Key takeaways
- Profound's public pricing for brands is a free 7-day trial plus custom Enterprise. There is no self-serve brand price you can hand to finance.
- Agencies get a published number: $99/month plus $399 per client workspace (100 prompts), roughly $3.99 per prompt per month before the base fee.
- Among published prices, tools like Otterly.AI, Peec AI, LLM Pulse and Writesonic land between roughly $1.20 and $2.00 per prompt.
- Per-prompt cost is only comparable if you normalize for check frequency, engine count, and bundled extras like articles.
- For most startups, the sensible path is to baseline by hand, then pay for the smallest plan that runs your real buyer questions.
Why this comparison is harder than it looks
I went into this expecting a tidy table. It is not tidy. Profound hides its brand price behind a sales call, other vendors sell prompts, others sell credits, and a few bundle content writing into the same sticker price. Dividing monthly cost by prompts gives you a number, but it is a rough one.
Still, a rough number beats none. If you are a seed-stage team with a few thousand dollars a year for AI visibility, you need a way to see which tools are priced like startups and which are priced like enterprises.
Prices below were checked in October 2026 from vendor pages and third-party roundups (humanswith.ai, SuperMarketers, Strategi, ZeroRank, SlateHQ). Several of those sites sell competing products, so confirm everything on the vendor's own pricing page before you buy.
What Profound actually costs
Here is what Profound's pricing page shows right now.
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Trial (brands) | Free | 50 prompts daily for 7 days on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, limited credits, no history, exports, API or support |
| Enterprise (brands) | Custom | Tailored prompt plan, up to 9 engines, team-wide credits, SSO/SAML, SOC 2, dedicated support |
| Agency Growth | $99/mo + $399/mo per client workspace | Client workspaces with 100 prompts and 400 credits each, 10 pitch workspaces a month, 5 seats |
| Agency Enterprise | Custom | Tailored workspaces, more engines, API |
The trial is a real evaluation window, not a budget option. Seven days of history that disappears is not a baseline.
The older Starter and Growth tiers
SlateHQ and Maintouch describe a $99 Starter (ChatGPT only, 50 prompts) and a $399 Growth tier (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, 100 prompts). SlateHQ says these only appear once you start sign-up, and Strategi notes the plan lineup has changed more than once in 2026. Treat them as unverified. If they are still offered when you sign up, the math is $1.98 per prompt on Starter and $3.99 on Growth.
Enterprise is a guess
Maintouch estimates Enterprise at $2,000 to $5,000+ per month. A Reddit commenter quoted by SlateHQ said it once started around $1,000 per month per brand per country. Both are anecdotal. The practical point: every added brand, country and engine moves the quote, so budget for a negotiated contract.
The agency math
One client workspace plus the base fee is $498/month (ZeroRank's figure). That is $4.98 per prompt in the first month if you only run one client, and $3.99 per prompt once the base fee is spread across several. Strategi's advice is blunt: model the $399 per workspace, because that is the number that scales.
Cost per tracked prompt across 12 tools
This is my arithmetic from published entry prices: monthly price divided by prompts included. Engine counts and check frequency differ, which I cover below.
| Tool | Entry plan | Prompts | Approx. cost per prompt | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI | $29 Lite | 15 | $1.93 | $189 for 100 ($1.89), $489 for 400 ($1.22); 4 engines included |
| Peec AI | $95 Starter | 50 | $1.90 | $245 for 150 ($1.63), $495 for 350 ($1.41); 3 models of your choice |
| LLM Pulse | EUR 49 weekly | 50 | EUR 0.98 | Daily is EUR 79 (EUR 1.58); 5 engines |
| Writesonic | $79 annual | 50 | $1.58 | 3 engines, bundles articles and audits |
| Humanswith.AI | $149 | 100 | $1.49 | One engine, checks monthly |
| Scrunch | $250 Core | 125 | $2.00 | Sources conflict on plan structure |
| AthenaHQ | $295 Starter | credits | about $0.08 per response | 3,600 credits, 11 models, no per-prompt price |
| Goodie AI | $399 Core | 120 | $3.33 | Includes content and action credits |
| Semrush AI Visibility | $99 per domain | 25 | $3.96 | Daily tracking, no free trial |
| Profound (agency) | $399 per workspace | 100 | $3.99 | Plus $99 base fee |
| Profound (brand) | Enterprise | custom | not published | Trial only before that |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | $199 standalone | varies | not comparable | Sources disagree on prompt allotments |
A few things jump out. The tools priced for startups cluster around $1.50 to $2.00 per prompt, and the price falls as you buy more prompts. Semrush and Profound's agency tier sit at roughly double that. Scrunch is the messy one: SuperMarketers lists a $300 Starter with 350 custom prompts (about $0.86 each), while humanswith.ai and Xtrusio list a single $250 Core plan. Check Scrunch directly.
The tools in more detail
Otterly.AI is the cheapest way to get a real paid baseline. Gemini, AI Mode and Claude are paid add-ons, and extra prompts cost $99 per 100.
Peec AI is a straightforward prompt tracker. Starter includes 4,500 answers a month (50 prompts x 3 models x 30 days), about $0.02 per answer. Prices vary by region, with euro listings around EUR 85 to 89.
At the very bottom of the market, Rankscale lists $20/month on annual billing only (cheapest monthly is $99), GetIntel is $29 for 25 buyer questions a day, Surfaced is EUR 39 annual, and Knowatoa is $59. HubSpot AEO monitoring is $50/month ($45 annual). Cheap is not the same as comparable, but if you only need a pulse check, these exist.
Why per-prompt cost can mislead you
The humanswith.ai comparison makes a point I agree with: the denominator is slippery.
- Check frequency. A daily prompt runs about 30 times a month, a weekly one about 4, a monthly one once. LLM Pulse charges 50 to 61 percent more for daily than weekly.
- Billing unit. Peec, Otterly and LLM Pulse sell prompts. AthenaHQ sells credits, one per AI response. Conductor sells keywords and drafts.
- Engines. Peec shows 6 models on its marketing site but includes 3. Otterly includes 4 and charges for 3 more.
- Bundles. Writesonic, Semrush, Goodie and Humanswith.AI include articles, audits or SEO tools, so their per-prompt number is not pure measurement.
- Annual discounts. Otterly gives 15 percent, LLM Pulse a year for ten months.
A useful normalization is cost per answer: price divided by prompts x engines x days. Honeyb's own math, for what it is worth, comes to about $0.008 per answer on a $199 plan covering 100 prompts across 8 engines. Peec Starter is about $0.02, Scrunch Core about $0.05, AthenaHQ about $0.08. Profound does not publish enough to compute one.
One prompt is not one search
A tracked prompt is a sample. Promptwatch Data's ChatGPT query fanouts report shows ChatGPT averaged about 2.15 web searches per response in early December 2025, about 1.84 by early March 2026, and 1.0 per response when fanouts returned in April 2026. Average fanout query length also fell from about 117 characters to about 53. The behavior moves, so a prompt set you wrote in January may not reflect how the engine retrieves in November. Rerun and revisit your prompts, and judge trends over several weeks rather than single days. SuperMarketers describes results as directionally reliable but individually noisy, which matches how I would use them.
What a startup should actually buy
Pre-seed and seed
Baseline by hand first. Spend 30 minutes asking ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity your 20 real buyer questions and write down who gets named. Then use a free tier, and pay for the smallest plan that runs those questions. Otterly at $29 or Peec at $95 fits here. Profound is not built for this stage, and with no published brand price, you cannot even plan for it.
Series A
If you want direction on what to fix rather than just a score, tools with action layers make sense. AthenaHQ and Goodie are the ones SuperMarketers points to. If you want monitoring plus execution in one place, Promptwatch is worth a look: Essential is $95/month for 50 prompts across all models, and it adds crawler logs, visitor analytics and a content gap analysis that most pure trackers lack. Business at $579/month includes the Content Agent that writes and publishes to your CMS. Confirm current pricing at promptwatch.com/pricing.
Funded and enterprise-ready
This is where Profound makes sense, per ZeroRank: Prompt Volumes, Agents, crawler analytics, Shopping intelligence, or enterprise controls like SOC 2 and SSO. Profound raised a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation in September 2026, per Strategi, and counts Comcast, Walmart and Zoom among customers. It is a different product for a different buyer.
Agencies
Model your real client roster. Five clients on Profound is $99 + 5 x $399 = $2,094/month. Compare that against agency plans elsewhere, for example Promptwatch's Kick-off at $199/month with unlimited projects and prompts (metered by 10,000 responses), or the directory at bestgeosoftware.com for more options. If you are weighing whether to hire help instead of buying software, 1001 SEO Media works on exactly this kind of GEO program.
A quick budgeting checklist
- Count the buyer questions you genuinely care about. 50 to 100 is plenty to start.
- Decide which engines your buyers use. Do not pay for nine you will not read.
- Ask what check frequency the price assumes.
- Ask what happens at your prompt limit and whether billing is annual only.
- Separate measurement cost from content or action credits.
- Wait at least two months after publishing fixes before judging results, since new pages take time to be cited.
- Get Profound or any Enterprise quote in writing, including brands, countries and engines.
For more tracker options, see the AI rank tracking directory.
Bottom line
Profound is not priced for startups, and it is mostly not trying to be. The honest comparison is not Profound versus Otterly on a per-prompt basis, because you cannot buy Profound that way as a brand. For most startups the real spend is $29 to $250 a month, around $1.20 to $2.00 per prompt, and the discipline is choosing prompts that reflect real buyer questions. Spend more only when you have someone who will act on the data.