Brand monitoring software cost ranges from $25 to $999 a month on self-serve tiers, based on public pricing pages checked on 13 July 2026. Legacy enterprise suites hide prices behind demo calls, and Meltwater states 12-month minimum contracts. The list price alone is a poor guide. The better question is what each dollar actually covers.
This is not a tool-by-tool price list. We keep a full plan-by-plan breakdown in our AI brand monitoring cost guide. This page divides those prices by what they buy, starting with the number of AI engines each entry tier monitors.
What brand monitoring software cost actually buys
Two tools at the same price can cover very different ground. Otterly and Honeyb, our own product, both start at $29 a month. Otterly's Lite plan tracks four engines with 15 prompts, while Honeyb's Minimum plan tracks one model deeply, scanning 10 prompts every day. Vendors rarely put this trade-off on the pricing page, so we did the arithmetic ourselves.
Entry price
Entry-tier price of AI brand monitoring tools
Entry prices cluster in two bands. Athena, Otterly and Honeyb open at $25 to $29 a month. Sight, Dageno, LLM Pulse, Siftly, Writesonic and Profound sit between $49 and $99. Semrush bundles AI visibility into plans from $199, and Sight's Premium tier reaches $999 for 500 prompts. Nothing about that spread maps neatly onto coverage, which is why the next table normalises it.
Cost per AI engine at entry tier
The table divides each vendor's cheapest public tier by the number of AI engines or models that tier monitors. All prices come from the vendors' public pricing pages on 13 July 2026. Honeyb is our product and is listed first. Peec covers six engines on all tiers but its prices render only in-browser, so it cannot be included in the calculation.
| Tool | Entry tier | Engines or models covered | Cost per engine |
|---|---|---|---|
| Honeyb (our product) | $29 Minimum | 1 model | $29.00 |
| Athena | $25 Essential | 5 models | $5.00 |
| Otterly | $29 Lite | 4 engines | $7.25 |
| Sight | $49 Starter | 5 engines | $9.80 |
| LLM Pulse | EUR 49 Starter | 5 engines | EUR 9.80 |
| Writesonic GEO | $79 Starter, annual-billed | 3 engines | $26.33 |
| Dageno | $79 Starter | 3 platforms | $26.33 |
| Siftly | $79 Try | 2 engines | $39.50 |
| Profound | $99 Starter, billed yearly | 1 engine (ChatGPT) | $99.00 |
The spread is nearly 20x. Athena's Essential plan works out at $5.00 per model, while Profound's Starter costs $99 for ChatGPT alone, and only with annual billing. Honeyb's entry plan sits at the top of the per-engine column by design: $29 buys daily scanning of 10 prompts on a single model rather than thin coverage of many. Buyers who want breadth from us move to Multi-Model at $79 for 3 models, which is $26.33 per model, or Full Spectrum at $249 for all 8 engines, which is $31.13 per engine with 100 prompts scanned daily.
Per-engine cost is one axis and prompt depth is another. Otterly Lite includes 15 prompts, Sight Starter includes 10 with 1,500 AI credits, and Athena's Essential plan works on 300 credits where 1 credit equals one AI response. A low per-engine figure paired with a small prompt allowance can still leave most of your buyer questions unmonitored.
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Self-serve tools vs demo-gated suites
| Segment | Vendors | Entry pricing | Commitment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Self-serve AI-native | Honeyb (ours), Athena, Otterly, Sight, LLM Pulse, Dageno, Siftly, Writesonic, Profound | $25 to $299 a month, public | Monthly options, trials on most |
| SEO-suite add-ons | SE Ranking, Semrush | EUR 79 add-on plus EUR 109 base; $199 bundle | Monthly or annual |
| Legacy listening suites | Brandwatch, Meltwater, Talkwalker | No public prices, demo only | Meltwater states 12-month minimums |
The split matters because the legacy suites predate AI answer tracking. Brandwatch, Meltwater and Talkwalker were built for media and social listening, and none publishes a price. If AI answers are the thing you need monitored, you can compare nine self-serve vendors on public numbers before sitting through a single sales call.
Why engine coverage is worth paying for
In our own July 2026 measurement, 20 buyer prompts run three times each across four engines for 240 answers in total, two engines named the same top brand in only 20% of cases for the ChatGPT and Perplexity pair, rising to 53% for Gemini and Claude. The same engine also changed its own top pick between identical runs 28% to 44% of the time. Monitoring one engine therefore tells you little about the other three. That is the case for judging tools on cost per engine, and for measuring AI share of voice across engines rather than in one.
How to budget without overpaying
Three checks before paying. First, confirm whether the displayed price is monthly or annual-billed: Profound's $99 and Writesonic's $79 are both annual figures. Second, price the full stack: SE Ranking's EUR 79 AI add-on requires a base plan from EUR 109 a month, so the real entry cost is EUR 188. Third, use the trials: Honeyb's Multi-Model and Full Spectrum plans carry 7-day trials, LLM Pulse offers 14 days with a card required, and Otterly, Dageno and Writesonic all list free trials. Our AI visibility software pricing guide covers the remaining plan-level detail.
The cheapest place to start costs nothing. Run a free AI visibility check to see how AI engines currently describe your brand, then use the per-engine table above to decide what coverage is worth paying for.
