Key takeaways
- Gauge's Growth plan is listed at $599/month by third-party sources, and nothing from Gauge sits under $100. Every option below is a smaller-scale product, not a like-for-like swap.
- Entry plans under $100 mostly run 15 to 50 prompts. That is enough to learn the basics, not enough to run a program.
- Prompt counts are not comparable across tools. Check engines, run frequency, countries and whether query fan-outs are shown.
- The only genuinely free option I found is the open-source Elmo, and it is self-hosted.
- Most cheap plans stop at monitoring. If you need to fix visibility gaps, budget for that separately.
Why Gauge pricing pushes people to look elsewhere
Gauge tracks brand mentions across AI engines and helps you optimize visibility. According to third-party comparison articles, its Growth plan is $599 a month and covers 600 prompts run daily through leading models, plus 18 monthly articles from its content engine. Enterprise is custom. One comparison calls Growth the only self-serve option.
That is a fair price if you need 600 daily prompts and a content engine. It is a lot if you are a two-person team who just wants to know whether ChatGPT mentions you. And I would not trust any price in this article blindly. The figures below come from third-party comparisons, and one of them (Dageno) is itself a vendor with an obvious angle. Open each vendor's pricing page before you pay anything.
What the under-$100 field looks like
Here are the entry prices reported in July 2026 comparisons.
| Tool | Entry price | Prompts | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| OtterlyAI Lite | $29/month | 15 | Monitoring plus audits |
| Peekaboo | ~$50/month | Not stated | Reported by checkthat.ai |
| Dageno Starter | $79/month | 50 | 3 platforms of your choice, up to 10 competitors, agent credits |
| Peec AI Starter | $95/month | 50 | Analytics only. Pro is $245, Advanced is $495 |
| Profound Starter | $99/month, billed yearly | 50 | Agent credits. Growth is $399/month billed yearly |
| Trakkr Growth | $100/month | 50 | 25 articles plus actions. At the cap, not under it |
| Elmo | Free (open source) | Self-managed | Self-hosted, no license or per-seat fee |
A pattern jumps out. Fifty prompts is the standard entry allowance, and the jump to the next tier is steep: Peec goes from $95 to $245, Profound from $99 to $399 (billed yearly). Under $100 is a trial lane. Plan for what happens when you outgrow it.
The options, one at a time
OtterlyAI Lite at $29
The cheapest paid on-ramp in the list. Fifteen prompts is tiny, but it is plenty if you only care about a handful of brand and category queries. You get monitoring and audits, not execution.
Otterly.AI
Dageno Starter at $79
Fifty prompts, three platforms of your choice, up to 10 competitors, and agent credits. The agent credits are the interesting part, since most tools at this price give you charts and nothing else. Dageno wrote the comparison I am pulling these numbers from, so verify the details yourself.
Peec AI Starter at $95
Clean analytics, 50 prompts, and no execution layer. A good pick if you have an SEO team that will act on the data without help. The next tiers ($245 and $495) are where the real capacity is.
Profound Starter at $99
The quoted $99 is billed yearly, so you are committing a year up front to get it. Growth jumps to $399 a month on annual billing. Profound is strong at the enterprise end, and the starter plan is a taste of it.
Profound
Trakkr Growth at $100
Strictly speaking this is at the cap rather than under it. It includes 25 articles plus actions, which makes it one of the few cheap plans with any content output. Worth a look if you want drafts included.
Elmo, the free one
Elmo is open source, with no license fee and no per-seat cost. It is the only genuinely free option I found. The catch is that you host it yourself, so your cost is setup time and maintenance. If you have a developer who enjoys that, it is hard to argue with $0. If you do not, a $29 hosted plan is cheaper than your afternoon.
Semrush, if you already pay for it
Semrush bundles AI visibility into SEO packages from $199 a month. That is above the cap, but if you already use it for classic SEO, the add-on may cost less than a separate tool.
Where Promptwatch fits
If your real goal is to fix visibility rather than watch it, Promptwatch is worth pricing out, even though its paid plans start above $100. Essential is $95 a month (check promptwatch.com/pricing, since plans change) and includes 50 prompts, 6,000 responses, all AI models, 500 Agent Credits, a site audit, content gap analysis and MCP/API access. There is also a free Explore plan with 10 prompts on ChatGPT only. So the entry point does sit under $100, and it goes past tracking: crawler logs, visitor analytics, and content tooling are in the same product.
The free tools are also useful before you pay for anything: the Free AI Visibility Report scans how ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity describe your brand with no login.
What the data says about choosing cheaply
Two findings from Promptwatch Data change how I would shop for a budget plan.
First, citation volume differs by engine. Promptwatch's average sources per response data shows ChatGPT citing about 5 sources per web-search answer, Google AI Overviews about 10, and Perplexity almost exactly 10 every day. Measure each engine separately, and do not assume a tool covering one covers the rest. If a cheap plan lets you pick only three platforms, pick based on where your buyers actually ask questions.
Second, one prompt is not one search. Promptwatch's ChatGPT query fanout report found an average of 2.15 web searches per response in early December, about 1.84 by early March, and exactly 1.0 in April after a data gap. A single prompt can trigger 3 to 8 or more searches in some cases. Cheap trackers that only count your prompts miss the sub-queries the model actually runs. That makes a tool that shows fan-outs worth more than a bigger prompt allowance. The behaviour keeps shifting too: ChatGPT started using the site: operator at scale on August 8, 2026, jumping from about 0.4% to about 17% of fan-out queries.
How to compare prompt counts honestly
"50 prompts" can mean very different things. Before you buy, ask:
- How many engines does each prompt run on, and which ones?
- How often does it run: daily, weekly, on demand?
- Are countries and languages included, or priced separately?
- Does it use the real user interface of each AI product, or API calls? Answers can differ.
- Are fan-outs visible?
- Is the headline price annual or monthly? Profound's $99 is billed yearly.
A plan with 50 prompts across 3 engines is effectively 150 prompt-runs. A plan with 50 prompts on one engine is 50. The sticker hides that.
Which one to pick
| Your situation | Sensible pick |
|---|---|
| Just curious, near-zero budget, have a developer | Elmo (self-hosted) |
| Want a minimal hosted monitor | OtterlyAI Lite at $29 |
| Want some automation in the starter plan | Dageno Starter at $79 |
| Have an SEO team, want analytics only | Peec AI Starter at $95 |
| Want monitoring plus fixing, with crawler data | Promptwatch Essential at $95, or the free Explore plan to start |
| Already pay for an SEO suite | Check the Semrush AI add-on first |
For wider lists, the directories at bestgeosoftware.com and ai-rank-tools.com cover far more tools than fit here.
Pitfalls to flag before you pay
- I did not verify these prices on vendor pages. Third-party comparisons contradict each other regularly in this category.
- I did not confirm free tiers for anything other than Elmo and Promptwatch Explore.
- Annual billing changes the headline number. Ask what you pay if you leave in month three.
- A cheap plan that you outgrow in two months is not cheap. Check what the next tier costs before you commit data to a tool.
The short version
Nothing at Gauge's level costs under $100. What does exist is a set of starter plans that answer one question: does AI mention us, and where? Start with the free or cheapest option, track 15 to 50 prompts for a month, and see whether the answers justify paying more. If they do, upgrade to a tool that shows fan-outs and helps you act, not just count.