Thirteen AI quoted prices for social media tools, checked on the vendor pages the next day

Asked which social media management tools a small team should buy, ChatGPT and Gemini named six products and attached thirteen checkable dollar figures to them. Fetched from the vendors' own pricing pages the next morning, eight of the thirteen matched exactly, three matched no figure anywhere on the page, and two sat in a monthly billing column that the vendor's page does not render at all. Both engines put the same product first and the same product second, so the ranking was never the risky part of the answer. The prices were.

What was asked, and what came back

One question, put to the ChatGPT and Gemini product surfaces through a data provider on 21 October 2026 at 22:20 and 22:37 UTC, with no product named in the question. Both engines ran a live web search.

• ChatGPT returned 46 citations and named five tools in order: Buffer, Metricool, Later, Planable, Hootsuite. Ten of its citations were Metricool pages, twelve were Planable pages including its help centre, five were Later and two were Buffer. Its evidence was mostly the vendors' own documentation.
• Gemini returned four citations and named four tools in order: Buffer, Metricool, Hootsuite, Sprout Social. None of its four cited hosts belongs to any product it recommended. They were a forms company, two small AI publishing tools and one unrelated site.
• Both engines ranked Buffer first and Metricool second, and both named Hootsuite. Six distinct products were named between them.

That difference in evidence is the whole story of the price errors below. Every claim the engine took from a vendor's own page survived the check. The claims that did not survive came from the engine that cited no vendor page.

The thirteen price claims, and what each vendor page rendered

All vendor figures read by us on 22 October 2026, each attached to the URL it was read on rather than to the brand. This machine sits on an Indian IP address, which matters for currency and is noted where it showed.

Product and claim	Which engine	What the vendor page rendered on 22 October 2026
Buffer Essentials, 5 dollars per channel a month on annual billing	Both	Matches. buffer.com/pricing renders 5 dollars a month per channel with 60 billed yearly beside it
Buffer Team, 10 dollars per channel a month on annual billing	Both	Matches, with 120 billed yearly beside it
Buffer free plan, up to 3 channels	Both	Matches, the page reads connect up to 3 channels
Buffer monthly billing at 6 and 12 dollars per channel	Gemini	Could not be read. The page's monthly and yearly toggle does not change the rendered text, so only the annual equivalents appear
Metricool Starter, 20 dollars a month on annual billing for up to 5 brands	ChatGPT	Matches. The page reads from 20 dollars a month under the annual tab, and from 25 under the monthly tab
Metricool Starter, 18 dollars annual or 22 monthly	Gemini	Neither figure is on the page. Its four rendered Starter prices are 20 and 25 in dollars and 16 and 20 in euros, and it states that the prices exclude VAT
Later Starter, 16.67 a month on annual billing	ChatGPT	The page renders 18.75 USD a month, billed yearly, with taxes extra. The engine told the reader to verify the rate, which is the right instruction to attach to a figure like this
Planable Basic, 33 dollars per workspace a month on annual billing	ChatGPT	The 33 figure matches and the annual part does not. The page renders 33 per workspace per month with a toggle labelled two months free whose yearly price it never shows
Planable, first 50 posts free	ChatGPT	Matches, and the page adds that the 50 posts are a total rather than a monthly allowance and need no card
Hootsuite at 99, 199 and 399 per user a month	Gemini	Matches the FAQ text. The plan cards themselves render no number at all, and the footnote reads prices displayed in, with the currency missing
Sprout Social Standard, 199 per seat a month on annual billing	Gemini	Matches
Sprout Social Professional, 299 per seat a month on annual billing	Gemini	Matches
Sprout Social Standard, 249 per seat a month on monthly billing	Gemini	Not rendered. The only monthly figure on the page is 99 per seat for the Essentials tier

The omission that matters more than any wrong number

Sprout Social's pricing page renders an Essentials tier at 79 dollars per seat a month on annual billing, or 99 billed monthly. The answer recommending Sprout to a small team called its 199 dollar Standard tier the entry level plan and did not mention Essentials. For a two person team that is the difference between 158 and 398 dollars a month, and the cheaper tier was never put in front of the reader.

Three of the six vendor pages also disagree with themselves, which is the other half of why quoted prices drift:

• Planable prints its analytics add on at 12 dollars on the plan card and 14 in the comparison table, its social inbox at 7.50 against 9, and its listening add on at 82.50 against 99. Both readings render.
• Hootsuite's plan cards carry no price and its currency footnote is empty, so the only numbers on the page sit in an FAQ below it.
• Metricool shows four different Starter prices across two currencies and two billing cycles, and an assistant that picks one has already made a choice the buyer never saw.

What a small team should actually do with this

1. Price your real channel count and seat count first. Buffer charges per channel with unlimited users on the Team plan, Planable charges per workspace with unlimited users, and Hootsuite and Sprout charge per seat. At four channels and three people those four models produce four very different bills from the same headline number.
2. Open the monthly tab before you commit. Every confirmed figure above is an annual billing price. Two vendors never render the monthly column at all, and one charges 25 per cent more for it.
3. Check the entry tier yourself. The cheapest seat on one of these six pages was invisible in the answer that recommended it.
4. Treat an assistant's price as a lead and the vendor page as the record. Eight of thirteen is a useful hit rate for building a shortlist and a poor one for signing a purchase order.
5. Note the date on any price you write into a plan. Every figure on this page is 22 October 2026 and taxes were excluded on three of the six pages.

Why the engine that cited vendor pages got the prices right

ChatGPT's 46 citations were dominated by the help centres and pricing pages of the products it named, and four of its five price claims survived the check, with the fifth being a stale figure it flagged for verification. Gemini cited four hosts, none of them belonging to Buffer, Metricool, Hootsuite or Sprout Social, and three of its seven checkable claims matched nothing on the vendor page.

For anyone selling software, that is the mechanism in one sentence: the page an engine can read is the page it quotes. A pricing page whose numbers live behind a toggle, inside an FAQ, or in a currency the visitor's country decides, hands the engine a gap, and the gap gets filled from a third party blog.

The reading neither answer offered

Both answers ranked tools on features and price. Neither reported how often an assistant names a given tool when a buyer asks this exact question, which is the measurement that decided which six products were in front of this reader at all. That is what AI Knows Us measures: we put buying questions to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, record every brand named and every source cited, and report the names and the sources rather than a score. We publish nothing on social media for clients and compete with none of the six tools above.

Our own rates, verified on 22 October 2026, since this page grades other vendors on published pricing. In the US and the UK the ladder runs SEO Start at 149 dollars a month, Growth 299, Scale 599, SEO Scale 699, Inbound 1,099, Outbound 1,299, Agency 1,299 and Everything 1,799. Outside the US and the UK the first two tiers are 99 and 199, so the floor is a US and UK floor rather than a global one. SEO Start reads 0 questions on 0 engines, which makes Growth at 299 the cheapest plan that reads all five surfaces, and a Claude reading costs 3 credits where the others cost 1.

Where a rival is stronger, by name. tryprofound.com publishes single sign on, SAML and SOC 2 with up to nine answer engines on its enterprise tier. Our own pricing document, 119,203 bytes read on the same day, renders no single sign on, no SAML, no SOC 2, no ISO certification, no data processing agreement and no white label, and we read five surfaces rather than nine. Our page also contradicts itself exactly as the vendor pages above do, listing businesses covered as 1 1 1 1 1 1 10 1 across the plans while the row beneath reads more than one business, no, in every column. Both render, and we would rather print that here than have a buyer find it after signing.

The limits of this price audit, stated plainly. It is one question per engine on one night and six vendor pages fetched once, on a machine with an Indian IP address, which is why the currency of each figure is recorded beside it. A page that served us a blank currency or an unrendered column may serve both correctly tomorrow, and a 403 or an unrendered field records what a server did on a date.

Questions small teams ask about tool prices in AI answers

Why did two assistants give different prices for the same tool

Because one read the vendor's pricing page and the other read commentary about it. For Metricool, the engine citing the vendor's own pages gave 20 dollars a month on annual billing, which the page renders. The engine citing none of the vendors gave 18, which appears in neither currency nor billing cycle on that page.

Is the tool an assistant names first the right one for a small team

On this question both engines named the same product first, and its per channel model with unlimited users genuinely suits a small team with few accounts and several people. A fuller comparison of that product against its closest alternatives, on what it will and will not do, is in our write up of Buffer and the alternatives. Agreement between two engines is a stronger signal than either ranking alone, and it is still worth pricing against your own channel and seat count.

What do social media management tools cost for a team of three

From the pages verified on 22 October 2026, a per channel tool with unlimited users runs 10 dollars per channel a month on annual billing, a per workspace tool runs 33 a month with unlimited users, and per seat tools run from 79 to 399 per seat a month. For three people the per seat models are between six and forty times the per workspace model, for different work.

How do I keep an assistant from quoting a stale price for my product

Render the number in text on the page, show it for every billing cycle without a click, name the currency beside it, and date it. Of the six pages here, the two whose numbers an engine could read without a toggle or an FAQ were the two quoted correctly by both engines.

How can I check what assistants say about my own software

Ask the buying question a customer would ask, with the category and the team size in it and your product name left out, on each assistant. Write down every product named, every price quoted and every source listed underneath, then check each price against your own page. Repeat it a week later, because the names and the numbers both move.