Key takeaways
- Profound's pricing page now lists a free 7-day trial and a custom-priced Enterprise plan. The old $99 and $399 self-serve plans are gone, so "cheaper" mostly means "has a published price."
- The cheapest paid entry points are Otterly.AI (from $29/mo) and Peec AI (roughly 70 to 85 EUR/mo). AthenaHQ has a free tier, and Scrunch has a 7-day trial.
- Cheap tiers usually cover 1 to 4 AI engines. Citation mixes differ a lot by engine, so check coverage before you commit.
- If you want a tool that fixes visibility gaps and not just reports them, Promptwatch is the one to try first, starting at $95/mo with a free tier to explore.
- Prices below were reported by third-party comparison sites in October 2026 and sometimes disagree. Confirm on each vendor's pricing page.
Why people are leaving Profound
Profound is still the enterprise name in this category. Profound reportedly raised a $180M Series D in September 2026 and says it serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands. Good for them. Less good if you're a five-person marketing team.
According to SEO Stuff's check on October 9, 2026, Profound's pricing page shows two options. One is a free 7-day trial (50 prompts a day across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, limited credits, no exports). The other is a custom Enterprise plan sold through a demo. That's it. If you want to know what you'll pay before talking to sales, you can't.
So the shortlist below is built on three filters: a published price, a free plan or free trial, and an entry cost that doesn't need a procurement meeting.
The 7 alternatives at a glance
| Tool | Starting price | Free option | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Promptwatch | $95/mo (Essential) | Free Explore plan (10 prompts, ChatGPT only); 7-day trial on monthly paid plans | Teams that want to fix gaps, not only track them |
| Otterly.AI | $29/mo | Free trial | Solo marketers and tight budgets |
| Peec AI | About 70 to 85 EUR/mo | Free trial (terms not published) | Agencies and multi-language teams |
| AthenaHQ | $295/mo paid; free Essential tier | Free tier (300 credits, per one source) | Action-oriented workflows |
| Scrunch | $250 to $300/mo | 7-day trial of Core or Starter | Mid-market teams wanting audits |
| Alhena | $199/mo billed annually | Permanent free tier | Ecommerce and DTC brands |
| AirOps | Not published | Free Solo tier | Content teams |
The Scrunch price differs by source (Ayzeo says $250/mo for Core, SEO Stuff says $300/mo). Treat both as ballpark.
1. Promptwatch: the best pick if you want to act on the data
Promptwatch is the one on this list that doesn't stop at "was my brand mentioned?" Its Content Agent plans, writes and publishes content against your visibility gaps, and published pages are then tracked through crawls, citations and AI traffic. Underperformers come back as actions on a to-do list.
The pricing is straightforward. There's a free Explore plan (1 project, 10 prompts, ChatGPT only), then Essential at $95/mo with 50 prompts, 6,000 responses, all AI models, a site audit and content gap analysis. Professional is $245/mo and Business is $579/mo. Monthly Essential and Professional include a 7-day free trial. Annual billing gets you 12 months for the price of 10.
A few things cheap trackers rarely include: IP-verified AI crawler logs that show which pages GPTBot, ClaudeBot and others actually read, visitor analytics that tie AI traffic to conversions, and tracking of Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn citations. It also monitors real user interfaces (ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and more) rather than only API outputs.
Who it's for: anyone who suspects the real problem isn't reporting but fixing. The free plan only covers ChatGPT, so treat it as a taste, and expect to need a paid tier for real work. Check promptwatch.com/pricing before you buy.
2. Otterly.AI: the cheapest published plan
At $29/mo, Otterly.AI is the cheapest paid entry in nearly every comparison I found. Ayzeo lists 4 engines on the entry tier (including AI Overviews and Copilot), 15 prompts and unlimited seats. SEO Stuff adds that Claude, AI Mode and Gemini are paid add-ons. Sonary reports a free trial with no card required.
The catch is depth. It's monitoring-first, with GEO URL audits as the main optimization feature. If you need a quick, cheap read on where you stand, it's hard to beat. If you need content workflows or crawler data, you'll outgrow it.
3. Peec AI: clean tracker, agency-friendly
Peec AI is Berlin-based and gets recommended repeatedly for agencies because every plan includes unlimited seats. IndustryLens lists the Starter plan at 85 EUR/mo (50 prompts, 3 models), while Ayzeo shows 70 EUR/mo on annual billing. Claude is Enterprise-only on the standard plans. There's a free trial, though the terms aren't published.
It's a good tracker and it's honest about being one. Ayzeo describes it as insights-only, so no fixing tools.
4. AthenaHQ: closest self-serve match to Profound
IndustryLens calls AthenaHQ the closest self-serve match to Profound: visibility, citation and hallucination tracking across 8+ LLM platforms, with a published Starter plan. Paid starts at $295/mo, but there's a free Essential tier (one source says 300 credits). One review notes that Starter API access costs extra.
The free tier is the draw here. It's not cheap once you pay, so use the free level to decide whether the recommendations and action features are worth the jump.
5. Scrunch: a trial with a published price
Scrunch goes beyond tracking by building a machine-readable layer so AI agents can crawl and represent your brand accurately. Ayzeo says Core is $250/mo billed monthly with 125 prompts, 5 user licenses and a 7-day free trial. Annual discounts are Enterprise only. SEO Stuff lists $300/mo, so verify.
Not cheap, but it's a rare mid-market option with a trial and a public number. The 7 days go fast, so load your prompts on day one.
6. Alhena: free tier for ecommerce
Alhena's own comparison page puts itself first for ecommerce and DTC brands, which is worth keeping in mind, since it's a vendor ranking its own product. The claim is that it tracks which SKUs AI recommends and ties AI traffic to orders. The free plan includes an AI visibility snapshot on one engine, and paid starts at $199/mo billed annually.
If you sell products, it's worth the free snapshot. If you don't, skip it.
7. AirOps: free to start, built for content teams
AirOps has a free Solo tier covering ChatGPT, and Pro mentions "7+ answer engines." Paid pricing isn't published, and one source mentions a 14-day trial. It's a content engineering platform with workflows and an expert team, so it fits content-heavy teams more than analysts who want dashboards.
Honorable mentions if you already pay for an SEO suite
Sonary compared six cheaper options and found that HubSpot AEO (28-day trial, no card), Frase, SE Ranking and Otterly all offer no-card trials, while Semrush's trial needs a card on file. Semrush AI Visibility starts around $99/mo per domain per Alhena's roundup, though Ayzeo lists a $199/mo Starter plan with AI visibility, so the sources conflict.
If you already use one of these, the add-on route is often the cheapest way in. Just expect fixed prompt sets and shallower AI-specific data than a dedicated tool.
How to choose without wasting your trial
Check which engines the cheap tier covers
This matters more than most pricing pages let on. Promptwatch Data shows that ChatGPT cites about 5 sources per web-search answer, while Google AI Overviews cites about 10 and Perplexity almost exactly 10. Citation mixes also differ sharply. In Promptwatch's social citation data for Sep 28 to Oct 4, 2026, ChatGPT got just 0.46% of its citations from social platforms, while Google AI Overviews got 12.2%. A tracker that covers only ChatGPT will tell you a very different story from one that covers AI Overviews too.
Run the same prompts everywhere
Pick 15 to 20 prompts that matter to your business: a few brand queries, a few competitor comparisons, a few category searches. Put the same set into every trial. Then compare how many mentions each tool finds, how fast it updates, and whether the data exports.
Ask whether it helps you fix things
Monitoring-only tools tell you the score. Some tools go further with content generation, crawler logs or an action list. Decide up front whether you have the people to act on raw data. If not, pay more for a tool that closes the loop.
Watch the trial limits
Profound's own trial limits you to 50 prompts a day and no exports. Several alternatives are similar. Seven days is short, so schedule your trial for a week when you can actually look at it.
Quick recommendations
| If you are... | Start with |
|---|---|
| A solo marketer on a tight budget | Otterly.AI |
| An agency with many clients | Peec AI |
| Wanting tracking plus content fixes | Promptwatch |
| An ecommerce brand | Alhena |
| A content team | AirOps |
| Wanting a Profound-style platform with a free tier | AthenaHQ |
For a wider list, the GEO software directory at bestgeosoftware.com covers more tools in this category, and the rank tracker listings at ai-rank-tools.com are useful if you want pure monitoring.
Bottom line
Profound's move to trial-or-Enterprise made the "cheap alternative" question easy to answer: pick anything with a price on the page. For most small teams, I'd run Otterly.AI for the cheapest baseline and Promptwatch to see whether acting on the data is worth the extra spend. Check each vendor's pricing page before you buy, because these numbers moved several times in 2026.