Why GEO Tools Cost $300/mo (And When You Should Pay Less)

Most GEO tools cost $300-500/mo — and most don't disclose that until you've already given them your email and survived a sales call. The pricing isn't arbitrary; there are real costs to running an AI visibility platform. But the pricing also isn't universal. There's a clear gap between when $300+/mo is justified and when it's an enterprise tax you don't need to pay.

What Actually Drives GEO Tool Pricing

Running a GEO tool has four meaningful costs:

1. LLM API Calls

Every audit fires queries against multiple AI platforms — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI, Claude. A single audit can cost $0.12-0.50 in API spend depending on platform coverage, prompt depth, and response length. Multiply by hundreds of customers running weekly or daily audits, and the bill stacks fast.

2. Infrastructure

Storing AI responses, citations, scoring history, and competitor data isn't free. Vector databases, caching layers, queue infrastructure for parallel platform calls — none of it is cheap at scale. The bigger the customer's keyword set, the bigger the storage burden.

3. Sales Teams

Most GEO tools sell through demo-led, sales-assisted motions. That means SDRs, AEs, customer success, and a buying-committee-friendly contract process. Sales-led acquisition is expensive — typically 30-50% of revenue at established SaaS — and the cost gets passed through in pricing.

4. Brand and Paid Acquisition

The well-funded entrants (Peec AI raised $29M, Profound raised $35M) spend aggressively on Google Ads, sponsorships, and brand. Our funding study found that this spend doesn't actually translate into proportional organic authority — but it absolutely translates into the price you pay.

Why Pricing Tends to Be Opaque

If you've tried to evaluate Peec AI, Otterly, or Goodie's lower tiers, you've hit the same wall: no pricing on the site. The opacity isn't an oversight — it's a deliberate enterprise-sales pattern. Hiding pricing does three things for the seller:

1. It enables variable pricing per buyer. Different customers pay different rates based on perceived budget, urgency, and competitive context.
2. It forces a sales conversation. Once you're on a demo call, the seller has more chances to qualify, negotiate, and upsell.
3. It filters out price-sensitive buyers early. If you bounce when you can't see a number, you weren't the target customer anyway.

This works for enterprise sellers. It actively repels SMB, founder, and self-serve buyers — the segment that's growing fastest in GEO.

When $300+/mo Is Genuinely Justified

The expensive tools aren't scams. They're built for specific use cases where the pricing maps to real value:

• Enterprise teams with dedicated SEO analysts. If you have a 5-person SEO team that needs deep dashboards and custom reporting, enterprise tools fit.
• Agencies managing 50+ brands. Per-brand costs amortize quickly at volume; enterprise plans usually include better multi-brand pricing.
• Heavy BI stack integrations. If you need native Looker Studio, Snowflake, or custom data warehouse connectors, expensive tools deliver them.
• Compliance requirements. SOC 2, HIPAA, custom data residency — these are real costs that justify enterprise pricing.
• 10+ AI platforms tracked. Profound covers DeepSeek, Grok, Meta AI on top of the major four. If your audience genuinely uses long-tail platforms, that coverage costs money.

When You Should Refuse to Pay $300+/mo

For the majority of GEO buyers, $300+/mo is overkill. Pay less if you're:

• A solo marketer or founder who needs to know what AI says about your brand and what to fix
• An SMB with 1-3 brands tracking 25-100 keywords each
• An agency managing fewer than 10 client brands
• A startup pre-product-market-fit where every line item over $100 needs justification
• Anyone whose primary need is auditing + fixing, not dashboards and BI integrations

The $49-149/mo tier exists for exactly this audience. 99Visibility vs Profound at 73% lower cost, vs Goodie AI at 70% lower cost — same core capability, no enterprise tax.

The Hidden Cost of Cheap Tools

Going too cheap has its own costs. Free GEO tools (HubSpot AI Grader, one-off scorers) give you a snapshot with no monitoring, no recommendations, and no path to fix what they find. The "cost" is the months of GEO drift you experience between manual checks.

A real AEO/GEO tool needs to do three things: monitor continuously, detect inaccuracies as they happen, and prescribe specific fixes. The minimum viable price for delivering all three is roughly $49/mo. Anything below that is either limited in scope or a loss leader heading toward higher pricing.

FAQ

Is enterprise GEO pricing negotiable?

Yes — almost always. If you're forced into a demo cycle, ask for the annual contract discount, the multi-brand discount, and the early-customer discount. Sticker prices on opaque tools are starting points.

Does cheaper mean worse?

Not in GEO. The product cost structure (LLM APIs + infrastructure) is roughly the same at $49 and $499. The price difference reflects sales-team cost and target-customer choice, not feature depth.

What's the lowest-cost tool that still includes hallucination detection?

99Visibility at $49/mo. Most tools at this price point skip accuracy verification entirely. See the full pricing breakdown.

Try the GEO Tool With Transparent Pricing

If you're done evaluating tools you can't price, start with the one that publishes everything. Sign up for 99Visibility — $49/mo Starter, public tiers, no credit card on trial, first audit in five minutes.