Otterly’s tiers gate on prompt count alone. All three self-serve plans carry the same four core engines, and Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode are add-ons at every level, so upgrading never buys you an extra engine.
The add-on price also scales with your tier, which means the same engine costs more the larger your plan. Figures read from Otterly’s own pricing page on 17 August 2026.
Last updated: 17 August 2026. Rechecked quarterly, because add-on pricing in this category moves faster than headline pricing.
Otterly is the cheapest way into this category, and the sticker price is genuinely low. It is also the plan where the sticker price is least likely to be what you pay, and the reason is structural rather than sneaky.
What are the published tiers?
Three self-serve, plus an enterprise tier. From its pricing page as read on 17 August 2026.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual, per month | Search prompts | Engines included |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lite | $29 | $25 | 15 | 4 core |
| Standard | $189 | $160 | 100 | 4 core |
| Premium | $489 | $422 | 400 | 4 core |
| Enterprise | Custom, from $1,000 | Not published | Customisable | 4 core |
The four core engines are ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. Annual billing is 15% off. Standard and Premium add API access, MCP access and GEO URL audits, at 5,000 and 10,000 a month respectively.
What does the engine column actually tell you?
That it does not change. Read down it and the number stays at four whether you pay $29 or $489, because coverage is not what the tiers sell. Prompt capacity is.
Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini sit outside the tiers entirely as separately billed add-ons. So the usual upgrade instinct, moving up a plan to reach an engine your buyers use, does not work here. You would pay six times more and still not have Claude.
15 to 100 to 400. This is a clean, legible ladder and the thing the price is genuinely tracking.
Claude runs from $29 to $439 a month. Google AI Mode and Gemini each run from $9 to $149. Independent of your tier, and charged on top of it.
Why does the same add-on cost different amounts?
Because add-on pricing scales with the plan underneath it. Claude is quoted as a range, $29 to $439 a month, and Google AI Mode and Gemini as $9 to $149 each. The low end attaches to Lite and the high end to the larger plans.
That is defensible, since a bigger plan runs the add-on engine against far more prompts. It does mean the marginal cost of coverage rises exactly when you have most prompts to cover, and it makes the full-coverage figure impossible to state as one number.
A plan whose coverage cost depends on your plan size cannot be compared to a flat-rate competitor using the headline price alone.
What does full coverage cost?
It depends on your tier, which is the point. Taking the published ranges at face value, adding Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini to a Lite plan costs at least $29 plus $9 plus $9, so around $76 a month all in at the bottom of every range.
At the top of the ranges the same three add-ons reach $439 plus $149 plus $149, which is $737 on top of whatever tier you are on. Otterly does not publish which figure attaches to which plan, so the honest answer is that full coverage costs somewhere between those two, and you have to ask.
| Scenario | Tier | Add-ons | Indicative total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cheapest possible start, four core engines | $29 | None | $29 |
| Lite with all three add-ons at the bottom of each range | $29 | $47 | About $76 |
| Standard, four core engines, 100 prompts | $189 | None | $189 |
| Standard with add-ons, priced anywhere in the ranges | $189 | $47 to $737 | $236 to $926 |
The last row is the one worth taking to a call. A spread that wide is not a price, it is a starting point for a conversation, and it is the single most important thing to pin down before comparing Otterly to anything else.
Who is the entry tier genuinely right for?
Someone testing whether any of this matters, on a budget that needs no approval. Fifteen prompts across four engines for $29 answers “does AI mention us at all” honestly and cheaply, and that is a real question worth $29.
It is not right for a programme. Fifteen prompts cannot cover a category with any breadth, and a set that small is where prompt selection quietly decides your results, which is the failure in realistic prompts for AI visibility tracking.
How does this compare to the rest of the market?
On prompts alone Otterly is competitive at the top and expensive at the bottom. Standard’s 100 prompts at $189 sits against Mentions.so at $199 for 100 prompts with all LLMs included, and against Trakkr at about $100 for 50 prompts with all eight models included.
The structural difference is that both of those include their engines. Otterly’s model is closer to Profound, which also gates engines, though Profound gates them by tier rather than by add-on. Neither approach is wrong, and both make the headline price a poor guide to the bill.
The wider field is in best AI visibility tracking tools, the sub-$200 band specifically in AthenaHQ alternatives, and the vendors people move to from Otterly in Otterly alternatives.
What should you ask before buying?
Two things the pricing page does not answer. Which end of each add-on range applies to your tier, in writing, because the spread is more than ten times on Claude. And how many times each prompt is queried per engine per day, because a prompt tracked once and a prompt tracked five times produce different numbers from identical reality, which is the first check in how to interpret an AI visibility report.