Profound Pricing (2026): Free Trial, Custom Quote, Real Cost

Profound no longer publishes a monthly price for businesses. As of October 3, 2026, its pricing page offers a free 7-day Trial and a custom-quoted Enterprise plan for brands. The only dollar figures are agency add-ons: $399 per client workspace per month and $199 per month for five trial workspaces. This guide is based on public documentation as of October 2026; we have not tested the product hands-on.

How much does Profound cost in 2026?

Nobody outside Profound can price a paid brand plan today, because none is public. The page offers a free Trial, a quote-only Enterprise tier, and two agency plans. Here is what the page showed us on October 3, 2026.

The agency prices appear only after you click "For agencies". They are not in the HTML the server sends, so a script or AI tool that reads only the raw page can miss them. The Trial's "Get Started" button links to a welcome page on Profound's app domain, while "Get a Demo" links to a contact-sales form.

The number you may have seen elsewhere has moved. Internet Archive copies of the same page from December 2025, September 1, 2026 and September 14, 2026 show Starter at $99 per month and Growth at $399 per month, both "billed yearly" with "2 months free". Our own September 23 version of this guide listed them. The live page no longer does, and $399 now reappears as the agency add-on, so check which plan a review means.

What do the plans include?

The Trial is a one-week sampler, and Enterprise is where history, exports, the API and most engines sit. Both plans include unlimited seats, according to the page's FAQ. This is the brand comparison as published on October 3, 2026.

Profound says it captures answers from the front-end experiences users see rather than API calls, and runs every tracked prompt daily because AI platforms "don't return the same answer twice". That daily repetition is the thing you pay for.

Profound Agents are a second meter. The pricing FAQ says they run on credits that scale with agent complexity, and an account can be set to allow overage billing or to pause at the limit. Credits are "limited" on the Trial and custom on Enterprise.

For agencies, each pitch workspace tracks 25 unique prompts for 7 days. A client workspace tracks 100 prompts, includes 400 agent credits a month and 4 opportunities a week, and the plan has 5 agency seats, email support and no API or SSO.

What does Profound cost per year in practice?

For a brand the honest answer is "unknown until you get a quote", but three parts can be computed from the page. Treat each as arithmetic on published inputs, not an invoice.

• Trial: $0. Fifty prompts on three engines for seven days is 1,050 answers, assuming each prompt runs on every engine daily (our arithmetic; the page does not state a total).
• Agency client workspaces: $399 × 12 = $4,788 a year per client, so three clients is $14,364. Five extra trial workspaces are $199 × 12 = $2,388. The Agency Growth base fee is not shown.
• The retired Growth plan: "$399 per month, billed yearly, 2 months free" is ambiguous. It is $3,990 if you pay for 10 months, but $4,788 if $399 is already the discounted monthly rate. Our September guide assumed $3,990; the page never said.

Is a 1,050-answer Trial enough to judge anything? Probably not. SparkToro's study ran each of 12 prompts 60 to 100 times and found under a 1-in-100 chance that ChatGPT or Google's AI gives the same brand list in any two responses. Seven daily runs per prompt are a first look, not a baseline.

Otterly lists a 15% discount for annual billing, and Peec's page displays dollars on the monthly toggle we loaded. Confirm both at checkout.

Is Profound worth it for a small business?

Usually not as your first purchase. Profound is built for teams that need many engines, regions, exports, SSO and support, and it sells those by quote. A small business should first learn whether AI engines name it at all, which takes an afternoon, not a contract.

Profound is a good fit when most of these are true:

• You are a mid-market or enterprise brand with someone whose job includes AI search.
• You need engines the Trial lacks, several regions or languages, an API, exports or SSO.
• AI search has a budget line and a procurement process that is comfortable with a custom contract.
• You want daily runs across hundreds of prompts and a vendor relationship around them.

Skip it for now if you are a founder, a local business, a small store or a small agency still asking "does ChatGPT recommend us?". The Trial helps with the commitment problem, but it is a week with no history. It cannot show a trend.

Our own data points the same way. In AEOeye's recommendation benchmark (127 audits, 27 brand names, self-selected, so indicative only), 144 of 157 brand mentions were positive. The common problem was not being named, not being criticised, and a one-off check answers that.

What we saw on Profound's own site: in AEOeye's crawler access study (October 2026), tryprofound.com's robots.txt blocks no AI bots and names none, /llms.txt returned 404, and we found no JSON-LD in the served HTML. That last point can mean schema injected by JavaScript. It is a fact about the site, not a verdict on the product.

A sensible path for a small team:

1. Get a baseline: run the same buyer questions in each engine, or use the free AEOeye audit, which asks three on ChatGPT.
2. If you need ongoing tracking, price self-serve tools; our Otterly and Peec AI guides show the limits.
3. Revisit Profound when the list above describes you. Our Profound alternatives, Profound vs AEOeye, Profound review and Profound vs Semrush pages cover the product, and the best AI visibility tools list covers the field.

AEOeye is not a daily tracker, so if you need daily monitoring across hundreds of prompts, Profound, Peec AI and Otterly are the right category.

What should you ask before a demo?

Get the answers in writing, because this page has already changed once. Use this checklist before you treat a sales call as a budget.

• Plan name and price: which plan will we be on, and is the amount a monthly rate or an annual total? "Billed yearly" pricing has been ambiguous before.
• Prompts and runs: how many prompts are included, and do reruns, backfills and prompts added by teammates use the same allowance?
• Engines, regions, languages: which of the nine engines are included, and in which markets? The Trial covers one region and one language.
• Trial conversion: what happens after seven days, and does any data carry over?
• Credits: how many agent credits do our workflows use, and is overage billed or paused?
• Access: seats, SSO, API, export formats and support response times.
• Renewal: term, renewal price, price-change notice and cancellation window.

If the quote cannot answer these, treat the number as an estimate. Walk in with your own measured baseline, so the demo proves something you can compare.