If you are researching Profound pricing, the first thing to know is that the ground just shifted: as of June 11, 2026, Profound's pricing page publishes dollar amounts for its two self-serve tiers, $99 a month for Starter and $399 a month for Growth, after showing the same tier matrix with no prices on it as recently as June 10. Enterprise, where the serious budgets land, still has no public number, so the four-figure estimates below still come from third-party reviewers, and they do not fully agree. Here is every number, vendor-published or reported, reconciled tier by tier and dated, plus the question the numbers exist to answer: whether Profound is worth it or a cheaper tool does the same job.
One disclosure before the numbers: we make geotoolbox, a cheaper competitor in this category, so weigh our framing accordingly. The Starter and Growth prices below now come straight from Profound's own page; the enterprise figures are third-party estimates, dated and sourced.
How Much Does Profound Cost? The Tiers, Reconciled
Profound is sold in three real tiers plus a disputed fourth. As of June 11, 2026 the Starter and Growth prices are published on Profound's own pricing page; the enterprise figures are still the ones third-party reviewers report most consistently. Treat the estimates as a starting point, not a quote.
| Tier | Monthly price | Engines and key limits | Who it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $99/mo, vendor-published ($82.50/mo billed yearly) | ChatGPT only; 50 prompts; 1 seat; no exports | A look around the dashboard, not a full program |
| Growth | $399/mo, vendor-published ($332.50/mo billed yearly) | ChatGPT + Perplexity + Google AI Overviews; 3 seats; 6 optimized articles/mo | Small teams wanting real multi-engine tracking |
| "Lite" (price disputed) | ~$499/mo (reviewer-reported; Profound's own blog lists "Lite from $499/month") | Profound's pricing FAQ still asks "Should I use Lite or Enterprise?" and its help center offers a 7-day free trial on Lite, so the tier is real; the pricing page itself never shows the price and reviewers disagree on what it includes | Verify the current packaging before trusting any figure |
| Enterprise | Custom (estimated ~$2,000-$5,000+/mo) | Up to 10 engines, full API, Prompt Volumes, SOC 2, dedicated SLA | Large brands and Fortune 500 with a dedicated analyst |
Here is why the numbers wobble. Until June 2026 the pricing page itself carried no dollar amounts, so each reviewer captured a slightly different snapshot, and the company renames and repackages tiers over time. One source lists a $99 Starter and $399 Growth; another lists a $499 "Lite" plan, a figure Profound's own blog roundup also carries ("Lite from $499/month") even though the pricing page never shows it; some earlier third-party snapshots described a $100 "Explorer" and a $500 "Growth" plan with rounder numbers. The enterprise estimates disagree too, as the Enterprise section below shows. None of that means a source is lying. It means the only honest answer to "what does Profound cost" is a sourced range with a date on it.
The agency packaging shows the same wobble from the vendor itself: Profound's own blog roundup still lists Agency Growth at $1,499 a month, while the pricing page's agency view, as of June 11, 2026, lists Agency Growth at $99 a month plus add-ons, where the base buys 10 pitch workspaces a month for prospect audits and each full client workspace is a $399 a month add-on, alongside a custom Agency Enterprise tier. If you are an agency doing the per-client math, the unit price is the $399 workspace, not the $99 base.
Why Profound Hid Its Pricing (and What Changed in June 2026)
Profound's own pricing page now shows dollar amounts. As of June 11, 2026 it lists Starter at $99 a month and Growth at $399 a month, each with a billed-yearly toggle marked "2 months free" that displays $82.50 and $332.50, alongside credit allowances of 100 a month on Starter and 400 on Growth, and self-serve signup including a "Try for free" path on Growth. Only Enterprise routes to a sales demo. The public prices are the newest move on a page with a history of them: reviews from earlier in 2026 described a demo-only motion with no trial at all, then signup buttons appeared without prices, and now the prices themselves, three states in about half a year.
Keeping the enterprise figure off the page is a deliberate sales motion, not an oversight. It lets the vendor quote each account differently, anchor to the value a Fortune 500 sees rather than a fixed number, and avoid handing competitors a target. It also means the one tier you still cannot compare on published price is the one where Profound's real money lives; that number arrives inside the funnel, in the demo, not on the page.
The practical effect on your side is simple. For Enterprise, budget for a conversation, not a card swipe. For the lower tiers, the sticker and the signup button are finally both on the page, so the homework shifts from guessing the price to checking what each tier leaves out, which is what the next two sections cover.
The $99 Starter Plan Is a ChatGPT-Only Demo
The $99 entry tier is the number that makes Profound look affordable, and it is the one to be most careful with. Profound's own tier card says it plainly, "ChatGPT tracking only": no Perplexity, no Gemini, no Google AI Overviews. For a tool whose whole pitch is visibility across the AI engines, watching one of them is a narrow slice.
The limits stack up from there. Starter is listed at 50 prompts, 1,500 analyzed responses a month, a single seat, and no data exports on the vendor matrix as of June 11, 2026. (Older reviews also cited a seven-day history cap; Profound's page now lists all-time history on every tier, so treat any limit you read, including these, as a snapshot.) In practice the $99 plan works as a guided look at the dashboard, not a tool you would run a real program on.
That matters for budgeting because it moves the real entry point. If you need to see how you show up across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews, which is the actual job most teams are buying this for, you are starting at the $399 Growth tier, not $99. Quoting yourself the $99 number and then discovering it only watches ChatGPT is the most common pricing surprise with Profound.
What $399 Growth Actually Buys You
Growth, at $399 a month on the vendor page as of June 11, 2026, is where Profound becomes a working multi-engine tracker. It adds Perplexity and Google AI Overviews to ChatGPT, lifts you to three seats, and turns on the data exports and competitive benchmarking that the Starter tier withholds. For a small team that needs real share of voice across the major engines, this is the plan reviewers point to.
The catch is what Growth does not do at volume. Its content generation is capped at six optimized articles a month per Profound's own page (some reviews cited as few as three), so the "write" side of the tool is more of a sampler than a production line. Reviewers repeatedly describe Profound as monitoring-heavy and execution-light: strong at telling you where you stand, thin on doing something about it. Profound's counter to that critique is Profound Agents, the automation layer it launched on February 24, 2026, the same day as its Series C: autonomous agents for content generation and optimization, metered by each plan's credit allowance, 100 credits a month on Starter and 400 on Growth per the pricing page. How much execution 400 credits actually buys is worth settling during the free trial, because the page does not say.
Factor that into the real cost. If Growth tells you what to fix but caps how much you can act on, you are likely pairing it with a separate content or SEO tool, and the true monthly spend is Profound plus that. A $399 line item that needs a second subscription to be useful is a different decision than $399 all-in, and it is worth doing that math before you commit. Our rundown of generative engine optimization (GEO) tools covers options that bundle tracking and action in one bill.
Enterprise: Custom Pricing, and What Pushes It to $2,000-$5,000+
Everything that makes Profound a category leader lives in the custom Enterprise tier. That is where you get coverage across up to 10 engines, full API access, the proprietary Prompt Volumes data, SOC 2 Type II, and a dedicated support SLA. (Agent Analytics, the AI-bot traffic view, is on every tier per the current matrix, so do not let a sales conversation sell it back to you as an enterprise exclusive.) It is also the tier with no public number at all.
The estimates that circulate disagree on the floor. One reviewer puts the entry around $1,000 a month, another around $2,000, and two more describe a $2,000-to-$5,000-plus range depending on scale and seats. The honest read is that Enterprise is genuinely custom, priced per account, and lands somewhere in the low four figures for most buyers and higher for large, multi-brand ones.
Two technical conditions can change the value before you ever discuss price. First, Agent Analytics needs your stack to be on one of Profound's supported integrations: CDNs like Cloudflare, Akamai, or Fastly, or platforms like Vercel, Netlify, and WordPress. If yours is not on the list, that headline feature may not work for you.
Second, while a Google Analytics integration exists for traffic, Profound does not natively tie AI visibility to real revenue in GA4, so attributing dollars to a citation still takes work outside the tool. Neither is a dealbreaker on its own, but both are the kind of thing you want to confirm in the demo, not discover after signing an annual contract.
Is Profound Worth the Price?
For the right buyer, yes. Profound is the most established tool in the category: it raised $96 million at a $1 billion valuation in early 2026, serves more than 700 enterprise customers including roughly a tenth of the Fortune 500, and carries a strong user rating on G2 and SOC 2 Type II compliance. If you are a large brand with a dedicated analyst, budget for market-intelligence depth, and a need for prompt-volume data competitors estimate rather than measure, the price buys something real.
For most other buyers, the math is harder to justify. One mid-2026 reviewer comparison of dozens of AI-search monitoring tools pegged the market average near $337 a month and put Profound well above it, and that is before the gaps: the entry tier watches one engine, the mid tier caps the content work, and the enterprise tier asks for a four-figure annual commitment you cannot price without a sales call. A useful discipline, borrowed from the reviewer Trakkr, is cost per prompt rather than sticker price: a plan that looks affordable but tracks 50 prompts can cost more per question answered than a pricier plan that tracks hundreds, so divide before you decide.
Framed by buyer profile, the decision looks like this.
| Profound is worth it if... | A cheaper tool is the better call if... |
|---|---|
| You are a large brand or Fortune 500 with a dedicated analyst to run it | You are an SMB or agency without someone to own the data |
| You need prompt-volume intelligence competitors only estimate | You mainly need to track visibility and act on what you find |
| A four-figure annual contract fits the budget | You want tracking plus execution for under $400 a month |
If the real question is whether to run this in-house at all, weigh agency versus software first.
Cheaper Profound Alternatives, in Brief
If the price or the still-unpublished enterprise pricing is the problem, the good news is that the tracking job is now well served at a fraction of Profound's cost. Reviewers list Otterly around $29 a month for simple mention monitoring and Peec AI near 89 euros a month for deeper tracking, and several others land under $100. We cover the full field, by the job you are hiring for, in our guide to Profound alternatives.
geotoolbox, which is ours, belongs in that cheaper tier too. The free plan tracks ChatGPT, and paid plans from $39 a month billed annually ($49 monthly) add more engines up to all seven; the $39 Starter covers the same three engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews) that Profound's $399 Growth does. It also adds the check most trackers skip: whether the AI crawlers can reach your pages at all, which in our experience is the most common reason a brand shows near-zero visibility, because a firewall or a JavaScript-only render quietly blocks the bots before they ever read the page. To be plain about the gaps as well as the pitch: geotoolbox has no equivalent of Profound's prompt-volume dataset or its SOC 2 enterprise posture, so weigh it against the rest on the free tier rather than on our word. The point is not that any one tool beats Profound. It is that multi-engine tracking costs $39 to $399 a month across this market, not four figures.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Profound bill monthly or annually? Both, per the vendor's pricing page as of June 11, 2026. The sticker prices ($99 and $399) are monthly; the billed-yearly toggle is labeled "2 months free" and displays $82.50 and $332.50 as the effective monthly figures. Enterprise contracts are typically annual commitments negotiated per account.
Does Profound have a free trial? As of June 2026 its pricing page shows a "Try for free" path on the Growth tier and self-serve signup on Starter, which appears to be a recent change: reviews from earlier in 2026 consistently reported no trial at all. Profound's help center also documents a 7-day free trial on its Lite plan, card details required up front. Enterprise still requires a demo. If a trial matters to you, confirm what it includes before building a test plan around it, because this page has a history of changing under the people describing it.
What do Profound's credits actually meter? Per the pricing page as of June 11, 2026, credits meter Profound Agents, the automation feature launched in February 2026: 100 credits a month on Starter and 400 on Growth, alongside prompt counts of 50 and 100. The page still does not publish a fixed credit-to-run number; its FAQ says each run consumes credits relative to the agent's complexity, and that going over your allotment can either bill as overage or pause usage depending on how the account is configured. The question worth asking before you size a plan is how many credits your typical agent run will consume.
Can you negotiate Profound's price? The structure suggests yes, at least at the top. Custom enterprise quotes are anchored to account value rather than a list price, which cuts both ways: there is no sticker to compare against, but seat counts, engine scope, and contract length are all levers a list price would have fixed. Bring a competing quote to the demo.
Is Profound worth it for a small business? Usually not, and budget is only half the reason. Profound's depth assumes someone owns the data full-time; without a dedicated analyst, the reports pile up unread while the subscription renews. A small team gets more from a cheaper tool that turns tracking into a short list of actions, and can revisit enterprise tooling when there is an analyst to feed.
What is the cheapest Profound alternative? Among the tools reviewers price publicly, Otterly's reported $29 a month is the lowest figure for serious mention monitoring. Cheapest is not automatically right, though: the better question is which job you are hiring the tool for, which is how our Profound alternatives guide organizes the field.
Before You Pay for Profound
There is still no single Profound price: two tiers now carry public stickers, but the enterprise tier where the real budgets land does not, and that part is unlikely to change while the company sells the way it does. What you can control is the order of operations: know which tier actually covers the engines you need, price the second tool you may need alongside it for execution, and walk into the demo with the reviewer estimates above as your anchor.
Before you book that demo, do two cheap things first. Weigh the Profound alternatives that cover the same tracking job for under $100, and run geotoolbox's free AI readiness check to catch robots.txt and crawler-policy blocks. (The paid Agent Readiness scan goes further, live-fetching your pages the way the AI crawlers do to catch firewall and JavaScript-render failures, the class of problem most trackers never surface; Profound's Agent Analytics is one of the exceptions, if your stack is on its integration list.) Then decide what you actually need to pay for.
Sources
- As AI Threatens Search, Profound Raises $96 Million - Fortune, 2026 (funding, $1B valuation, enterprise scale)
- Profound pricing page - vendor (primary evidence: $99 and $399 published prices, yearly billing at "2 months free", credit allowances, and the agency track; rechecked 2026-06-11; note the page is JavaScript-rendered, so simple fetches still show the old no-price state)
- Announcing our Series C (Profound changelog) - vendor, February 24, 2026 (Profound Agents launch and plan-level agent runs)
- Profound's GEO tools roundup - vendor blog (lists "Lite from $499/month" and "Agency Growth at $1,499/month"; live as of 2026-06-11 and archived since December 2025, predating the pricing page's public prices)
- Can I get a trial plan for Profound? - vendor help center (7-day Lite trial)
- Profound reviews on G2 - G2 (user ratings and ease-of-use signals)
- Nick Lafferty's independent Profound analysis - independent analyst, 2026 (value and three-job framework)
- Peec AI Raises $21M - TechCrunch, 2025 (the affordable-alternative category)