Scrunch alternatives on a budget: ask about money and the engines promote the two biggest suites, and the cheapest specialist tier has no Gemini

Two measurements govern a budget decision in this category and they point in opposite directions. The first: across 1,260 assistant readings, 54 of them asked a question that named a budget, a price, the word cheapest or a free tier, and 32 of those produced a numbered shortlist. In those 32, Ahrefs took 7 of the 19 first places. Across all 397 numbered shortlists in the set it took 21 of 152. So asking about money nearly triples the chance that an engine puts one of the two largest search suites on top, and the cheap specialist tools get moved down the list rather than up it.

The second measurement is the one that decides whether a cheap tier is worth buying at all. Read on 20 October 2026, the Scrunch pricing page publishes one buyable plan, Core, and it supports four engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot. Gemini and Claude appear on its Enterprise tier and not on Core. In our own readings, 918 of the 1,314 vendor namings we counted, 61.9 per cent, came from Gemini. A budget plan without Gemini is monitoring the engine that does the smaller share of the naming.

We sell a tracker here, so our own entry terms sit in the table with everybody else's.

What asking about money does to the shortlist

vendor	first places in the 32 budget shortlists	first places across all 397 shortlists
Ahrefs	7 of 19	21 of 152
Semrush, an Adobe company	4 of 19	52 of 152
Otterly	3 of 19	32 of 152
Peec	2 of 19	24 of 152
Depra	2 of 19	5 of 152
Conductor	1 of 19	1 of 152
Scrunch	0	1 of 152
AI Knows Us, ours	0	0 of 152

Scrunch was named in 21 readings of the 1,260 and in only one of the 54 budget framed ones, so the engines are not treating it as a budget answer. Our own name was named in none of the 1,260, which is why we publish this rather than cite somebody else's listicle. The thirteen questions behind the budget cut are ordinary buying questions, among them what the cheapest AI brand monitoring tool is, which platform has the best free tier, and what the minimum budget is to make a difference.

There is a wider pattern underneath. Measuring five reason groups in the same readings, the set of vendors an engine names barely changes with the reason in the question, with a similarity of 0.95 between a budget framing and a small team framing on who gets named at all, while the similarity on who is placed first falls to 0.37. The reason you give an assistant does not change the candidate list. It reorders it. That is why a budget page and an enterprise page are two pages and not one.

The criterion: what the cheapest buyable tier actually contains

One criterion, checkable in an afternoon: on the cheapest plan a buyer can purchase without a call, how many engines are included, how many prompts, and what the cadence is. All read from vendor pricing pages on 20 October 2026, under a Chrome on Windows agent and a Safari on macOS agent, bodies saved.

cheapest buyable plan, read 20 Oct 2026	engines included	prompt or credit allowance	cadence
Rankscale, its lowest monthly plan	its full published list, including Gemini, Claude, Copilot, DeepSeek and Mistral	1,200 credits a month, with each engine query costing a fraction of a credit, and unused credits rolling over	hourly to monthly, your choice
Evertune Starter	5 models	5,000 prompt credits a month	daily
Peec Starter	3 models you choose	50 prompts	daily
Otterly Lite	4 included, with Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode as paid add ons	15 prompts	daily
Scrunch Core	4, which are ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot	125 unique prompts and 5,000 responses a month	not stated on the page
AI Knows Us, ours	all 5 surfaces we name, with Claude on the plans that include it	published per plan as credits against watched buyer questions	four answers a week for each watched question
Conductor Essentials	no AI search credit line on this plan	500 tracked keywords and 1,000 pages analysed	not stated for AI on the page

On that criterion Rankscale is first, and it is first for a reason worth naming: it is the only entry plan in the set that includes the full engine list rather than a subset, and it publishes hourly to monthly scheduling on every plan where our own published cadence is four answers a week. Evertune publishes a larger credit allowance on its entry plan and five models. Both of those beat us on a line a budget buyer cares about, and saying so costs us nothing we were entitled to.

Where we are first is narrower and it is the one line that is hard to copy: every surface we name is served on the plans that include it, with the collection route for each one published, rather than a subset on the cheap plan and the rest behind a sales call.

The unit, which is where a cheap plan turns expensive

Three different units are on sale in the table above and they are not comparable until you convert them. A prompt is a question you wrote. A response is one answer collected. A credit is a fraction of an engine query. So the quantity to compute for every vendor is the same product: questions multiplied by engines multiplied by readings a month. Twenty questions on four engines checked weekly is 320 readings a month. The same twenty questions on five engines checked daily is about 3,000. One of those fits inside a 5,000 response allowance and the other is close to the ceiling, with the same twenty questions.

Vendors reprice by changing the unit rather than the number, which is the quietest way a bill moves. SE Ranking is the clearest worked example of it, now metered in two units at once, and one platform metered in keywords a day and prompts a day takes it apart.

Which alternative fits which budget constraint

• You need Gemini on the cheapest plan. Rankscale includes it on every plan and Peec lets you choose it as one of your three models on Starter. Otterly sells it as an add on. Scrunch Core does not carry it.
• You have many questions and little money. Scrunch Core publishes 125 unique prompts, the largest prompt count on any entry tier in this set, against Otterly's 15 and Peec's 50. If the engine list on Core covers your buyers, that is a strong entry plan and the prompt count is the reason.
• You want to try before paying. Scrunch and Rankscale both publish a seven day free trial, Otterly publishes a free trial on sign up, and Evertune publishes a seven day free trial on its advertising agent.
• The budget is a one off rather than a subscription. Our own free plan grants twenty credits once, which is enough to put a handful of buyer questions to the apps and see the shape of the answer before deciding anything.

What a buyer on a budget asks first

What does Scrunch include on its cheapest plan? Core publishes 125 unique prompts, 5,000 responses a month, five site audits a month, one brand workspace, five user licences, one country, one persona, one language, five competitors and four supported engines, with reporting described as self serve and query fan out as limited.

Does Scrunch track Gemini? Its Enterprise tier lists nine engines including Gemini, Claude, Meta AI, Google AI Mode and Grok. Core lists four and Gemini is not among them.

Is the cheapest tool the one an assistant recommends? On the 54 budget framed readings the engines put Ahrefs first seven times out of nineteen, and Ahrefs is one of the two largest suites in the set rather than one of the cheap specialists. Ask the engine for its reasoning and check the entry tier yourself, because the entry tier is the thing you are buying.

What is the smallest useful amount of this work? Pick ten buyer questions a customer would really type, choose the two engines your customers use most, and collect weekly. That is 80 readings a month, it fits inside every entry plan above, and it produces a baseline you can argue from.