Here is the advice I would give a DTC founder over coffee: you can start GEO with $0, and you probably should. GEOly's free tier covers mention and product-card tracking, the paid ladder above it runs $29 (Otterly.AI Lite) and $99 (Semrush's AI toolkit), and nothing about a small brand's situation justifies the $250-to-$2,000+ platforms yet. The interesting question is not which tool is cheapest — it is where each rung's ceiling sits, and what to do with the money you refuse to spend.
Key takeaways
- Start at $0: GEOly's free tier plus its one-click Shopify app covers the signals a small DTC brand needs first, including product-card tracking.
- The paid ladder is short: $29 buys daily text-answer monitoring (Otterly.AI Lite), $99 buys AI metrics inside an SEO suite (Semrush). Each rung has a hard ceiling worth knowing before you pay.
- Skip, for now: $250+ platforms, $495 content tools and enterprise quotes above $2,000 a month. Small brands rarely have the prompt volume or team to use them.
- Redirect the savings into what engines actually reward: content on the sources they cite. Reddit alone drives 5.5M citations in AI brand decisions.
- The payoff is real: ChatGPT referrals convert at 7.1%, second only to paid search, per Similarweb.
Start at $0, seriously
Disclosure: GEOly is our product — so discount this section accordingly, then check the free tier yourself at app.geoly.ai.
The reason $0 is a serious recommendation and not a teaser: GEOly's free tier includes the two measurements a small DTC brand cannot get anywhere else at any of these prices — Share of Model for who gets named in answers, and Share of Card for who holds the product-card slots that 88.8% of ChatGPT shopping answers now carry. Citation source analysis rounds it out. If your store runs on Shopify, install GEOly AI on the Shopify App Store and skip configuration entirely; if not, starting free takes a few minutes either way.
Honest limitation: the free tier is sized for getting started — a narrow prompt panel, not a wall of dashboards — and GEOly has no rank tracking or backlink index, so it does not replace whatever you use for classic SEO. Whether upgrading later is worth it, we argued both sides in the pricing review.
The $29 rung: Otterly.AI Lite, and where its ceiling is
Otterly.AI Lite at $29 a month is the cheapest paid tracker worth having: it re-runs your prompts daily across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot, and the history it accumulates is genuinely useful for spotting trends. The ceiling: Gemini and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons, competitive analytics are thin at this tier, and there is no shelf coverage — Otterly can tell you ChatGPT praised you, not whether there was a card to buy from. Its deeper GEO audit lives on the $189 Standard plan, which is a different budget conversation.
