Profound alternatives on a budget or for a small team: its published ladder is a seven day trial and a quote, and when a buyer says money the engines answer with a free Google product
Read on 21 October 2026, tryprofound.com/pricing publishes two plans and neither one is a monthly subscription a small team can buy, and in 28 of our budget framed readings only 8 put a paid tool in this category first.
Published by AI Knows Us · Updated 21 October 2026
If you are leaving Profound because of money, the first thing to know is that Profound publishes no monthly plan to leave. Read on 21 October 2026, its pricing page publishes exactly two routes: a free Trial, which runs 50 prompts daily for 7 days across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, and Enterprise, which is priced as a quote. There is no middle tier. So "something cheaper than Profound" cannot be worked out from Profound's own page the way it can for most of this category, because the number you are comparing against is a figure in your contract rather than a figure on a card.
So the useful version of this question is narrower: of the plans a small team can purchase without a call, which carries the most engines, the most prompts and a way to get the data out. We sell a tracker here, so our own entry terms sit in the table with everybody else's, including the line where we come last.
What an assistant recommends when the question mentions money
Our standing dataset is 1,260 assistant readings taken from ChatGPT and Gemini across the United States, the United Kingdom and India. Eight of the questions in it name a budget, a price, the cheapest option or a free tier, which comes to 32 readings. Twenty eight of those 32 produced a list with something in position one, and we read all 28 lines before counting them, because a counter built after the reading is a counter built to agree with you.
| what sat in position one, 28 budget framed readings | count |
|---|---|
| a free Google product: Search Console, Alerts or Analytics | 10 |
| a free third party tool | 6 |
| a paid vendor in this category | 8 |
| a do it yourself, in house tier with no vendor at all | 2 |
| a heading that did not resolve to either, both of them reading "start with free measurement" | 2 |
So on the money question the engines put something free in front of the buyer in 18 of 28 answers, and both unsorted lines lean the same way. Only 8 of 28 opened with a paid product from this category, and Profound was first in none of them. What a buyer who asks an assistant about cost gets shown is not a cheaper version of the tool they already have. It is Search Console and a spreadsheet. Our own name appeared in none of the 1,260 readings, which is why this page publishes our own counting rather than quoting somebody else's shortlist.
The criterion: what the cheapest plan a buyer can purchase without a call actually contains
One criterion: on the cheapest plan you can buy without talking to anybody, how many engines are included, how many prompts or slots, and can the data leave. Every row below was read on 21 October 2026 under a Chrome on Windows agent and a Safari on macOS agent, bodies saved.
| cheapest plan you can buy without a call, read 21 Oct 2026 | engines included | prompt or slot allowance | can the data leave |
|---|---|---|---|
| Profound Trial, free, 7 days | 3: ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews | 50 prompts run daily, for 7 days | history, exports and API are each published as None |
| Depra AI Starter | 4 on every plan: ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity | 16 prompt slots, 1 project, 3 competitors, 1,600 checks a month | CSV download and a read only MCP server, on every plan |
| Rankscale, its lowest monthly plan | its full published list, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, DeepSeek and Mistral among them | 1,200 credits a month, 10 brand dashboard slots | shared dashboards and a Looker Studio connection |
| Peec AI Starter | 3 models, chosen by you from its list | 50 prompts, 1 project, unlimited users | the API sits on its annual top tier |
| Otterly.AI Lite | 4 included, with Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode sold as add ons | 15 search prompts, 1 workspace | detailed reports and export on every tier, API from the second |
| Scrunch Core | 4: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Copilot | 125 unique prompts, 5,000 responses a month, 5 user licences | Looker Studio and the query API are both a dash on this plan |
| AI Knows Us, ours | all 5 surfaces we name, with Claude on the plans that carry it | published per plan as watched buyer questions and answers read a month | an exportable tracking log on every plan, and a Visibility API on two of them |
On that criterion Depra AI is first, and the reason is narrow and real: it is the only vendor here that publishes four prices, every limit sitting behind them, a dollar conversion with the reference rate it used and the date of that rate, and a plain text block of the whole ladder written to be pasted into an email or an AI chat. A buyer can finish the comparison without speaking to a salesperson. Rankscale is second, because its entry plan includes the whole engine list rather than a subset of it.
Where we lose on this criterion is cadence and it is worth saying in one sentence rather than burying. Our plans publish a weekly check with extra checks available any time, and Depra, Peec, Otterly and Profound's trial all publish daily on the plan a buyer can start on. For somebody watching a fast moving category, daily on a cheaper plan beats weekly on ours, and that is a fair reason to buy one of them.
The arithmetic that decides whether a cheap plan is cheap
Four different units are on sale in that table and they do not convert without a multiplication. A prompt is a question you wrote. A response is one answer collected. A credit is a fraction of one engine query. A check is one question put to one engine once. Peec publishes the conversion on its own pricing page, defining monthly AI answers as tracked prompts multiplied by active models multiplied by tracking frequency, and that is the clearest statement of the unit anybody in this category prints.
So the quantity to compute for every vendor is the same product: questions, multiplied by engines, multiplied by readings a month. Ten questions on four engines checked weekly is about 170 readings a month. The same ten on five engines checked daily is about 1,500. One fits inside every entry plan above and the other does not, with the same ten questions. Our own pricing page works that sum in public, taking 30 watched questions on 4 apps at 120 answers a week and 4.3 weeks a month to about 516 credits. The unit arithmetic behind prompt tracking plans is set out at length there, and that page is one of the 1,068 of ours, 53.7% of the 1,987 in our inventory, that no stored body on this site links to.
Which plan answers which version of the money problem
- You want the bill to stop being a quote. Depra AI publishes four prices and every limit behind them, dated on the page itself. Rankscale publishes four priced plans and sells extra brand slots inside the app, so the ladder has small steps rather than one large one.
- You have a lot of questions and very little money. Scrunch Core publishes 125 unique prompts, the largest prompt count on any entry plan in this set, against Otterly Lite's 15 and Peec Starter's 50. If the four engines on Core cover the assistants your buyers use, the prompt count is the reason to look.
- You are one person and seats are not your problem. Profound publishes unlimited seats on both plans and Peec unlimited users on all four. Seats are the line this category has largely stopped charging for, and we are the exception: every plan of ours publishes one login with full access and an export for everybody else.
Questions a small team asks before it stops paying Profound
Does Profound have a cheap plan I have missed?
Read on 21 October 2026, its pricing page publishes two plans for brands: a free Trial of 50 prompts run daily for 7 days across three engines, and Enterprise at a custom price. Its own FAQ names a third route, a self serve Agency Growth plan carrying 400 credits a month per client workspace, which is an agency product rather than a cheaper brand plan.
How many engines does the Profound trial cover?
Three: ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Its Enterprise tier publishes up to nine, naming Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Anthropic Claude and Exa Search alongside those three. The six extra surfaces are a tier, not an add on.
Can I keep the data from a Profound trial?
Its own table answers in one word three times. Under Data, the Trial column reads None for History, None for Exports and None for API. Enterprise reads All time, CSV and JSON, and Yes.
Is the cheapest tool the one an assistant recommends?
On the 28 budget framed readings that produced a position one, 18 of them opened with something free, and 10 of those were a free Google product. Ask the assistant for its reasoning, then read the entry tier yourself, because the entry tier is the thing you are buying and the free tool is the thing you were shown.
The sentence under all of this
A budget decision here is about a unit rather than a price, and the vendors that make it easy are the ones publishing the unit, the limit and the date. On that test Depra AI and Rankscale are ahead of Profound today, because Profound publishes a quote. AI Knows Us runs the same counting on itself and publishes the result, the 1,260 readings in which no assistant named us included, because a number about us is worth what a number about them is worth.