# Profound pricing teardown (2026): $99/month buys 50 prompts and one engine

> We ran Profound's full onboarding to the paywall. Starter is $99/month for 50 prompts, ChatGPT only, one seat, no trial; Growth is $399/month for 100 prompts and 3 engines with a 7-day trial. There is

Source: https://geoplaybooks.com/blog/2026-07-12-profound-review/

# Profound pricing teardown (2026): $99/month buys 50 prompts and one engine

This is not a full Profound review, and that's the finding. We completed the entire onboarding — nine-ish steps, well-designed, fully localized — and hit a hard paywall before seeing a single data point. **There is no free tier and no trial on the entry plan.** So this is a teardown of exactly what a new user can evaluate before paying: the onboarding, the plans, and the checkout.

> How we tested: full signup and onboarding on July 12, 2026, stopped at the payment screen, screenshots throughout. Disclosure — we build GEO tools ourselves (the free checker and Monitor ), so read this as a competitor's field notes on the part of Profound anyone can see for free.

> TL;DR Starter: $99/month — 50 unique prompts, 1 answer engine (ChatGPT only), 1 seat. No trial: the button says "Purchase Plan." Growth: $399/month — 100 prompts, 3 engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews), 3 seats, 6 "optimized articles" per month, 7-day free trial. Yearly billing: 2 months free. No free tier. After onboarding the only exits are pay or log out. Onboarding starts you at 5 topics × 5 prompts = 25 tracked prompts, max 10 topics; runs are daily.

## The plans, verbatim

> $99/mo Starter: 50 prompts · ChatGPT only · 1 seat $399/mo Growth: 100 prompts · 3 engines · 3 seats 0 free tier — none 7 days trial, Growth plan only

Two things stand out in the fine print. First, **Starter tracks one engine: ChatGPT.** Perplexity and Google AI Overviews arrive only at $399. The onboarding explainer says Profound runs your prompts daily across "ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and other services" — but the plan you can buy for $99 watches exactly one of those. Second, the trial asymmetry: Growth gets "Try Free for 7 Days," Starter gets "Purchase Plan." The cheaper the commitment, the less Profound lets you verify first.

Do the per-unit math and Starter comes out at **about $1.98 per tracked prompt per month, on one engine**. For comparison within this week's test set: LLMrefs prices at €79/month for 500 prompts across all its engines — roughly €0.16 per prompt — and our own Monitor Lite is $20/month. Different depths of product, to be fair; but the spread on the raw unit is more than tenfold.

## The onboarding is genuinely good

Credit where due: the wizard is the most polished we tested. It's fully localized (ours ran in flawless Russian, down to the Stripe checkout, which quoted the $99 plan in Kazakhstani tenge at an explicit exchange rate — 48,735.96 KZT at 492.28 per dollar, with Apple Pay supported). It asks company size and whether you're an agency, explains the daily prompt-run model with a sample "brand visibility 65%" widget, sets your region and language for prompt runs, and starts you with five topics — each spawning five tracked prompts — expandable to ten.

One choice we'd flag: mid-onboarding, before any real data exists, Profound shows your brand ranked **#1** in a category leaderboard. It's illustrative, but it reads as your data, and the numbers are motivational fiction. A 12-character password minimum, on the other hand, quietly says someone there takes security seriously.

## What we couldn't see

Everything behind the paywall: the actual dashboard, data quality, citations, the "optimized articles" workflow, exports, API. That's the point of this teardown — **a $99/month product offers a prospective buyer zero data to evaluate**, while its own onboarding demonstrates exactly how the evaluation should work. If you've used Profound in production, our comments are open; we'd like the other half of this review to exist.

## Who this pricing is for

Profound is visibly built for teams where $399/month is a rounding error and a procurement call decides anyway — the Growth trial plus daily runs plus multi-engine coverage is the actual product. The $99 Starter reads less like a product and more like a price anchor: one engine, one seat, no trial, no way to test-drive.

If you're not that buyer yet, the rational path is: check whether AI engines can read your site at all — [free](/check/) — fix the failures, and track movement with [Monitor from $20/month](/monitor/) until the numbers justify enterprise tooling.

*Also in this series: *[*LLMrefs review*](/blog/2026-07-12-llmrefs-review/)*, *[*Otterly review*](/blog/2026-07-12-otterly-review/)*, *[*our Scrunch test that got blocked*](/blog/2026-07-12-scrunch-review-attempt/)*.*