turning flipbook on a link you can share. That is the whole product. You upload a PDF, pick a page turn effect, and the pages a reader sees are exactly the pages you exported, with nothing rewritten and nothing redesigned. The paid plans add your own logo in place of our corner mark, brand colours for the reader controls, background music and a separate password for each reader. If you arrived here from an old Tome review, this is the part of Tome's job that still has a working answer.

Choose Tome if you can, which in August 2026 you cannot, and that is the honest headline of this comparison. The AI presentation product was retired and tome.app returns a 404 error rather than a website. What Tome did well was the thing we do not do at all: it wrote and designed a narrative deck for you from a prompt, and it was unusually good at the story shape rather than just the slide layout. If that is what you actually want, your category is AI presentation generators, and this page will point you at what to look for rather than pretend we are it.

Flipbooks AI vs Tome at a Glance

Flipbooks AI wins 8 of these 11 rows, ties 3 and loses none. They are rows we picked, so read them that way. The sections below say plainly where Tome is the better buy.

Pricing Compared

There is nothing to compare, and inventing a comparison would be worse than admitting it. Tome's pricing page is gone along with the rest of the site, so any figure quoted here would be a number copied from a third party listing that nobody can now check against the source. It had a free tier and paid tiers while it ran, and we are not going to put amounts next to them. If you find a page today confidently listing Tome's monthly price, treat it as an old article that was never updated rather than as a live quote.

Ours is simple to state and sits on one page in US dollars, the same price wherever in the world you check from. The free plan costs nothing and keeps 3 flipbooks live at a time on 1 GB of storage. Starter is 59 dollars a year, annual only, and removes our corner mark or swaps in your own logo, unlocks brand colours for the reader controls and opens the page turn effects the free plan does not carry. Plus is 14 dollars a month or 108 a year and adds the embed code with an allowed domain list. Ultra is 29 dollars a month or 228 a year and adds background music and a separate password for each reader.

There is a pricing lesson buried in this comparison that is worth more than a table of numbers. Press reporting at the time of the shutdown described a product with a very large free user base and comparatively little revenue, which is a well known way for a tool to disappear underneath the people using it. When you pick where a document lives, the question is not only what the plan costs this month. It is whether the thing you are pointing a QR code at will still resolve in three years, and the only defence that always works is keeping your own copy of the source file.

What Each Free Plan Really Gives You

Tome's free tier does not exist any more, so this section is about what to take from the fact that it once did. By the reporting around its closure, Tome reached roughly 20 million users in a very short time, and the free experience was a large part of why. People liked it because it produced something presentable from very little input, which is a genuinely hard thing to build. What it did not do was convert enough of those people into payers, and the product was retired rather than starved slowly.

The Flipbooks AI free plan is deliberately modest and durable. You get 3 flipbooks live at a time on 1 GB of storage, with the magazine page turn effect only and a small Flipbooks AI mark in the corner of the viewer. There is no page cap, so a 300 page catalogue goes up whole. No ads sit beside the reader, readers never need an account, and a flipbook is never listed in any public directory. One shared password is allowed. The three flipbook allowance is rolling rather than a lifetime count, so deleting one frees the slot straight away.

The part of our free plan that speaks directly to a Tome refugee is the boring part. There is no inactivity rule, so a flipbook nobody opens for a year does not get swept up, and it stays live until you delete it. That is a promise about a running service rather than a guarantee about the future, and it comes with the same advice we give on every page: keep the source PDF. A publishing tool should be the place your document is read, not the only place it exists.

Branding and Watermarks

Whether Tome branded free decks, and what removing that cost, cannot be checked now. The pages that would answer it are gone with the site, and we are not going to reconstruct a vendor's branding policy from memory or from a cached review. What can be said is the general shape the category has always had, and that Tome followed it: a free tier that carried the maker's name somewhere on the shared deck, with removal sold further up the ladder.

Flipbooks AI puts a small mark in the corner of the viewer on free flipbooks, never a watermark stamped across your pages, and it does not show ads on any plan. Starter at 59 dollars a year removes that mark or swaps in your own logo in its place, and the same plan unlocks brand colours for the reader controls so the chrome around your pages matches your palette. That is one paid step rather than two, and it is the cheapest thing on our ladder.

The distinction worth holding on to is what branding even means for each kind of tool. In a generator, branding is applied to content the tool produced, so it covers fonts, colours and themes inside the document. In a publisher like ours, the inside of the document is already yours: the typography and layout came out of whatever you used to make the PDF, and we are only responsible for the frame around it. Neither approach is better, but they are answering different questions, and a comparison table tends to hide that.

Privacy and Who Can Find Your Flipbook

Tome shared decks by link, in the way most modern tools do, and beyond that we will not characterise their privacy settings from memory. The more useful privacy observation about Tome is the one its ending provides. A hosted document is not only exposed to the people who might find the link. It is also exposed to the business decisions of whoever hosts it, and when the hosting stops, both the privacy question and the availability question are answered for you, permanently and without notice.

Flipbooks AI shares by link too. A flipbook is never listed in any public directory and we never submit one to a search engine. The free plan allows one shared password, and Ultra at 228 dollars a year gives each reader a separate password rather than a single code that gets forwarded around. There is no public gallery to opt out of, and nothing about your document is used to promote the service.

The caveat we put on every one of these pages applies here too, and it is about our own product rather than anyone else's. A shared link is a public URL, and a URL pasted somewhere public can be found. On Flipbooks AI a password gates the reader interface rather than the file behind it, so a document that genuinely must not leak needs a system with real access control instead. That is a limit of link based publishing generally, and it was as true of Tome as it is of us.

Embedding and Sharing

On Flipbooks AI, sharing is a link that opens in any browser, with no account needed at the other end, and that works on every plan including the free one. The embed code, which puts the flipbook inside a page on your own site, starts on Plus at 14 dollars a month or 108 a year, and the same plan carries an allowed domain list so you can decide which sites are permitted to frame it. That list is the part worth paying for if the flipbook is going on a site you own and you would rather nobody else embedded it somewhere you had not approved.

Whatever embedding Tome offered stopped working when the product did, and this is where a shutdown hurts most. An embedded deck is not a file sitting on your server, it is an iframe pointing at somebody else's. When the host goes, every page that carried it shows a gap, and the gap appears everywhere at once: your site, your investor updates, your partners' pages and any post that ever linked it. Nobody sends you a list of where they were.

If you are reading this because of exactly that problem, the practical order of work is worth writing down. Find every place the old link was published, starting with your own site, your email footers, printed material and any QR code you cannot recall. Replace them with a link you control the fate of. Then keep the source PDF somewhere that is not a publishing service, so the next time a tool closes you are doing one upload rather than one reconstruction.

Ease of Use and What Each Tool Is For

Tome was, by a wide margin, the better tool at the thing it did. It started life as an AI storytelling product and its distinguishing feature was that it thought in narratives rather than slides: you gave it a subject and it produced a sequence with an argument in it, formatted well enough to show someone. That is genuinely difficult and it is why the product spread so fast. The founders later moved to a different problem entirely and now build an AI native CRM called Lightfield, which loads today where the presentation tool does not.

Flipbooks AI is narrow and it is quicker to say what it is not. There is no template gallery, no in tool page editor, no custom domains, no team seats, no API, no reader analytics and no lead capture forms. It writes nothing and designs nothing. You upload a finished PDF, choose a page turn effect, set a password or your colours if you are paying, and share the link. The design work already happened wherever you made the file, which is the assumption the whole product is built on.

That is the precision this comparison exists to give, because both products put AI in the pitch and meant different things by it. Tome's AI generated the document: the words, the order and the look. Ours converts and presents a document you supply, and it does not touch the content. If what you miss about Tome is having a first draft written for you, no flipbook tool replaces that, and you want a current AI presentation generator instead. If what you want is for the deck you already made to have a home that turns like a real book, that is this.

Who Should Choose Which

Choose Flipbooks AI if

• You already have the finished PDF and want it online, branded and readable in a couple of minutes
• You want a real page turn, brand colours and your own logo from 59 dollars a year
• You want background music or a separate password for each reader, at 228 dollars a year
• You want the pages a reader sees to be exactly the pages you exported, with nothing rewritten

Choose Tome if

• What you actually want is what Tome did, an AI that writes and designs the narrative from a prompt
• You are trying to recover old decks, in which case that hunt comes before choosing any new tool
• Your document does not exist yet, so a current AI presentation generator serves you better than we can
• You landed here from an older comparison article, and the useful update is that only one of these two still exists

How to Switch from Tome to Flipbooks AI

This is less a switch than a rescue, and the order matters. There is no import path between the two, partly because Tome is gone and partly because a flipbook is always built from a source document rather than from another tool's account. What follows assumes the worst case, which is that you have links in the world pointing at something that no longer answers.

1. Find every export you already made. Search your drive, your email and your shared folders for PDF or PowerPoint files you downloaded while the product was still running, because those exports are now the only copies of that work you are certain to have. Check the dated folders you use for client work first, since a deck was usually exported at the moment it was sent.
2. List the places the old link was published. Your own website, email signatures, proposals, investor updates, social posts, partner pages and any printed QR code all point somewhere that no longer resolves. Write the list down before you do anything else, because it is the piece of work people forget and it is the one your audience actually sees.
3. Rebuild what you cannot recover, in something that still exists. If a deck has no surviving export, treat it as content to rewrite rather than a file to retrieve, and use whichever current tool suits you, including an AI generator if the draft matters more than the design. The goal at this stage is simply to end up with a finished PDF you own.
4. Upload the PDF to Flipbooks AI and set it up. Drop the file on the create page, choose a page turn effect, add a password if the document is private, and set your own logo and brand colours if you are on a paid plan. Preview it before publishing, and remember the free plan keeps three flipbooks live at a time with the magazine effect.
5. Repoint the links, and keep the source file this time. Work through the list from step two and swap every reference to the new address. Then store the source PDF somewhere that is not a publishing service, because that single habit is what turns the next shutdown, ours or anyone else's, into an afternoon of re uploading rather than a loss.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Tome free, and what does its free plan include?

Neither, any more. Tome had a well liked free tier while it ran, and it was a large part of why the product grew so quickly, but the AI presentation product has been retired and there is no plan of any kind to sign up for in August 2026. Visiting tome.app returns a 404 error rather than a pricing page. For comparison, the Flipbooks AI free plan keeps 3 flipbooks live at a time on 1 GB of storage, with the magazine page turn effect, a small corner mark, one shared password and no page cap.

What happened to Tome?

The company stopped building its AI presentation product and moved to a different market. Press reporting at the time described a pivot announced in late 2024 and confirmed in 2025, with the slides product sunset and most of the team let go, after which the founders went on to build an AI native CRM called Lightfield. The commonly cited reason is that the tool had a very large free user base and comparatively little revenue. What can be verified directly today is simpler: tome.app does not serve a website, and lightfield.app does.

Is tome.app still online?

No. Loading tome.app in a browser in August 2026 returns an HTTP 404 not found response rather than a homepage, which was checked directly for this comparison rather than taken from another article. That means there is no product page, no pricing page, no login and no help centre to consult. If you are following an old link into a Tome deck, expect the same result, and treat anything you find describing the live product as an article that was written before the shutdown and never revisited.

Can I still get my old Tome decks back?

Probably not, and you should plan on the assumption that you cannot. With the site returning a 404 there is no account to log into and no export button to press, so the realistic sources are copies you already made: PDF or PowerPoint files you downloaded at the time, email attachments you sent to someone, or a shared drive where a colleague saved a version. Search by date rather than by name, since exports usually happened on the day a deck was sent to somebody.

How much does Tome cost now?

Nothing, because there is nothing to buy. The pricing page went with the rest of the site, so any figure you find quoted today comes from a third party article that nobody can check against the source, and we are not going to repeat one. Flipbooks AI publishes its prices on one page in US dollars: free to start, Starter at 59 dollars a year, Plus at 14 a month or 108 a year, and Ultra at 29 a month or 228 a year, the same wherever in the world you check from.

Was Tome ever a flipbook maker?

No, and that is the main thing to clear up if you are comparing the two. Tome generated presentations and narrative documents from a prompt, and its output was a web deck you scrolled or clicked through rather than a book whose pages turn. It did not take a finished PDF and reproduce it page for page, which is the specific job Flipbooks AI exists to do. The two products overlapped only in the loose sense that both put a document on a link somebody else could open.

What should I use instead of Tome?

It depends which half of Tome you miss. If you want the AI that wrote and designed the deck for you, look at the current generation of AI presentation tools, since that is a busy category and several of them do the same job now. If what you want is for a document you have already finished to live somewhere as a real page turning flipbook, with your logo on it and a link you can share, that is what Flipbooks AI does, and the two are complements rather than rivals.

Can Flipbooks AI write my presentation the way Tome did?

No, and it is worth being blunt because both products used the word AI. Flipbooks AI converts and presents a document you supply. It does not write a sentence, choose a font, pick an image or move a margin, and the pages a reader sees are exactly the pages you exported. If the draft is the hard part for you, our tool does not help with the hard part. Make the document wherever suits you, then bring the finished PDF here to publish it.

I exported my Tome deck as a PDF, what can I do with it?

Quite a lot, and this is the good case. A PDF is a finished, portable document, so it can be emailed, printed, archived or published, and Flipbooks AI turns exactly that file into a flipbook on a shareable link in about a minute. Upload it, choose a page turn effect, add a password if it is private, and add your own logo and brand colours if you are on a paid plan. Nothing in the file is altered, so the layout you exported is the layout your readers see.

Is Tome a good tool?

It was, and pretending otherwise would be cheap. Tome was one of the first products to make AI generated presentations feel like a story rather than a pile of bullet points, it grew to a scale most tools never reach, and plenty of people who used it still describe it as the nicest first draft experience they have had. Its ending was a business outcome rather than a verdict on the software. The honest summary is that Tome was very good at creating a document out of nothing, Flipbooks AI is built to publish one you have already finished, and only one of those two is still available to use.