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Best AI visibility tool for a startup: seven of the eight rivals will sell you a plan off the page today, and we ask you to talk to us first

A startup buys on a card at eleven at night, not through a procurement cycle. Otterly, Peec, Rankscale, Scrunch, Depra, Semrush and Profound all publish a tier you can start from the page. Every call to action on our own pricing page is a conversation. That is the test this page ranks on, and we fail it.

Published by AI Knows Us · Updated 20 October 2026

The thing that decides this purchase for a startup is whether you can start it yourself tonight, and on that test we come last. Otterly, Peec, Rankscale, Scrunch, Depra, Semrush and Profound each publish a tier a founder can begin from the page: a sign-up button, a free trial, or both. Our own pricing page carries rupee figures for eight plans and every button on it is a conversation: "Tell us you want this", "Talk to us", "Contact sales". There is no checkout. If buying without a meeting is your requirement, buy somebody else, and this page is more useful for saying so plainly.

The criterion, and what each vendor's entry tier actually meters

VendorStart from the page?What the entry tier metersSeats
Depra AIYes. "Start 7 days free", "no card needed"16 prompt slots, 1,600 successful checks a month, 1 project, 3 competitors, any of 40 marketsNot published as a seat count
Peec AIYes, "Get started"50 prompts, "Choose 3 models", 1 project, daily tracking"Unlimited users"
Otterly.AIYes, "Sign up now"15 search prompts, 4 engines, 1 Workspace, 3 recommendations a week"Unlimited team members"
RankscaleYes, including "Try Pro for Free"Credits, with unlimited search terms and "execution is limited only by your available credits""Team workspaces (unlimited seats)"
SemrushYes, 7-day free trial"50 prompts to track daily" on its entry tier, with 25 on the AI Visibility Toolkit per its own FAQPer plan
ScrunchYes, "Start 7-day free trial"125 unique prompts, 5,000 responses a month, 1 brand workspace5 user licences
ProfoundYes, a free trial only50 prompts run daily for 7 days, 3 engines, 1 region, 1 language, and "History None", "Exports None", "API None""Seats Unlimited"
AI Knows UsNoEight plans with published rupee prices, from 12 pages a month at the bottom to 30 or 100 watched questions on the AI plans"1, full access" login on every plan

The inversion a startup should notice: seats are free and brands are not

Four vendors publish unlimited or near-unlimited users on their cheapest tier: Peec, Otterly, Rankscale and Profound. The same tiers publish one project or one workspace. Peec Starter is 1 project with unlimited users. Otterly Lite is 1 Workspace with unlimited team members. Scrunch Core is 1 brand workspace with 5 user licences.

That is the right shape for a startup and the wrong shape for a freelancer, and it is worth knowing which side of it you are on before you compare prices. A startup has one product and several people who want to look at the dashboard, so unlimited seats on one workspace is exactly the thing. We are the awkward case here: we publish one full-access login on every plan, with one business covered on all but our agency plan, so a four-person team sharing a login is what our pricing page describes. Our page says the tracking log can be exported any time for the rest of the team, which is a workaround and not a seat.

Where a free trial stops being enough, which matters more for a startup than for anybody

A trial proves coverage and the interface. A trend needs more cycles than a trial has days, and the thing a startup actually wants to know is whether the work it is about to do changes an answer, which is a question about two readings a month apart. Profound's trial makes this unusually explicit: alongside 50 prompts run daily for seven days it publishes "History None", "Exports None" and "API None". So you can see today's answer and you cannot keep it.

The practical move is to create your own history before any trial starts. Write your five real buying questions down, with your company name absent from them, ask each one on each surface you care about, and save the full answer text with the date. Two of those readings, a month apart, are worth more to a seed-stage company than a dashboard it has had for a week, and they cost nothing.

So who should a startup buy

  • Peec AI is the cleanest fit on the stated criterion: start from the page, 50 prompts, daily, unlimited users, one project. The constraint to understand is "Choose 3 models", which means three surfaces until Enterprise.
  • Depra AI is the strongest option if you sell in India, and it is the only one whose entry tier publishes seven days free with no card, four engines, and any of 40 markets. It also publishes a copyable plain-text summary of every plan and its limits, which is the most startup-friendly thing anybody in this category does.
  • Otterly.AI is the lowest published entry point and it suits one product in one market. 15 prompts is enough for a focused question set and will not stretch to a second language.
  • Rankscale is the best fit if your usage is lumpy, because you buy credits rather than a prompt ceiling and can schedule anywhere from hourly to monthly. Its published per-engine weights let you cost a month before you sign up.
  • Scrunch gives the largest entry prompt allowance in the set, which suits a startup with a wide category rather than a single product.
  • Semrush makes sense if the same person owns your SEO, since you get both in one place rather than paying for two tools at a stage where nobody has time for two logins.
  • Profound is worth a free week to see the quality of the data and is then a demo, which is a poor shape for a company of five.
  • AI Knows Us publishes its full ladder in rupees with every limit on the page, and you cannot buy any of it without talking to us. We also publish one login where four rivals publish unlimited, and we check weekly where five publish daily or faster.

Of the two vendors in this set that sell at opposite extremes, one sells a plan off the page and the other sells a conversation, and that contrast is worked through here. It carries no durable inbound link from anywhere else on this site, which is true of 147 of our live pages in this category, counted across 2,054 stored bodies.

Questions a startup asks before buying one of these

How few questions can I usefully track?

Five, if they are the questions a buyer types before choosing rather than the keywords you want to rank for. Every entry tier in this set carries five comfortably. The count grows when you add a market or a language, not when you add ambition, so your second country is the thing that doubles the bill.

Is this worth buying before product-market fit?

Run it free first and let the answer decide. If you ask your category's buying question on two surfaces and the assistant names five vendors and none of them is you, that is the finding, and it is available this afternoon for nothing. Buy a tool when repeating that reading on a schedule, with competitors beside you, has become somebody's weekly job.

Does a startup need all the engines?

Start with the ones your buyers open. Several vendors will sell you three, and three well-chosen surfaces read weekly beats nine read once. Note that at four of eight vendors the surface list changes with the tier, so check the plan rather than the homepage.

What should I ask on a demo if I cannot avoid one?

Convert my workload into your unit: this many questions, these surfaces, these markets, this often, what does that consume a month on the named plan. Then ask whether editing a question resets the history, because a reset trend line is the most expensive thing that can quietly happen to a young company's reporting.

Which vendors make it easy to leave?

Look for exports as a published feature rather than a promise. Profound names "CSV, JSON" exports at Enterprise and "None" on the trial. Depra publishes CSV download and the websites AI cites on its entry tier. Rankscale publishes CSV and Sheets export from its second tier. Export at the bottom of the ladder is a good proxy for a vendor that expects to be audited.

The one hour that should come before any of these purchases

Ask your category's buying question on two surfaces tonight, with your own name left out, and write down every company the answers name. If you are in that list, you are buying monitoring and the cheapest self-serve tier here will do. If you are not in it, you are buying a change, and the tool is the smaller half of that work. Seven of these eight vendors will let you find out which situation you are in before you give anybody a card. We will not, and a founder deciding this week should know that before reading anything else about us.

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