Profound alternatives for agencies without an enterprise budget

What Profound sells without a sales call

Profound’s pricing page has two tabs. For brands there is a free trial, 50 prompts asked daily for 7 days on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, and then Enterprise, priced through sales ^[1].

For agencies there is Agency Growth at $99 a month. It includes 10 pitch workspaces a month to audit prospects (25 prompts each, asked daily for 7 days) and 5 agency seats. Each client you track is a client workspace at $399 a month, with 100 prompts asked daily on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews ^[1].

The rest sits in Enterprise: the API, single sign-on, the nine answer engines it can track, and MCP, which its docs list as an Enterprise feature ^[2].

What one client costs, tool by tool

For an agency, the number that decides is what the next client costs. On Profound, one client is $498 a month and each one after it adds $399. Here are the agency entry plans of four alternatives, as their pages describe them.

Prices alone mislead, because each plan buys a different amount of measurement. So we divided each list price by the answers the plan can collect in a month: prompts × engines × runs, or the answer count when the page gives one.

Cheaper per answer isn’t the whole story. AthenaHQ’s answers can come from 11 engines; ours come from 4. Profound’s include Perplexity, which we don’t track yet. And an AI Overview doesn’t appear for every question, on any tool.

What you give up by leaving Profound

Profound’s Enterprise plan does things none of the alternatives here match in full ^[1]:

• Nine answer engines, among them Google AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, Exa Search and Muse Spark.
• AI traffic from your logs: Agent Analytics on unlimited domains, with integrations for Cloudflare, AWS, Akamai, Fastly, Vercel and others.
• ChatGPT Shopping tracking and prompt volumes, to see what people ask AI and how often.
• AI agents that research, write and report for your team, paid in credits.
• Enterprise basics: SSO with SAML, SOC 2 compliance and support on a dedicated Slack channel.

If your client is a large brand that needs those, the tools below are a step down, and that’s fine to say out loud.

Four alternatives and who each one suits

Peec AI: the closest match, priced in euros

Agency plans start at €205 a month: 111 prompts asked daily on three engines you pick, three client projects and unlimited seats ^[3]. It adds free 7-day pitch projects, the API from Essential, MCP, and branded dashboards through a Looker Studio template ^[6]. Our Peec AI alternatives page goes deeper.

Scrunch: enterprise roots with a self-serve door

Agency Core is $500 a month for three brand workspaces, 250 prompts, 10,000 answers, three pitch workspaces and unlimited users, on ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews and Copilot, with a 7-day trial. Looker Studio and MCP are included; the API and the pitch workspaces are for Scrunch partners ^[4]. It pitches its API for white-label client output ^[7].

AthenaHQ: the most engines for the money

Starter is $295 a month for 3,600 answers across 11 models, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek and Mistral among them, with no cap on prompts or seats. The API is a paid add-on, and a free plan gives 300 credits to start ^[5].

Menzio (ours): small agencies that report to clients

Growth is $149 a month for 10 brands sharing 100 questions, asked every day on ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. Every rate comes with its 95% range and opens the answers behind it (how we measure). Your logo and colors go on reports and on 10 prospect audits a month, clients get a portal without login, and MCP works on every plan; the API is on Scale, $299/mo. Seats are unlimited, and 50 more questions cost $49 a month.

Where Profound is ahead of us: each client workspace gets its own 100 prompts, where our Growth shares 100 questions across all its brands; it tracks Perplexity today (for us it’s coming soon, with Copilot and Grok); it reads AI traffic from server logs, tracks ChatGPT Shopping and has SSO and SOC 2. Claude is an add-on with us, at $29 a month per brand on up to 15 of its questions.

Five questions to ask any vendor

1. How many answers sit behind each number? Prompts × engines × runs a month. A rate built on a handful of answers can’t tell a real change from noise.
2. Which engines are in my price, and which are add-ons or Enterprise-only?
3. Is the API or MCP in my plan, or only in the one above it?
4. Can my client see the report under my brand, without logging in to yours?
5. What does the next client cost? The first one is easy to afford; the tenth decides your margin.