Profound Pricing in 2026: What It Costs and 6 Alternatives

As of August 2026, Profound lists Starter at $99 per month and Growth at $399 per month, both billed yearly; Claude tracking requires the custom-priced Enterprise plan. This is a genuine change worth noting: Profound now publishes self-serve pricing on its site, so the older complaint that its pricing was hidden no longer holds. What survives is a narrower kind of opacity. The published tiers cover 1 to 3 engines, and everything beyond them, including Claude, Grok, Copilot, and SSO, lives in a custom-priced, sales-led Enterprise plan.

Both self-serve prices are displayed as annual-billing commitments, so the practical decision is a yearly one: roughly $1,188 for Starter and $4,788 for Growth at the displayed rates. Profound also offers a free AEO report as a lead magnet; whether a standard free trial exists is less clear, with conflicting signals as of August 2026. Searches for Profound AI pricing land on the same 3 tiers; there is no separate product line. Pricing verified August 2026; check vendor pages for current rates.

Profound’s Starter tier includes ChatGPT tracking only, Growth adds Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, and Enterprise unlocks up to 9 engines including Claude. The tiers differ far more in engine coverage than the price gap alone suggests. Starter comes with 50 prompts, 1,500 responses per month, 100 agent-analytics credits, 1 seat, and email support. Growth quadruples the price and delivers 3 engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews), 100 prompts, 9,000 responses per month, 400 credits, and 3 seats. Enterprise is where the platform becomes what its marketing describes: up to 9 engines, agent analytics at scale, and the security features larger companies require.

That structure is the source of the most common criticism in independent reviews: a single-engine Starter plan reads to many reviewers as a funnel toward the $399 Growth plan rather than a complete product in its own right. AI visibility differs meaningfully by engine, so a ChatGPT-only view answers only part of the question a buyer is asking. The 1-workspace limit on self-serve plans matters too: an agency cannot run multiple client brands from one account without going Enterprise.

Reviewers rate Profound highly on depth and polish, and critically on price and reliability. On the praise side, reviewers on G2 and SourceForge describe it as the most complete tool in the category, with a strong interface, useful sentiment analysis, and an enterprise dataset competitors struggle to match. Its agent analytics, showing how AI crawlers and agents actually interact with your site, is a genuine differentiator.

The complaint record from the same reviews clusters into 4 themes. First, price: Profound is more expensive than most of its competition at every published tier. Second, the tier design: the restricted Starter plan is widely read as a stepping stone to Growth rather than a standalone product. Third, reliability: independent reviews from 2026 report slow dashboard loads of 10–15 seconds and billing freezes. Fourth, the one-workspace limit, which blocks agency use on self-serve plans entirely. None of these complaints disputes the quality of the data; they dispute what it costs to reach it.

Profound fits enterprise and mid-market brands that run a continuous AI visibility program with a serious budget behind it. It is a serious product, not an overpriced toy: if your brand competes in a category where AI answers already shape buying decisions, and you need sentiment tracking, agent analytics, citation-source monitoring, and competitor benchmarking as an ongoing operation, the Enterprise plan delivers a depth few rivals match. Teams already comparing it against other enterprise platforms are usually choosing between Profound and Scrunch AI, and either can be the right answer.

Profound fits poorly in 3 situations. If you need Claude coverage without an Enterprise contract, the self-serve plans cannot provide it at any price. If you are an agency managing several client brands, the 1-workspace limit forces you into the sales-led tier. And if you have never measured your AI visibility before, spending $1,188 to $4,788 a year to find out where you stand is the expensive way to answer a question a one-time scan answers for $19.99.

Claude coverage is the clearest price divider in the entire AI visibility category, and yes, several tools include it without an enterprise contract. The market splits 3 ways as of August 2026:

• Gated to Enterprise: Profound tracks Claude only on its custom-priced Enterprise plan.
• Paid add-on:Otterly.AI charges $29–$439 per month extra depending on tier, and Peec AI charges $35–$165 per month per additional model.
• Included: Scrunch AI, Rankscale, AthenaHQ, and Knowatoa include Claude on every plan. The Cruelx AI Visibility Scan includes Claude in every $19.99 scan.

The add-on math deserves attention because it compounds quietly. An Otterly Standard subscriber adding Claude pays $109 per month for that engine alone, $1,308 per year, more than an entire Profound Starter subscription, for 1 additional engine. If Claude matters to your buyers, start your shortlist with the tools that include it.

The strongest Profound alternatives depend on whether you need continuous monitoring or a one-time measurement, and on whether Claude coverage must be included. The 6 below span $19.99 one-time to $500 per month; the wider field, including Semrush and Ahrefs add-ons, is in the full AI visibility tools comparison.

Cruelx AI Visibility Scan: one-time measurement, all 6 surfaces

The Cruelx AI Visibility Scan is the only alternative here that is not a subscription: $19.99 one time, with a 3-pack at $49 and a 10-pack at $129. Where Profound meters engines by tier, the scan covers all 6 surfaces in every purchase: ChatGPT, Gemini, both of Google’s AI surfaces, Perplexity, and Claude, with 270 collected answers per scan. Every answer is stored as evidence you can read, each result lands in a clear status (from Recommended down to Invisible, plus Misdescribed for the hallucination case where an AI gets your business wrong), and the report leads with a prioritized, evidence-ranked fix list. It ships as both a screen report and a designed PDF. The honest limitation: it is a point-in-time measurement. If you need a daily tracking dashboard, one of the subscriptions below fits better; many buyers scan first and subscribe only if the result justifies it.

Peec AI: clean mid-market dashboards, opaque pricing

Peec AI is the closest philosophical rival to Profound at a lower reported price point, though it does not publish pricing on its own site. Independent reviews from August 2026 report plans from about $95 per month, with higher tiers around $245 and $495. The dashboard is genuinely clean, prompt suggestions come with search volumes, and CSV, Looker, and API exports suit agency reporting. The catch mirrors Profound in miniature: self-serve plans cap you at 3 models, and each additional model, including Claude, costs $35–$165 per month depending on tier, so multi-engine coverage becomes an add-on bill. Anyone searching for a Peec AI alternative is usually reacting to one of those 2 things: the pricing opacity or the add-on stacking.

Otterly.AI: the cheapest credible subscription entry

Otterly.AI has the lowest published entry price of any credible monitoring tool: $29 per month ($25 on annual billing) for 15 prompts, tracked daily across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Copilot in 50+ countries. Read the headline price carefully, though. Gemini and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons, and Claude costs $29, $109, or $439 per month extra depending on tier, so a broad engine set can multiply the bill. For a solo marketer who mainly needs ChatGPT and AI Overviews tracked cheaply, it is a sensible starting subscription.

Scrunch AI: the enterprise alternative with Claude included

Scrunch AI is the alternative most often shortlisted directly against Profound Enterprise. Starter runs $250 per month on annual billing ($300 monthly) and Growth $417 ($500 monthly), with Claude included on every tier alongside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews, and Meta. Its distinctive bet is the Agent Experience Platform, which serves machine-readable versions of your site to AI agents, and it is SOC 2 certified. There is no cheap entry point, but unlike Profound, the full engine set does not require a sales call.

Rankscale: the broadest engine list at a low entry price

Rankscale offers the cheapest broad-engine coverage in the category: plans start at $20 per month, Pro runs $99 with 1,200 credits, and the engine list claims 17+ including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Mode, AI Overviews, DeepSeek, Mistral, Grok, Copilot, and Claude, included on all tiers. Credits roll over, and its 94-checkpoint readiness audits add a technical layer most trackers skip. The tradeoff is that credit-based pricing makes actual monthly capacity harder to predict than a flat prompt count.

Knowatoa: 7 engines at a small-team price

Knowatoa covers 7 engines, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, and Meta AI, from $59 per month, with a $199 Growth tier. Claude is included, and AI content agents come with the monitoring. The main limitation is cadence: tracking runs weekly rather than daily, which is fine for most small teams and too slow for brands managing an active reputation issue.

The cheapest credible way to find out whether AI engines recommend, ignore, or misdescribe your business is a one-time scan, not a monitoring subscription. Profound’s published plans commit you to roughly $1,188 to $4,788 a year before you know whether you have a problem worth tracking. A $19.99 scan answers the diagnostic question first, and the paid one-shot slot in this market is strikingly empty: between the free checkers at $0 and Prompt Visible’s $299 one-time audit, the Cruelx AI Visibility Scan is the only automated one-time report available.

A one-time measurement is also more defensible than it sounds, provided it samples properly. Single AI answers are noisy, and different engines disagree with each other 54.5% of the time (SparkToro/Gumshoe, 2025), which is why a credible scan asks every question multiple times and reports per-engine appearance rates rather than one blended score. Sampled that way, the picture holds still: in Cruelx scan data from 2026, only 8% of engine-question pairs changed verdict across repeated runs, and most of that movement came from Google AI Overviews. One scan gives you a reliable baseline: your visibility score, engine coverage, mentions and citations, and how you rank against competitors in AI answers.

Whatever the scan shows, measurement is only step 1. The fixes that raise AI visibility, list-format content, cited statistics, stronger organic rankings, and presence on the sources engines actually read, are their own discipline: the full playbook is in how to get recommended by ChatGPT and AI search. Measure once, fix what the evidence ranks highest, then re-measure. If that loop shows AI answers moving your market week to week, that is the moment a monitoring subscription like Profound earns its price.