Key takeaways
- Profound's pricing page now lists only a free 7-day Trial and a custom-priced Enterprise tier. The old $99 Starter and $399 Growth plans are gone, so a "cheaper Profound alternative" now just means a tool with a published price.
- Under $100 a month you can find plans from about $20 to $99, but they differ a lot in prompt count, engines tracked, and whether answers are captured from the real user interface.
- A lower sticker price often means fewer prompts, fewer engines, or weekly scans instead of daily ones. Compare cost per tracked answer, not the headline number.
- Almost every plan in this price band is monitoring-only. Crawler logs, AI traffic attribution, and content fixes are mostly missing, so budget separately for the "what do I do about it" step.
- Third-party price roundups disagree with each other. Confirm every number on the vendor's own pricing page before you buy.
Why this question exists now
A year ago, the standard advice was "Profound for depth, something cheaper if you must." Profound's Starter plan sat at $99 a month for ChatGPT tracking only, with 50 prompts and one seat. Growth was $399.
That changed. Profound's own pricing page now shows a free Trial and a custom Enterprise plan. The trial runs 50 prompts daily for 7 days across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, with no data history, no exports and no API. Enterprise covers up to 9 engines, ChatGPT Shopping, SSO and SOC 2, but you have to talk to sales. There is a mention of a self-serve Agency Growth plan in the FAQ, but no price is shown.
Profound
A Rework roundup updated in October 2026 makes the same point: if the old ~$99 figure doesn't match the site, that isn't your mistake. It's gone. Profound also repositioned around an "AI Marketer" with credit-based agents, and raised a $180M Series D in September 2026 according to Alhena's write-up. It is clearly aimed at large enterprise now.
So if you are a small team, a startup, a consultant or an agency testing the waters, the useful question is not "what replaces Profound?" It is "what does $50 to $100 a month actually buy, and what is missing?"
What the price points look like
Here are the entry prices reported by third-party roundups. I have not been able to verify all of them on vendor pages, and the sources disagree in places, so treat this as a starting list rather than a quote.
| Tool | Reported entry price | Reported limits | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rankscale | $20/mo Essential; $99/mo Pro | 120 credits (480 responses) on Essential; 1,200 credits on Pro | Credit-based, engine weights vary |
| Otterly.ai | $29/mo Lite | 15 prompts | Cheapest published plan per several roundups |
| HubSpot AEO | $50/mo | 25 prompts, 3 engines | Partial coverage of a 50-prompt workload |
| LLMrefs | $79/mo Pro | Varies | Covers many engines |
| Peec AI | about 85-95 EUR/USD per month | 25 prompts (SE Ranking) or 50 prompts (Rework) | Unlimited seats; fourth engine is a paid add-on |
| Cognizo | about $89/mo Monitor | 50 prompts | Unlimited seats, daily tracking |
| Semrush AI Visibility | $99/mo per domain | 25 daily prompts, 4 engines | Sold as an add-on to the Semrush suite |
| Similarweb | from $99 | 4 engines | Pairs AI visibility with referral traffic |
| Am I On AI | about $100/mo | about 100 prompts | Weekly scans, one product |
Note the Peec AI discrepancy. SE Ranking lists Starter at 89 EUR with 25 prompts, while Rework lists $95 with 50 prompts and three engines. One of them is stale or counting differently. That kind of gap is why checking the vendor's page matters.
The tools, briefly
Otterly.ai
The cheapest real self-serve plan, according to Rework and Alhena, at $29 a month for 15 prompts. Per Rework, you get unlimited team members and brand reports plus tracking across 50+ countries and multiple languages. You don't get a free tier to test it, and you won't get deep content or technical fix recommendations.
Otterly.AI
Rankscale
Rankscale uses credits. Rework's worked example: 1,200 credits on the $99 Pro plan covers up to 4,800 engine answers at the lowest 0.25-credit engine weight, with all engines included. The $20 Essential tier gives 120 credits, or 480 responses. Credits make it cheap if you track a little and expensive if you pick heavier engines, so do the arithmetic for your actual prompt list.
Peec AI
Popular with agencies because every plan has unlimited seats. The catch is engine selection: the three self-serve engines are picked from ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI, and a fourth is a paid add-on in Rework's pricing.
Semrush and Ahrefs Brand Radar
If you already pay for Semrush, the AI Visibility add-on is $99 a month per domain with 25 daily prompts, per Geoptie and Alhena. Ahrefs Brand Radar has a different model, with plans reported at $50 for 2,500 checks and $100 for 7,000 checks, and its prompts come from real People Also Ask data rather than invented ones. Both make the most sense when you are already in the suite.
Cognizo, LLMrefs and others
Cognizo's Monitor plan is about $89 a month with 50 prompts and unlimited seats. LLMrefs Pro is $79. Both fit the budget, but check engine coverage and refresh frequency.
Cognizo
LLMrefs
What an essential-tier plan really includes
The headline numbers (prompts, engines, price) are only half the story. These are the things that quietly differ.
Prompt count versus real coverage
Fifteen prompts is a spot check, not a program. Twenty-five is enough to monitor one product line in one country. Fifty is a reasonable minimum for a small brand with a few topics and a couple of competitors. HubSpot AEO's $50 plan covers 25 of the 50 prompts in Rework's test workload and doesn't price the rest, so it looks cheaper than it is.
Which engines, and how they are captured
Some plans track ChatGPT only. Others include Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot. Engine choice changes what you learn, because the engines behave differently. According to Promptwatch's average sources per response data (published September 2025), ChatGPT cites about 5 sources per web-search answer, Google AI Overviews about 10, and Perplexity almost exactly 10 every day. Copilot's average swung from under 2 to nearly 17 within a few weeks. So ChatGPT citation slots are scarce, Perplexity is a stable benchmark, and Copilot should be judged on monthly trends rather than weekly snapshots.
Also ask whether answers come from the real user interface or an API. The two can differ in citations and recommendations.
Daily versus weekly scans
AI answers are noisy. A weekly scan of 100 prompts gives you less signal than a daily scan of 25. Am I On AI's roughly $100 plan covers about 100 prompts but scans weekly, for instance. Neither is wrong, but they answer different questions.
Fan-out visibility
A prompt tracker runs the prompt you typed. It usually doesn't show the searches the model actually runs behind the scenes. Promptwatch's ChatGPT query fanout report found a single prompt can trigger 3 to 8+ searches according to its intro, though the measured average was 2.15 searches per response in early December, about 1.84 by early March, and exactly 1.0 when fanout data returned in April. Average fanout query length also fell from about 117 characters to about 53. If a plan doesn't expose fan-outs, you are optimizing for prompts nobody sees retrieved.
History, exports and API
Profound's own trial has no history, exports or API, which tells you how these features are used to gate tiers. At the budget end, check whether you can export to CSV and whether history is capped. If you want to build client reports, this matters more than a fancy dashboard.
What is almost always missing
- AI crawler logs showing whether bots can read your pages
- Traffic and conversion attribution from AI referrals
- Content creation or publishing tied to the gaps found
- Site audits aimed at AI readability
- Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn citation reports
Monitoring tells you that you are invisible. It doesn't tell you why, or fix it. That is the real gap in the under-$100 market.
Where Promptwatch fits at this price
One option sits just under the ceiling and goes past monitoring. Promptwatch Essential is $95 a month ($85 on EUR billing) for 1 project, 1 seat, 50 prompts and 6,000 responses, with all AI models unlocked. It also includes country tracking, a site audit, 360 Insights, content gap analysis, Agent Chat credits (500 a month), 200K visitor events, and MCP and API access. Annual billing gives 12 months for the price of 10, and monthly Essential has a 7-day free trial. Confirm current numbers at promptwatch.com/pricing.
The difference from most of the list above is what sits next to the prompt tracking. It monitors the real interfaces of ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and more rather than only API outputs, shows prompt volumes and difficulty, and includes content gap analysis so you can see which prompts AI answers that your pages don't cover. The heavier tools (the automated Content Agent, crawler logs at volume) sit on higher plans, so don't assume everything is included at $95. Agency plans start at $199 and skip some content features.
How to pick, by situation
| Your situation | Sensible pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Just testing whether AI search matters | Otterly.ai Lite or Rankscale Essential | Lowest published entry prices |
| One brand, 50 prompts, several engines | Rankscale Pro, Peec AI, or Promptwatch Essential | 50-prompt fit; compare engines and add-ons |
| Already paying for an SEO suite | Semrush AI Visibility or Ahrefs Brand Radar | Data sits next to keywords and backlinks |
| Agency with many client workspaces | Peec AI or a Kick-off agency plan | Unlimited seats or projects |
| Want to act on gaps, not only see them | Promptwatch Essential or above | Content gap analysis, site audit, traffic data |
For wider browsing, the GEO software directory at bestgeosoftware.com and the AI rank tracking directory at ai-rank-tools.com list many more options.
A quick checklist before you pay
- Price a 50-prompt, 3-engine, daily workload on every tool, including add-ons. This is the same method Rework used, and it exposes the gaps fast.
- Check the vendor's own pricing page. Roundups from vendors such as Omnia and Geoptie are self-interested, and even neutral ones go stale.
- Ask how responses are collected: real UI or API.
- Check history limits and export options.
- Decide what you will do with the data. If the answer is "publish more content," make sure the plan helps with that or budget another tool for it.
- Use monthly billing for the first month if there's a trial. Cancel if the prompt set turns out wrong.
Final thought
Profound moving upmarket doesn't leave small teams stranded. It just removes the easy benchmark. The sub-$100 tier is crowded, and the differences hide in prompt limits, engine add-ons, scan frequency and what's missing entirely. Pick the plan that fits a realistic 50-prompt workload, then spend your attention on the pages AI keeps skipping rather than on the dashboard.