Under $200 a month the market is crowded rather than thin, and the tools differ less on features than on the unit they meter: prompts per month, prompts per day, or credits. Two plans at the same price can buy tracking volumes that differ by more than ten times.
Normalise to prompts tracked per day and engines included before comparing anything. Every figure below was read from the vendor’s own pricing page on 17 August 2026 and is linked.
Last updated: 17 August 2026. Prices in this category change often, so this page is rechecked quarterly.
AthenaHQ’s entry paid tier is $295 a month, so anyone shopping below $200 is shopping outside its range entirely. That is the reason this list exists, and it is worth saying plainly that six credible tools sit under that line. The problem is not scarcity. The problem is that their prices are quoted in units that do not convert into each other.
What does AthenaHQ cost, and what are you leaving?
Its published pricing lists a free Essential tier with 300 credits and $25 of credit, then Starter at $295 a month for 3,600 credits, then Enterprise on request. The free tier is genuinely broad, covering ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude.
So the gap you are trying to fill is the one between a free evaluation tier and $295. That is a wide jump, and it is the specific reason people arrive at this question.
Why can you not compare these prices directly?
Because four different units are in play, and none of the vendors converts for you.
| Metering unit | Who uses it | What it makes hard |
|---|---|---|
| Prompts tracked, billed monthly | Otterly.AI, Mentions.so | Nothing, once you know the tracking frequency. This is the clearest unit. |
| Prompts per day | Rivarise | Looks larger than a monthly figure and is not directly comparable to one. |
| Credits | Rankscale | Requires knowing the credit cost per query before any comparison is possible. |
| Prompts per brand | Trakkr | Cheap for one brand, and the unit that scales best across several. |
| Not published | Knowatoa | You cannot size the plan before a sales call. |
Rankscale is the clearest illustration. Its pricing page quotes Pro at $99 a month for 1,200 credits, states that each AI engine query costs 0.25 credits, and translates that itself into “up to 4,800 AI engine answers.” Without that conversion the $99 figure means nothing next to a competitor’s “100 prompts.”
Which tools sit under $200 a month?
Six, ordered by entry price. Each entry names what the entry tier actually buys, because the headline price is rarely the number that decides the purchase.
Teams that would rather buy a budget than a plan, and audit pages as well as track prompts.
- What the entry tier buys
- Essentials starts at $20 a month, with allocations not detailed on the pricing page. Pro at $99 carries 1,200 credits, around 4,800 engine answers.
- Engines
- Ten named, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Gemini, DeepSeek, Mistral, Claude, Grok and Copilot.
- Where it is weaker
- Credit maths makes cross-vendor comparison genuinely hard, which may or may not be deliberate.
The cheapest way to start tracking anything at all.
- What the entry tier buys
- Lite at $29 covers 15 search prompts. Standard at $189 covers 100, with 5,000 GEO URL audits and API access.
- Engines
- Four core: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot. Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini are separately billed add-ons.
- Where it is weaker
- The add-on pricing is the catch. Claude runs from $29 to $439 a month depending on tier, so full coverage rarely costs the sticker price.
Agencies wanting several sites on one bill, with unlimited seats at every tier.
- What the entry tier buys
- Starter at $49 covers 25 prompts, three LLMs and one site. Pro at $99 covers 50 prompts, all LLMs and five sites. Business at $199 covers 100 prompts and ten sites.
- Engines
- Three LLMs at Starter, all of them from Pro upward.
- Where it is weaker
- Prompt allowances are low at the bottom tier relative to the price, and the entry tier’s three-LLM cap is the real limit rather than the prompt count.
Reporting-stack teams: the integrations arrive well below enterprise pricing.
- What the entry tier buys
- Starter at $59 covers ChatGPT, AI Overviews and AI Mode. Growth at $199 covers all seven services.
- Engines
- Seven at Growth, including Claude, Gemini, Meta AI and Perplexity.
- Where it is weaker
- Question allowances are not stated anywhere on the pricing page, which directs you to schedule a call. You cannot size it before talking to them.
Teams that want the answer text behind every number, and the reason for an absence rather than only the fact of it.
- What the entry tier buys
- Starter at $69 covers 50 prompts a day on four engines. Growth at $149 covers 75 prompts a day on six.
- Engines
- Nine in total, added cumulatively by tier. All nine arrive at Business, which is $349 and therefore outside this list.
- Where it is weaker
- Full engine coverage is above the $200 line, so this list cannot recommend us for that. There is a permanent free plan rather than a trial.
Anyone tired of per-model add-on pricing. Every model is in every tier.
- What the entry tier buys
- Growth at £79 a month covers one brand and 50 prompts for that brand. Scale at £395 covers ten brands at 50 prompts each.
- Engines
- All eight included at every tier: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Grok, DeepSeek and Meta AI.
- Where it is weaker
- One brand at the entry tier, so multi-brand work moves you up quickly. Pricing is in sterling, so the dollar figure moves with the rate.
What does full engine coverage cost under $200?
This is the question the price alone will not answer, and the answer is better than the conventional wisdom suggests. Full or near-full coverage is available below $200 from several vendors, so paying more does not automatically buy more surfaces.
That has a direct consequence for how you shortlist. If breadth is what you need, price is not the filter, and the cheapest full-coverage option here is Trakkr rather than anything further up the list. If depth on a few engines matters more, the prompt allowance is the filter instead.
Which one should you actually pick?
Whatever you pick, ask for the run count before you sign. A tool that queries each prompt once a day and one that queries five times report different numbers from identical reality, and only one of them is measuring. The full field, including the tiers above $200, is in the 12 best AI visibility tracking tools in 2026, and the reading discipline that keeps any of these numbers honest is in how to interpret an AI visibility report.
If you came here from a specific vendor rather than from AthenaHQ, the same normalising exercise is done for two of them in Otterly alternatives and Peec AI alternatives. And if you are weighing whether a share-of-voice figure from any of these is comparable to the last one you saw, how to calculate AI share of voice covers what has to be fixed before two numbers mean the same thing.