Below about $70 a month you get engine breadth or prompt volume, rarely both. At the $99 ceiling the trade-off largely dissolves: three vendors offer full engine coverage with usable prompt counts at that price.
So the real decision is not breadth against volume. It is whether your budget clears roughly $99, because that is where the constraint stops binding. Figures read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 17 August 2026.
Last updated: 17 August 2026. Rechecked quarterly.
Under $100 is where most first purchases happen, and it is the band where the published numbers are least comparable. Two plans a dollar apart can differ by an order of magnitude in what they actually query.
What is actually available under $100?
| Tool and tier | Price | Prompts | Engines | Shape |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rankscale Essentials | From $20 | Not detailed on the page | Not detailed | Unknown |
| Otterly.AI Lite | $29 | 15 | 4 core, others as add-ons | Neither |
| Mentions.so Starter | $49 | 25 | 3 LLMs | Neither |
| Knowatoa Starter | $59 | Not published | 3 services | Unknown |
| Rivarise Starter | $69 | 50 per day | 4 of 9 | Volume |
| Profound Starter | $99 billed yearly | 50 | ChatGPT only | Volume |
| Semrush AI Visibility | $99 per domain, yearly | 25 | 4 engine families | Neither |
| Mentions.so Pro | $99 | 50, plus 5 sites | All LLMs | Both |
| Rankscale Pro | $99 | 1,200 credits, about 4,800 answers | 10 named | Both |
| Trakkr Growth | £79, about $100 | 50 for 1 brand | All 8 included | Both |
Read the last column down the table. Everything at $69 and below is compromised on one axis or the other. Everything at the $99 mark except Profound and Semrush gives you both.
Where does the trade-off actually bind?
Between roughly $29 and $69, and it is a real constraint rather than a marketing artefact. Otterly at $29 gives four engines and fifteen prompts. Mentions.so at $49 gives twenty-five prompts and three LLMs. Neither is generous on either axis, because there is not much room in $29 to be generous with.
Compromised on both axes. Enough to answer whether engines mention you at all, not enough to run a programme.
Existence checkYou pick an axis. Volume with partial coverage, or partial coverage with modest volume.
Pick oneThree vendors give full or near-full coverage with fifty prompts or a large credit budget.
Both availableThat has a practical consequence. If you are deciding between $49 and $69, you are choosing which compromise to accept. If you can reach $99, you should, because the same thirty dollars buys more there than anywhere else in the range.
Which one for which job?
The cleanest full-coverage option at the ceiling, with no add-on arithmetic.
- What you get
- All eight models at the entry tier and 50 prompts for one brand. Nothing is tiered away and nothing is sold separately.
- Constraint
- One brand. Pricing is in sterling, so the dollar figure moves with the rate.
The most raw volume in the band, if you are willing to do the credit conversion.
- What you get
- 1,200 credits at 0.25 credits per engine query, which the vendor states is up to 4,800 answers, across ten named engines and ten brand dashboards.
- Constraint
- Credits must be converted before comparing to any per-prompt plan, and the Essentials tier below it does not detail its allocations.
The option for anyone tracking more than one property at this price.
- What you get
- 50 prompts across all LLMs, five sites, and unlimited seats. Five sites at $99 is unusual anywhere in this band.
- Constraint
- The $49 tier below it is three LLMs and 25 prompts, so the useful version of this product is the $99 one.
Daily depth on a partial engine set, with the answer text kept behind every number.
- What you get
- 50 prompts a day on four of nine engines, five runs per prompt per engine per day, and the stored answers rather than a score alone.
- Constraint
- Four engines, not nine. Full coverage is $349, well outside this band, so on breadth alone the $99 options above beat us.
The cheapest way to find out whether any of this matters.
- What you get
- 15 prompts on four core engines, for a price that needs no approval.
- Constraint
- Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode are separately billed add-ons, so the coverage figure is not the whole picture.
How do you compare a credit plan to a prompt plan?
Convert both to observations, where one observation is one prompt on one engine once. Rankscale does the conversion for you by stating 0.25 credits per engine query, so 1,200 credits is about 4,800 answers a month.
Against that, a 50-prompt plan checked once a day on four engines is 6,000 observations a month, and the same plan checked once a day on eight engines is 12,000. So Rankscale Pro’s 4,800 is smaller than it first appears next to a per-prompt plan with daily checking, and larger than a plan checked weekly.
The variable that decides it is frequency, and it is the one least often published. A vendor quoting prompts without a requery frequency has given you a number you cannot convert, which is why that question belongs in the first sales email rather than the last.
Does daily checking actually matter at this price?
It matters more at this price than at any other, because small plans are where sample size is scarce. A 25-prompt plan checked weekly on three engines produces 75 observations a week, and an interval on that is wide enough that most movement is unreadable.
The same 25 prompts checked daily produce 525 a week, which is a different instrument entirely for the same prompt count. Frequency is the cheapest precision available, because it multiplies the sample without needing a bigger plan.
This is also why comparing two cheap plans on prompt count alone is misleading. Fifty prompts checked weekly is a smaller measurement than fifteen prompts checked daily, and the pricing pages present the first as the larger product.
What does $99 not buy you at this level?
Three things, consistently.
Multiple brands, with one exception. Mentions.so Pro carries five sites; everything else in the band is one brand or one domain, and Semrush charges per domain on top.
Requery frequency you can verify. Almost nobody in this band publishes how many times a prompt is queried per engine per day, and that number decides whether your figure is a rate or a single observation, as set out in how to interpret an AI visibility report.
Sample size sufficient for tight reporting. Fifty prompts on four engines checked daily is 200 observations a day, which supports a monthly figure with a usable interval and does not support confident weekly movement claims. The arithmetic is in how many times to run a prompt.
What about the tiers that publish nothing?
Two entries in this band withhold the number that decides fit. Knowatoa’s Starter at $59 covers three services and does not state a question allowance anywhere on the pricing page, directing you to schedule a call instead. Rankscale’s Essentials tier starts at $20 with no allocations detailed.
Treat both as unpriced until you have the figure in writing. A tool that will not say how many prompts you get cannot be compared to one that does, and the missing number is never the flattering one.
This is not a reason to rule either out. It is a reason not to shortlist them against published competitors until the gap is filled, because an unpublished allowance tends to be read optimistically by the person doing the comparison.
Should you buy at the bottom or stretch to the ceiling?
Stretch, if the difference is approvable. The $29 and $49 tiers answer a yes-or-no question and then stop being useful, and most teams that buy them upgrade within a quarter, which makes the cheap plan the more expensive route.
The real cost of the $29 plan is the $99 plan three months later, plus a quarter of data from a prompt set too small to trust.
Buy at the bottom deliberately when the question genuinely is yes-or-no, or when you want a second opinion running alongside something you already pay for. Otherwise size the prompt set first and let that select the tier, because prompt count is the constraint that binds before anything else.
The full field including everything above this band is in best AI visibility tracking tools, the sub-$200 view in AthenaHQ alternatives, and what the category costs overall in how much do AI visibility tools cost.