Profound alternatives: enterprise dashboards with prices, and APIs without a contract

Profound stopped selling self-serve plans in September 2026. The $99 Starter and $399 Growth tiers are gone, and a brand now gets a free seven-day trial of 50 fixed prompts on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, then a custom Enterprise contract. If you were on one of those plans, or you priced Profound and came away with a quote in the thousands, this guide is for you.

The alternatives split into three groups. Scrunch, AthenaHQ and Evertune are enterprise-capable dashboards with published prices. Peec AI is the self-serve dashboard most teams land on. Cite42 is a pay-per-call API and MCP server for teams that would rather run their own prompts than buy a seat. Cite42 publishes this guide. We checked every vendor's pricing and documentation pages on November 5, 2026, and did not run paid tests through the other products.

The best Profound alternatives for different jobs

• Scrunch: the closest enterprise-style platform with a price on the page, $300 a month for 350 custom prompts, plus agent pages and AI bot analytics.
• AthenaHQ: eleven models with unlimited prompts for $295 a month, and a free tier to start.
• Evertune: statistical sampling of every prompt 100 times and a ChatGPT ads layer, from $60 a month billed annually.
• Peec AI: the daily dashboard most teams compare first, from $95 for 50 prompts.
• Cite42: on-demand checks across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews from an API or an MCP client, billed per call.

Comparison at a glance

Prices are the vendors' published figures before tax. Engine lists come from each vendor's pricing page; Profound's own pages disagree with each other on which nine engines Enterprise includes.

What Profound sells, and why people look elsewhere

Profound's platform tracks a prompt set daily across the consumer AI apps, and says so: it captures answers "directly from the consumer browsing experience rather than from model APIs." Its distinctive asset is Prompt Volumes, a dataset of real user conversations licensed from consumer panels that estimates how often a prompt is actually asked. Enterprise customers also get agent analytics from Cloudflare, AWS or Vercel logs, workflows, a REST API and an MCP server.

The reasons to leave are price and access. The trial cannot be customized, has no history, exports or API, and lasts a week. Everything after that is a quote, and independent reviews name cost as the main complaint, with one Reddit user summarizing it as "quite good but too expensive." The API and MCP server are Enterprise only. For a team that wants programmatic access or a predictable monthly bill, the options below are the ones to price.

Scrunch: published prices and the site layer

Scrunch is the enterprise-style platform that still prints a price. Starter is $300 a month ($250 billed annually) for 3 users, 350 custom prompts, 1,000 industry prompts, 3 personas and 5 page audits; Growth is $500 ($417 annually) for 5 users and 700 custom prompts; Enterprise adds SSO and the Enterprise Data API. Every plan covers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews and Meta AI. Scrunch collects "using a mix of browser automation and official platform APIs." New prompts run daily for 14 days, then every 72 hours by default, with a refresh button.

Beyond tracking, Scrunch sells a site layer: AI crawl readiness audits, bot traffic from your CDN, and agent pages, a parallel version of your site written for AI agents. The REST API is limited to Agency and Enterprise plans, but the MCP server works on any plan. Sitecore acquired Scrunch in June 2026, which matters if you run Sitecore and want the two to merge, and is a risk to watch if you do not.

Pros

• A real price for a large prompt allowance with every major engine included.
• Site-side features Profound does not have: agent pages and crawl readiness.

Cons

• Refresh drops to every 72 hours after two weeks.
• REST API only on Agency and Enterprise; no conversation-volume dataset.

AthenaHQ: eleven models and a free tier

AthenaHQ sells its Starter plan at $295 a month (17% off annually) with unlimited topics and prompts, unlimited competitors and seats, and 3,600 credits a month, where a credit is one AI response. Eleven models are tracked: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral. A free Essential tier with 300 credits lets you try it without a trial clock. The platform adds an "Ask Athena" copilot, personas, sentiment, prompt volume forecasting and a citation engine, and it has a 4.9 rating from 31 reviews on G2.

The API is where it falls short of Profound's Enterprise tier: it is "billed on top of the subscription" at a price that is not published, and the Slack bot and some features are Enterprise only. AthenaHQ does not say how it collects answers.

Pros

• The widest engine list at a published price, and no prompt cap.
• Free tier to evaluate on your own prompts.

Cons

• API is a quoted add-on; credit-based billing makes the monthly cost harder to predict.
• Collection method not stated.

Evertune: sampled measurement and ChatGPT ads

Evertune takes a measurement-first approach: it "samples each prompt 100 times across every AI model" and publishes a margin of error, about one point overall, instead of treating one answer as the truth. It separates two things most vendors blur: base model answers reached "through direct API integration with the model provider," and live consumer-app answers that search the web as the question is asked. Prompts come from EverPanel, its own panel of real user prompts, which is the closest thing here to Profound's Prompt Volumes.

Pricing changed in October 2026 with a self-serve Starter plan at $60 a month billed annually for 5,000 prompt credits and up to five models, with the first seven days free. Pro is $800 a month billed annually for 100,000 credits across all eleven models and an MCP connection to Claude or ChatGPT; API export is Enterprise only. Evertune also sells a ChatGPT ads manager and AI retargeting, so it suits brands that advertise in AI assistants as well as measure them.

Pros

• Statistically sampled answers with a stated error margin, and an API-versus-app distinction in the methodology.
• A $60 entry point and a panel-based prompt dataset.

Cons

• The full measurement product starts at $800 a month billed annually; no developer API below Enterprise.
• No independent reviews yet; the ads manager is in beta.

Peec AI: the self-serve default

Peec AI is where most teams leaving Profound land when they want a dashboard with a card-friendly price. Starter is $95 a month for 50 prompts, Pro $245 for 150, Advanced $495 for 350, with daily tracking, unlimited seats, an MCP server on every plan and the API from Pro. Each project runs three active models from ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI; Perplexity, Claude and other API-sourced models are Enterprise only. Peec collects by scraping the consumer apps as a logged-out user, the same posture as Profound. The detailed comparison is in the Peec AI alternatives guide.

Pros

• Published prices, MCP on every plan, API from $245.

Cons

• Prompt quotas, three active models per project, and Claude and Perplexity behind an Enterprise quote.

Cite42: your own prompts on demand, with no contract

Cite42 is the option for teams that want the data without the platform. It is a pay-per-call API and MCP server: send a prompt and a list of brands, choose any of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, and get back which brands each answer mentioned, in what order, and which sources it cited, in a few seconds. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are queried through their official APIs with web search on, Perplexity through its own search, and AI Overviews from live Google results. The response records how each tool was queried in a measurement block. That is a different thing from Profound's consumer-app capture, and the trackers can opt into a capture of the ChatGPT app itself where the app answer is what you need.

There is no contract, seat or quota. You top up a balance (minimum $25.00) that never expires and pay only for calls that succeed, from $0.01 per AI tool: $0.05 for a ChatGPT-only check, $0.20 across all five. A verified signup includes $1.00 of credit. A tracker reruns up to 30 prompts weekly or monthly and keeps the history, so 50 prompts across all five tools every week costs about $43.33 a month, a figure you can check against any Enterprise quote. The same tools run in Claude, ChatGPT, Codex and Cursor over MCP, and the REST API is described in an OpenAPI spec for your own integrations.

curl --fail-with-body https://www.cite42.dev/api/v1/rankings \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CITE42_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "query": "Best generative engine optimization software for a B2B SaaS company",
    "competitors": ["Profound", "Scrunch", "AthenaHQ", "Evertune", "Peec AI", "Cite42"],
    "fullSweep": true
  }'

Pros

• API and MCP from the first dollar, where Profound gates both behind Enterprise.
• Claude on every call; a predictable per-call price instead of a quote.
• Any prompt, any time, from code or an AI assistant.

Cons

• No dashboard, no conversation-volume dataset, no agent analytics.
• Measures the models through their APIs rather than the consumer apps, apart from the opt-in ChatGPT app capture.
• Five tools; no Copilot, AI Mode, Grok or Meta AI.

Also worth a look: Goodie AI, a $295-a-month platform that pairs monitoring with an optimization layer and an MCP server, and the AI visibility add-ons inside Semrush, Ahrefs and SE Ranking if you already pay for one of those suites.

Which alternative fits which reason to leave

• You want an enterprise platform with a price on the page. Scrunch, then AthenaHQ.
• You want Prompt Volumes without Profound. Evertune's panel-based prompts are the nearest substitute; AthenaHQ offers prompt volume forecasting.
• You lost your $99 or $399 plan. Peec AI at $95 or $245, Otterly from $29, or AthenaHQ's free tier.
• You want the API or MCP server without an Enterprise contract. Cite42 bills per call from the first request; Scrunch's MCP works on any plan.
• You want to run your own prompts on demand. Cite42 is the only option here that does.

Frequently asked questions

Does Profound still have a self-serve plan?

Not for brands. The pricing page lists a free seven-day trial of 50 fixed prompts on three engines and an Enterprise plan with a custom price; the former $99 and $399 tiers were removed in September 2026. An Agency Growth plan with 400 credits per client workspace is mentioned without a price.

What is the cheapest Profound alternative with an API?

Cite42 has no subscription: API and MCP access come with the account, a brand check across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews costs $0.20, and top-ups start at $25.00. Among dashboards, Peec AI includes its API from the $245 Pro plan and Scrunch's MCP server works on its $300 Starter plan.

Which Profound alternatives track the most AI engines?

AthenaHQ tracks eleven models on its $295 plan and Evertune eleven on its $800 Pro plan. Scrunch covers eight on every plan. Cite42 covers five, including Claude.

Which alternatives capture the consumer apps like Profound does?

Peec AI scrapes the consumer apps as a logged-out user, Scrunch mixes browser automation with official APIs, and Evertune uses APIs for base model answers and the consumer apps for live answers. Cite42 queries the models through their official APIs and offers a ChatGPT app capture in trackers.

Price your own prompt set before you take a quote

Write down the 20 prompts you would want Profound to track, then run them yourself. A free Cite42 account comes with $1.00 of starter credit from the dashboard or your MCP client, and a weekly tracker on all five tools would cost about $17.33 a month. Put that figure next to the dashboards above and the quote, and the decision usually makes itself. The AI visibility tools guide covers the dashboards in more depth.