Profound alternatives, compared on published prices.

Re-read on 7 September 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page, first read on 21 July 2026. Six of the eight served a price our fetcher could read straight from the HTML. Peec served its tier names without figures, to the HTTP client and to a browser, and Otterly's site did not answer from two routes, so those two rows keep their 21 July 2026 browser readings and say so.

Our row is the only one where the plan produces pages as well as measuring them. The entry price is above Otterly, Ahrefs or Profound because $149 buys a scan and an article, not a dashboard, and the higher tiers buy article counts, not seats. Read it as a different product on the same shelf, not as a cheaper or dearer version of the others.

Until 21 July 2026 our internal sheet described Profound's agency pricing as a $399 base plus $399 for each additional client workspace. We used that structure to argue our own stack was cheaper. When we went back to check it against the published page, the per-client ladder was not there — and the Internet Archive capture nearest our May baseline is a JavaScript shell with no prices in it, so we cannot date when it changed or confirm it was ever published in that form. The structure was our construction, not their price list.

We are stating that here because it is the error most likely to have misled someone, and because it ran in our favour: a per-client ladder looks more expensive than a flat tier. Four of the five errors that audit found flattered us. The full list, with the archive links that caught them, is in the research write-up.

On 7 September 2026 each pricing page was fetched through our parsing stack, and the served text was searched for the visible price. Six pages carried their prices in plain text: Profound, AthenaHQ, Scrunch (which now redirects to scrunch.com), Semrush (which redirects to its SEO + AI Search plans page), Ahrefs and AIVO, whose pricing URL redirects to a home page with no price on it. Peec served tier names and metering without any figure, to the HTTP client and to a rendering browser. Otterly's site did not answer from a US route or a UAE route. Those two rows keep the 21 July 2026 browser reading and are dated as such in the table. The July procedure is the one described in the first-party study linked below.

The underlying dataset — 21 tools priced twice, with an Internet Archive cross-check that corrected five errors in our own procurement sheet — is published as first-party research on gregshevchenko.com.

Re-check this yourself in an afternoon

You do not need our tooling, and you should not take a vendor comparison — including this one — on trust. Open each shortlisted vendor's pricing page and write down two things: the exact entry price, and the exact sentence describing what that tier covers. Then pull the Internet Archive snapshot of the same page from the date your existing comparison was written, and search it for the same sentence.

If the sentence was already there, the repositioning your source described is a classification error rather than a product change. If the price differs from your notes, your notes were wrong on the day they were written — which is exactly what happened to ours. Budget about twenty minutes per vendor. For a shortlist of five, that is an afternoon, and it is the cheapest due diligence available in this category. If a vendor's tier has moved since we read it, the archive snapshot will show you the change and the date it happened — which is more than any comparison page, ours included, can promise on its own.