Profound pricing 2026: what $99 and $399 actually buy.

Profound's published self-serve prices are $99/month for Starter — ChatGPT only, 50 prompts, one seat — and $399/month for Growth, which adds two more engines, exports, and the Opportunities panel. Everything else the platform is famous for sits behind a custom, sales-quoted Enterprise contract that third parties report in the thousands per month, with four- and five-figure one-time setup fees. Two things complicate the stickers: reviewers widely treat $399 as the real entry price, and 2026 sources disagree about whether the prices are still published at all. Every number below is sourced, dated (August 2026), and shown with its conflicts.

The ladder at a glance

Profound sells three rungs. Enterprise AI-visibility platform with an agentic content layer (Agents, Aim), sold demo-first to large brands. The published spec for each rung, straight from the verified dataset:

This page stays on price. For which alternative fits which team — and for the cases where none of them beats staying put — the companion page is Profound alternatives, honestly compared.

What $99 actually buys

The published Starter spec reads: “ChatGPT only (1 engine), 50 prompts, 1 seat, 100 agent credits; no exports, no Opportunities panel.” The two absences carry most of the meaning. Without exports, the data stays inside the dashboard; without the Opportunities panel, the layer that turns readings into suggested moves is missing too. What remains is a clean daily read of one engine. Billing softens the sticker somewhat — Annual = 2 months free (effective ~$82.50/mo).

Independent reviewers read Starter less as a plan than as an on-ramp: Geoptie's teardown describes the $99 tier as a funnel toward Growth, and Xseek advises buyers outright to treat $399 as the entry price for meaningful use. Neither is a knock on the data quality. The issue is scope — one engine's view of a market where buyers also ask Gemini, Copilot, Claude, and the rest.

There is a role the tier fills well, though. Because evaluation is otherwise demo-gated with no hands-on trial, Starter functions as Profound's paid preview: $99 to drive the real interface on your own live prompts before a larger commitment. Budget it as evaluation, not as coverage.

What $399 unlocks — and still excludes

The Growth spec: “3 engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews), 100 prompts (~9,000 responses/mo), 3 seats, 400 agent credits, CSV/JSON export, Opportunities panel.” The unlock list is real — exports, the Opportunities panel, two more engines, triple the seats, four times the agent credits. On billing: Annual = 2 months free (effective ~$332.50/mo). Reviewers call $399 'the real entry price.'

The exclusion list is the part to read twice. On engines: $99 buys ChatGPT only; $399 buys 3 engines. Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Grok, Meta AI, DeepSeek, and Google AI Mode all require a custom enterprise contract. If the buyers you care about ask their questions in Gemini or Copilot, no published self-serve tier covers those engines, per the tier descriptions.

The acting layer follows the same pattern. Per Profound's published materials: Agents research, brief, and draft content with a per-run human approval step, pushing to Webflow, WordPress, Sanity, and Contentful — credit-metered, with the full agent surface (Workflows, Content suite, Aim, Agent Analytics) enterprise-only. No Squarespace or Wix integration and no IndexNow submission found in public materials. In short: drafting exists at self-serve tiers, metered by credits, while the always-on orchestration (Aim), the workflow builder, crawler analytics, Prompt Volumes, and the API sit on the Enterprise rung.

The Enterprise quote, decoded

Above Growth, the published numbers stop. The tier's published scope: “Up to 10 engines, Prompt Volumes, Agent Analytics, Workflows/Content suite, Aim orchestrator, API, SOC 2, SSO.” What it costs is reported rather than listed: Third parties report real contracts at $2,000–5,000+/mo plus one-time setup fees of $2,500–15,000.

SubscribePR's cost survey itemizes what those setup fees buy — prompt-set design, persona modeling, competitor benchmarking, integration work — which is a useful tell: this rung is a services-shaped engagement, not a bigger subscription. And buyers at that scale mostly rate it well: Profound holds a 4.5/5 seller-level rating across 1,037 reviews on G2 (2026), and the depth up there — Prompt Volumes' real-user query panel above all — has no equivalent lower on the ladder.

So the decoded ladder: watching one engine costs $99, watching three costs $399, and nearly everything that acts at scale starts with a sales call. That shape is deliberate — Profound is built for the top rung — and whether it fits you is a different question from what it costs.

Why sources disagree about Profound's price

In July 2026, Trakkr — a competitor that markets itself as the $100alternative, so weigh its reporting accordingly — claimed that Profound's pricing page had gone fully demo-led: no public prices, no plan ladder, no self-serve checkout. If that were the whole story, the $99/$399 ladder above would be a snapshot of a page that no longer exists.

The counter-evidence is broad. Pricing teardowns at Indexly, Workduo, That Marketing Buddy, Geoptie, and Xseek — all updated in 2026 — corroborate the $99/$399tiers, and indexed snippets of tryprofound.com/pricing itself still showed them at our last check. Our resolution rule prefers a vendor's own page over any competitor's report, so $99/$399 stands as the published anchor here — with the conflict kept visible instead of resolved away.

A second ambiguity compounds the first: some sources present $99/$399 as annual-billing rates rather than monthly list prices, which would make the month-to-month sticker higher. And a third is categorical: this market reprices fast — among the six vendors in our verified dataset, one repriced its entire ladder and another added a tier mid-2026 — so undated price quotes in this category age in weeks. That is why every table on this page carries the August 2026 stamp, and why the cross-vendor numbers live in one maintained table: AI visibility tool pricing, every vendor compared.

What to do with the mess: treat every Profound price you read — this page included — as a claim to confirm on the call, and put three exact questions to the demo team. Monthly versus annual list price. What the credit meter does once the 100 or 400 runs out. And which engines your tier can see this quarter.

The yearly arithmetic the stickers leave out

Stickers are monthly; budgets are yearly. The multiplication below is ours, on the published prices — labeled so you can check it.

One more line belongs in the budget before deciding: the reported Enterprise range overlaps what human AEO agencies charge for the adjacent job —

For where every rung of that wider ladder starts — DIY hours, tools, software, agencies — see how much AEO costs in 2026 and what AEO services actually charge.

What the same budget buys elsewhere (including ours)

Published list prices for AI-visibility monitoring run $29–399/month (August 2026). Mapping Profound's two stickers onto that field — with the disclosure repeated: the last option is our product.

• Around the $99 mark:Trakkr's Growth plan at $100/month includes all 8 of its models flat, with a hard 50-prompt cap; Peec's Starter at $95/month runs 50 prompts daily across 3 chosen engines with unlimited seats (extra engines are paid add-ons); Rankscale's Pro at $99/month spends 1,200 credits across 17+ engines, credit-weighted. All three are monitoring — the work the readings point at stays yours.
• Around the $399 mark:AthenaHQ's entry tier at $295/month covers 8 surfaces, on a credit meter its reviewers calculate runs out before daily multi-engine tracking. And from our field notes on Goodie: “Executes content via its AEO Writer ($399/mo Explorer, 11 tracked engines); users can 'publish directly or export for your CMS workflow,' but specific CMS integrations are undocumented in accessible sources.” The stage-by-stage map of who does what across the whole field is in the best AI visibility tools by workflow stage.
• In between — ours, disclosed: AEO Action Solo at $149/month runs daily scans of 50 prompts across three engines you pick; Solo Pro at $299/month runs 100 prompts across four of the six engines it supports, including Copilot and Claude — Claude read in a labeled model mode, never counted as live. The difference in kind from the trackers at either mark: the sticker covers execution, not monitoring alone — one prepared artifact a day, published only after your approval, with a dated shipped-to-cited receipt kept for approved landing pages. The loop's step-by-step mechanics, publishing paths included, are in AEO Action vs Profound.

And the honest routing: choose Profound if you are buying the top of its ladder on purpose — panel-scale query data, SOC 2 and SSO for procurement, and an analyst who will live in the dashboards. Nothing self-serve in this section replaces that. The row-by-row version of that concession, including everything Profound has that we don't, is AEO Action vs Profound.

Best for: five budgets, five answers

Pricing pages compare products. Buyers compare budgets. Below, the same five monthly numbers read twice — once for the best watcher at that spend, once for the best way to get work published at it. Prices as verified August 2026.

When not to choose AEO Action

Our column above is the one written by an interested party, so it owes you the exclusions. Skip us if any of these is true:

• Your reporting runs on a large prompt panel. Solo tracks 50 prompts and Solo Pro 100; Agency tracks 50per client. Profound's Enterprise data volume is a different product, and the price gap between us reflects a real capability gap, not only packaging.
• You want coverage with no approval step. Nothing publishes here without a person clicking approve. An unattended account produces prepared work and no published pages.
• Your stack is Wix, Shopify, or custom. Direct publishing reaches Webflow and Squarespace only; WordPress pulls from a plugin. Everywhere else the deliverable is paste-ready HTML and structured data, verified after it goes live.
• Procurement wants SOC 2, SSO, or a signed DPA.We have none of the three. That is Profound's row.
• Your reporting rhythm is a scheduled email. Production email sending is switched off here, so reports live in the product and export as PDFs instead of landing in an inbox.
• You want to enter a card and buy right now. Self-serve card checkout is not live yet. The 7-day trial takes no card because there is nowhere yet to put one.

The line item no pricing page carries

Whatever the sticker comparison says, the switch itself costs something. Three items to add to the spreadsheet:

• Prompt sets are rebuilt, not migrated. Vendors count prompts differently — per engine, per market, per day — and our scans regenerate buyer questions from your business profile on every run rather than storing a fixed list. Price an afternoon of setup per brand.
• Trend history does not transfer. The series you have been showing in the quarterly review stays in the tool that built it, and the new one starts empty. If a board slide depends on a continuous line, run both vendors through one reporting cycle instead of switching cold.
• Annual terms and setup fees decide the timing. Annual billing runs to term on both sides, and the one-time setup fees reported on Profound's Enterprise tier are sunk once paid. Switching at renewal usually costs nothing; switching in month three costs a quarter.