Apple Creator Studio AI usage limits seem way lower than promised

When Apple launched the Apple Creator Studio (ACS) subscription, the company indicated that you could use the AI features to produce 50 Keynote presentations per month "as a minimum." However, developer and security researcher Steve Troughton-Smith had a very different experience when it came to AI usage limits.

He reported that far from being able to produce 50 presentations, a single Keynote slideshow used half of his monthly ACS limit, so the limit would be just two.

Troughton-Smith started by saying how impressed he was by Xcode's Codex support. "So Xcode just builds entire apps without you now. Xcode's Codex support will happily trundle away for half an hour sticking its tendrils into every little corner of your project, touching and changing every file [...] I had Xcode's new agent feature throw together this little UIKit timeline app, without me writing anything myself, all using Codex [...] I've used ChatGPT in and out of Xcode a ton, but I've never had it just build the entire app for me change by change like you can in Xcode 26.3. I don't think I wrote one line manually in this timeline app."

He then went on to contrast this with the included AI usage in the Apple Creator Studio subscription. "This entire app used 7% of my weekly Codex usage limit. Compare that to a single (awful) slideshow in Keynote using 47% of my monthly Apple Creator Studio usage limit."

This would mean that creating just two presentations would use up his entire monthly AI usage allocation, not 50. Of course, Apple did use the example of extremely short presentations of just 8-10 slides for its own numbers, but even so, this seems to be a massive disparity.

As John Gruber notes, the contrast between Codex and Apple Creator Studio limits seems the opposite of what we would reasonably expect.

Here's how to check your current usage status:

On Mac, depending on the app you're using, choose Pages, Numbers or Keynote from the menu bar, choose Intelligence Features, then choose Show Usage Status.

On iPhone or iPad, open Pages, Numbers or Keynote, tap the More button , tap Intelligence Features, then tap Show Usage Status.

If you have a subscription, please check your percentage and share the results in the comments, along with a brief summary of your usage.

This discrepancy raises questions about how Apple calculates AI usage across different applications and whether the promised "50 presentations per month" was based on unrealistic assumptions about presentation complexity. For creative professionals who signed up for Apple Creator Studio expecting to produce multiple presentations monthly, this limitation could significantly impact their workflow and the value proposition of the subscription.

The contrast between Xcode's generous Codex limits and Keynote's restrictive AI usage is particularly striking. While Xcode's AI can generate entire applications while consuming only 7% of weekly usage, Keynote's AI appears to be throttled to the point where two presentations exhaust monthly limits. This suggests either different computational costs between the two AI systems or, more concerning, that Apple may have implemented artificial limits on certain applications to manage server load or subscription costs.

For developers and content creators who invested in Apple Creator Studio specifically for its AI capabilities, this revelation could be particularly frustrating. The promise of "50 presentations per month" was a key selling point for many potential subscribers, and discovering that actual usage is closer to 2 presentations represents a 96% reduction from expectations.

As more users check their usage status and share results, it will become clearer whether Troughton-Smith's experience is typical or an outlier. However, the significant gap between promised and delivered AI capabilities could impact Apple's reputation for transparency and customer satisfaction with its subscription services.