Key takeaways
- Profound no longer shows a self-serve paid plan for brands. Its pricing page lists a 7-day trial and a custom Enterprise contract, so a startup has to go through a demo and a quote.
- Otterly.AI is the cheapest way in ($29/mo) and has unlimited seats, but Gemini, AI Mode and Claude are paid add-ons, and it stops at monitoring plus recommendations.
- Promptwatch costs more per month at the same prompt count, but includes all models on paid plans, crawler logs, visitor analytics and content tools. Seats are the catch: plans cap them.
- For most 5-person startups, the real choice is Otterly (measure cheaply first) or Promptwatch (measure and fix in one tool). Profound only makes sense if you can justify an enterprise budget.
- Pricing in this category changes fast. Verify everything on the vendors' own pricing pages before you buy.
The question a 5-person team should actually ask
Most comparison posts rank these tools by feature count. That is the wrong lens for a startup. You have maybe one person who half-owns SEO, a founder who wants to know whether ChatGPT mentions the product, and no procurement department.
So the useful questions are simpler. What does it cost once you add the things you will need? Can your whole team log in? Does it just tell you that you are invisible, or does it help you fix that? And can you get started this week without a sales call?
I will go through each tool with those questions, then put the numbers side by side.
Profound: powerful, but now sales-led
Profound is the best-funded company in this space. It raised a Series D (reported at $180M on a $1.8B valuation in September 2026) and counts brands like Ramp, MongoDB, Figma and Walmart as customers. Its headline asset is Prompt Volumes, a dataset built from licensed consumer panel conversations that estimates how often a given prompt is actually asked. Nobody else in this comparison has anything like it.
Profound
The problem for a small team is access. Older articles, including the Otterly listicle in our research, quote a $99 Starter and a $399 Growth plan. Those appear to be gone. As of the vendor's current pricing page, brands get a free trial (50 preset prompts, 7 days, ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews only, no exports, no API) or a custom Enterprise plan. Vendr's buyer data puts the median contract around $35,250 a year, according to a third-party analysis, which is a number I would treat as indicative rather than gospel.
What you get at Enterprise is genuinely strong: up to nine engines, daily tracking, SOC 2, SSO, an API, Agent Analytics tied to GA4, and Aim, its agent layer that proposes ranked projects. Unlimited seats are included, which is nice.
But the thing that makes Profound special, Prompt Volumes, is gated behind that Enterprise plan beyond five trial searches. For a startup tracking 30 to 50 prompts, you would be paying enterprise money for a data layer you may not have the content capacity to act on.
To be fair, that page is written by Profound, so read its Otterly criticisms as a vendor's view. The point about Otterly's volume numbers being AI-generated estimates rather than real conversation counts is valid, though.
Otterly.AI: the cheap, honest starting point
Otterly.AI is a self-funded Vienna company that launched in late 2024 and claims 40,000+ marketing professionals. It was named a Gartner Cool Vendor for AI in Marketing in 2025. G2 reviews average 4.7 out of 5 across 54 ratings, per SE Visible's review, with particularly high marks for ease of setup.
Otterly.AI
Pricing from its own page:
- Lite: $29/mo, 15 prompts, daily tracking, unlimited team members
- Standard: $189/mo, 100 prompts, API and MCP access, Agent Analytics, Data Studio connector
- Premium: $489/mo, 400 prompts
- Enterprise: custom, from 1,000 prompts
- 15% off annual billing
Unlimited seats on every tier is a real advantage for a team of five. Nobody has to fight over a login.
Now the caveat. Some of Otterly's own marketing says six engines come on every paid plan with no upgrade tax. The pricing page contradicts that: the base price covers ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, while Gemini, AI Mode and Claude are add-ons. SE Visible's math puts a Standard plan with all seven engines at about $416/mo. When two sources disagree, I trust the pricing page.
The other limit is what happens after you measure. Otterly gives you GEO recommendations, content briefs and crawlability checks, plus an MCP server and API so you can wire up your own agent. It does not write and publish for you. For a founder who has no spare hours, that gap matters.
SE Visible's review also flags the sentiment classifier as occasionally oversensitive, so hand-check that metric before putting it in an investor update.
Promptwatch: more expensive, but built to close the loop
Promptwatch sits between the two on price and well above both on breadth. It tracks the live consumer interfaces of ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Meta AI and others, with API models like Claude and DeepSeek alongside. Every paid plan unlocks all models, so there is no per-engine add-on math.
Plans a startup would look at:
- Explore: free, 10 prompts, ChatGPT only
- Essential: $95/mo, 1 project, 50 prompts, 6,000 responses, 500 Agent Credits, 7-day trial
- Professional: $245/mo, 150 prompts, 18,000 responses, Agent Analytics (AI crawler logs), content writing and refresh, Knowledge Base
- Business: $579/mo, 350 prompts, the automated Content Agent, local targeting, Shopping Insights, Ads Radar
What justifies the higher price is what sits around the tracking. IP-verified crawler logs show which AI bots hit which pages and where they hit errors. Visitor analytics attribute actual traffic and conversions from AI platforms. The Action Board turns gaps into a prioritized to-do list, and the Content Agent can write and publish to Webflow, Framer or WordPress, then track whether the page gets crawled and cited. Crisp reported 2x higher conversion from AI traffic than from traditional channels, and TreeHouse (Pararius) reached roughly 25% of organic conversions from AI search after fixing crawler access.
The catch for a 5-person team is seats. Essential looks like one seat, and the Professional and Business seat counts in the plan table are not cleanly confirmed in the scrape, so check the pricing page. Otterly and Profound are unlimited here. Also note that crawler logs and content features start at Professional ($245), not Essential.
If you use Claude, Cursor or ChatGPT daily, the hosted MCP server and Agent Chat are worth a look, since they let you query your data without opening the dashboard.
Side-by-side comparison
| Profound | Promptwatch | Otterly.AI | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Self-serve paid plan | No (trial or Enterprise) | Yes, from $95/mo | Yes, from $29/mo |
| Free option | 7-day trial, 50 preset prompts | Explore: 10 prompts, ChatGPT only | 7 to 14 day trial |
| Entry price per prompt | Custom | about $1.90 (Essential) | about $1.93 (Lite) |
| Seats | Unlimited | Capped by plan | Unlimited |
| Engine coverage | Up to 9 on Enterprise | All models on paid plans | 4 base, 3 as add-ons |
| Prompt volume data | Licensed panel data (Enterprise) | Volume bands, difficulty, fan-outs | AI-estimated intent volume |
| AI crawler logs | Yes (CDN integrations) | Yes (Professional and up) | Yes (Standard and up) |
| Content creation | Agents built by Aim | Content Agent, refresh, CMS publishing | Standalone GEO Content Creator, briefs |
| Traffic attribution | GA4 integration | Built-in visitor analytics | On the roadmap |
| Security | SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA | ISO 27001, GDPR | Not publicly listed |
The per-prompt figures are my own arithmetic from list prices, not vendor claims. Promptwatch Professional drops to about $1.63 per prompt.
What it really costs a 5-person startup
Sticker price is misleading, so here are three realistic setups.
The scrappy validator wants to know if the product shows up at all. Otterly Lite at $29/mo, or Promptwatch Explore for free on ChatGPT, answers that. Spend nothing or almost nothing for a month.
The serious tracker has 50 to 100 prompts and wants competitor benchmarking. Otterly Standard at $189 (plus roughly $227 more if you need all seven engines) or Promptwatch Essential at $95 for 50 prompts. Promptwatch is cheaper at that level if multi-engine coverage matters. Otterly wins if you need unlimited seats and mostly care about four engines.
The team that wants to ship fixes has one content person and wants the tool to do some of the work. Promptwatch Professional at $245 (crawler logs, content writing and refresh, Knowledge Base) is the natural fit. Otterly Standard plus a separate writing tool is the alternative, and you will wire it together yourself.
Profound does not fit any of these unless you already have enterprise-scale spend.
Which one I would pick
Honestly, it depends on whether you have anyone to act on the data.
If the answer is no, spending $95 to $245 on a tool that writes and tracks content for you beats spending $29 on a dashboard you stop opening in week three. That is the argument for Promptwatch. Monitoring alone tells you that you are invisible. It does not change it.
If you have a capable SEO or content lead already, and want a clean, cheap baseline with unlimited seats, Otterly is the sensible pick. It is simple, quick to set up, and the free GEO audit and fan-out tools cost nothing.
If your content planning depends on knowing which prompts carry real demand, and you can handle a demo and a quote, Profound's Prompt Volumes is the one asset the others do not replicate. Get an Enterprise quote before deciding, but do not expect startup pricing.
Where the data says to focus matters too. Promptwatch Data's ChatGPT citation share by content type report found product pages were the most cited type at 22.4% of citations (Sep 28 to Oct 4, 2026), followed by landing pages and listicles. And its half-life study showed landing pages and docs stayed cited longest while news lost half its pages within 36 days. For a startup, that points toward investing in durable product and docs pages rather than chasing news.
A short buying checklist
- Run the free options first. Promptwatch's free AI visibility report and Otterly's free GEO audit cost nothing and show whether you have a problem.
- Count the engines your buyers actually use. Do not pay for nine if your audience lives in ChatGPT and Perplexity.
- Model add-ons and seats before you sign. This is where Otterly and Promptwatch each have a hidden cost.
- Decide who acts on the data. If nobody, buy the tool with execution built in.
- Recheck pricing on the day you buy. Profound removed its self-serve brand plans around the time of its Series D, which shows how quickly this changes.
If you want to browse more options beyond these three, the GEO software directory at bestgeosoftware.com lists dozens of alternatives, including Peec AI, Scrunch and Lumirank.
Bottom line
For a 5-person startup in 2026, Profound is the best product you probably cannot buy. Otterly.AI is the cheapest honest way to start measuring. Promptwatch costs more but is the one that helps you fix what you find, which is usually where small teams get stuck.