# Promptmonitor

Aiolum story: https://aiolum.com/story/promptmonitor/ · added 2026-10-25 · updated 2026-10-25

**In short.** Promptmonitor (AI search visibility tracking (GEO), USA): Sold for US$85K, January 2026. Evidence grade D: reported, not verified. Team: 1 founder (Yogesh, @yogesharc), who also ran the Remote3 job board. Launched 3 June 2025; sold 7 months after launch.

AI search visibility tracking (GEO) · USA · AI-native · solo founder · sold · group: SEO and AI search

- Outcome: Sold for US$85K, January 2026 (evidence grade of the headline number: D; headline in US dollars: 85000)
- Launch: 3 June 2025; months from launch to the outcome: 7
- Team: 1 founder (Yogesh, @yogesharc), who also ran the Remote3 job board
- Outside funding: None found
- Main factor: Timing
- Meters, 1 to 4: evidence strength 1, copyable pattern 3, capital needed 1
- Tags: AI-native, Solo founder, Bootstrapped, Exit, B2B, Marketing

**The product.** Software that sends a brand's chosen questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, DeepSeek and Grok every day, records whether each answer names the brand, in which position and with what sentiment, and lists the web pages that the answers cite. For each cited page it extracts the author's contact details, so that the customer can ask the publisher to mention the brand. A snippet on the customer's site also logs visits by AI crawlers such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot.

**Why it worked.** According to the newsletter that told his story, the founder saw visitors arrive at his job board from ChatGPT in May 2025 and built the tool that he wanted for himself in about three weeks. He launched it on Product Hunt on 3 June 2025, kept shipping weekly through months of slow sales, and cut his prices from a range of US$99 to US$499 a month (July 2025) to US$29 to US$129 a month (January 2026), according to the archived pricing pages. Stripe data on TrustMRR lists revenue of US$2,054 in November 2025 and US$2,648 in December 2025. A newsletter reported that he then listed the product for US$100,000 and sold it nine days later for US$85,000.

Evidence grades: A = disclosed by a public company, a filing or a payment processor, or verified by one; B = two or more independent reports agree, or a journalist confirmed it; C = a founder claim that no one else verified; D = reported, not verified: one founder claim or a third-party estimate with no second source; calc = computed on this page from graded facts.

## Summary

Promptmonitor is a tool for generative engine optimization (GEO), the work of making a brand appear in the answers of AI assistants, in the way that search engine optimization (SEO) makes a page appear in Google's list of links. The same work is also called answer engine optimization (AEO). The customer enters questions that buyers might ask, called prompts (the text that a person types into an AI assistant), for example "best accounting software for small business". Promptmonitor sends each prompt to several AI models on a schedule, stores every answer, and computes a visibility score. The founder-era page defined it as 80% presence rate (the share of answers that name the brand) plus 20% position (how early the brand is named). For example, a brand named in 6 of 10 answers has a presence rate of 60%, and being named earlier in those answers adds to the score. The AI models are not only the subject of the product: every number in it is computed from answers that the models generate when the product calls them.

The founder, Yogesh (@yogesharc on X), also ran Remote3, a job board for web3 jobs. According to the newsletter AI & No-Code Exits (10 July 2026), he saw visitors arrive at the job board from ChatGPT in May 2025, built a first version in about three weeks, and then sat at about US$500 a month of revenue for months, as the newsletter reported. Product Hunt shows a launch on 3 June 2025, eighth product of the day. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment processor, lists Stripe revenue of US$2,054 in November 2025 and US$2,648 in December 2025, and MRR (monthly recurring revenue: the subscription revenue that comes in each month) of US$2,473 from 38 active subscriptions at its last sync on 25 January 2026. The newsletter reported that he listed the product on TrustMRR on 5 January 2026 with an asking price of US$100,000 and sold it on 14 January 2026 for US$85,000 to a buyer building a small portfolio of software products.

The revenue figures on this page are grade A: they come from Stripe through TrustMRR. The sale price, the asking price and the dates of the sale rest on one newsletter article, grade D: no buyer statement and no second article confirms them. Other records agree with a change of owner in early 2026: the Stripe connection stopped syncing on 25 January 2026, the TrustMRR profile no longer lists the product for sale, and the company named in the terms of service changed from Bootstrapped LLC (December 2025) to Stackdirectory LLC (May 2026). The page also shows four earlier companies that sold brands a measure of their visibility on platforms that they did not own.

## Pricing

Promptmonitor prices in October 2026, from the company's pricing page, run by the owner after the sale (grade C)

| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 33 | 39 | 2,250 AI answers a month, 1 website, 25 prompts tracked twice a week, 1 seat |
| Growth | 67 | 79 | 4,500 AI answers a month, 2 websites, 50 prompts tracked daily, unlimited seats |
| Pro | 83 | 149 | 14,000 AI answers a month, 5 websites, 150 prompts tracked daily, unlimited seats |
| Enterprise | custom |  | more than 20 websites, custom prompt volume, SSO and API access |

The page offers a monthly and a yearly price and says yearly billing saves 15%. The yearly price per month in the page data is US$33 for Starter and US$67 for Growth, which match 15%, but US$83 for Pro, which does not (15% off US$149 is about US$127); the table shows the page data. An "AI answer" is one run of one prompt on one model. Starter covers ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity; the page data gives 5 models for Growth and 8 for Pro. Every paid plan has a 7-day free trial. Under the founder the prices were different: Free, Lite US$99, Startup US$199 and Business US$499 a month in July 2025, and Starter US$29, Growth US$39 and Pro US$129 a month in January 2026, the month of the sale.

## How much did Promptmonitor make, and what was it sold for? The numbers, graded

A one-person AI visibility tracker with Stripe-verified revenue of about US$2,000 to US$2,700 a month at the end of 2025, reported sold for US$85,000 in January 2026, seven months after launch

| Fact | Value | Grade | Note | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sale price, 14 January 2026 | US$85,000 | D | Reported by the newsletter AI & No-Code Exits on 10 July 2026, which calls it the marketplace's biggest acquisition at the time. No buyer statement or second source found. The buyer is described only as a SaaS portfolio operator. | [2] |
| Asking price, 5 January 2026 | US$100,000 | D | Same newsletter: listed on TrustMRR on 5 January 2026. The TrustMRR profile now says the startup is not listed for sale. | [2, 1] |
| Sale price as a share of the asking price | 85%, after 9 days on the market | calc | Calculated: US$85,000 divided by US$100,000; 5 to 14 January 2026. | [2] |
| Revenue, November 2025 | US$2,054 | A | Stripe, connected to TrustMRR by API key. | [1] |
| Revenue, December 2025 | US$2,648 | A | Stripe through TrustMRR. 28.9% more than November, calculated. January 2026 shows US$1,441, a month that the data covers only until the last sync on 25 January. | [1] |
| MRR at the last sync, 25 January 2026 | US$2,473 from 38 active subscriptions | A | Stripe through TrustMRR. The profile says the Stripe API key has expired, so no later data exists on TrustMRR. | [1] |
| Run rate from that MRR | about US$29,676 a year | calc | Calculated: US$2,473 times 12. | [1] |
| Sale price divided by the run rate | about 2.9 times | calc | Calculated: US$85,000 divided by US$29,676. Divided by the revenue of the twelve months shown on TrustMRR (US$6,599), it is about 12.9 times. | [1, 2] |
| Average MRR per active subscription | about US$65 a month | calc | Calculated: US$2,473 divided by 38. Between the January 2026 Growth plan (US$39) and Pro plan (US$129). | [1, 4] |
| All-time revenue at the last sync | US$11,297 | A | Stripe through TrustMRR. The last-twelve-months figure is US$6,599, so US$4,698 came before late October 2025 (calculated). The profile gives a founded date of 6 April 2023, two years before the product, so part of that earlier revenue may come from another product on the same Stripe account: not verified. | [1] |
| Revenue before the rise | about US$500 of MRR for months | D | Newsletter account, no exact dates. It says revenue then jumped and doubled again shortly after. | [2] |
| Product Hunt launches | 3 June 2025: 8th of the day, 193 points on launch day; 25 August 2025: 15th of the day | C | Product Hunt's product page. The first launch was featured; the second was not. | [5] |
| Price of the cheapest paid plan | US$99 a month in July 2025; US$29 a month from September 2025 | C | Archived pricing pages. The top plan fell from US$499 (July 2025) to US$249 (September and October 2025) and US$129 (January 2026). | [3, 8, 9, 4] |
| Companies signed up, as the site claimed | 650+ in July 2025; 1,450 in January 2026 | C | Company claims on the home page, not verified. TrustMRR's estimated user count is also 1,450. The verified number of paying subscriptions in January 2026 is 38. | [3, 4, 1] |
| Team | 1 founder | C | The newsletter describes one indie builder. The founder-era site says "Text the founder on LinkedIn", and Product Hunt lists Yogesh as the maker. | [2, 4, 5] |
| Outside funding | none found | C | No source names an investor. Not verified beyond these pages. | [2, 1] |
| Company in the terms of service | Bootstrapped LLC in December 2025; Stackdirectory LLC by May 2026 | C | Archived terms of service. Both versions say "Last Updated: September 30, 2025" and have the same Delaware mailing address; only the company name changed. The home page still named Bootstrapped LLC on 8 February 2026. | [10, 11, 13] |
| Time from launch to the sale | 7 months | calc | Calculated: June 2025 to January 2026. | [5, 2] |

How to read this table: grade A values come from Stripe through TrustMRR. Grade C values are the company's own pages (live or archived) or Product Hunt's records. Grade D values rest on one newsletter article and are not verified. A "calc" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.

## When did Promptmonitor launch, and how did it grow? Timeline

From a strange line in a job board's traffic report to a sale in nine days, in seven months. Each entry carries its grade.

- **May 2025** (grade D [2]): Yogesh sees visitors arrive at his job board, Remote3, from ChatGPT. He decides to build a tool that shows when and why AI models mention a site, and ships a first version in about three weeks.
- **3 June 2025** (grade C [5]): Launch on Product Hunt: "Get your brand mentioned by ChatGPT, Gemini + other AI/LLMs". It is featured and ends 8th of the day.
- **8 July 2025** (grade C [3]): The archived site offers a free plan and paid plans of US$99, US$199 and US$499 a month, tracks six AI models, extracts publishers' contacts, and claims more than 650 companies. The footer names Bootstrapped LLC and links to Remote3.
- **June to October 2025** (grade D [2]): The newsletter reported that revenue sat at about US$500 a month for months while the founder shipped new features every week.
- **25 August 2025** (grade C [5]): Second Product Hunt launch, 15th of the day, not featured.
- **8 September 2025** (grade C [8]): New prices: Starter US$29, a middle plan US$89 and Pro US$249 a month.
- **25 October 2025** (grade C [9]): Growth costs US$49 a month with a Halloween discount code; the 7-day free trial replaces a 10-day one.
- **November 2025** (grade A [1]): Stripe revenue of US$2,054 in the month.
- **December 2025** (grade A [1]): Stripe revenue of US$2,648 in the month.
- **1 January 2026** (grade C [4]): The archived site shows Starter US$29, Growth US$39 and Pro US$129 a month, a free Agency plan with revenue sharing, and "Over 1450 Companies Signed Up".
- **5 January 2026** (grade D [2]): Listed for sale on TrustMRR with an asking price of US$100,000, as the newsletter reported.
- **14 January 2026** (grade D [2]): Sold for US$85,000 to a buyer building a small SaaS portfolio, as the newsletter reported.
- **25 January 2026** (grade A [1]): Last Stripe sync on TrustMRR: MRR of US$2,473 from 38 active subscriptions.
- **March 2026** (grade C [12]): The public changelog shows new releases: CSV export, a new sign-in screen and weekly reports for every user of an account.
- **May 2026** (grade C [11]): The terms of service name Stackdirectory LLC instead of Bootstrapped LLC.
- **10 July 2026** (grade D [2]): The newsletter AI & No-Code Exits publishes the account of the sale.
- **October 2026** (grade C [6, 7]): The site, now run by the new owner, tracks eight AI models, sells plans from US$39 a month and claims more than 5,000 marketing teams.

## Why did Promptmonitor work?

### The idea came from the founder's own traffic data

According to the newsletter, the founder saw an unexplained referrer, ChatGPT, in the analytics of his job board. He had the problem himself (AI models were mentioning his site and he could not see when or why), so he built for one known user first and did not run a market survey.

### A product that runs on the models it measures

Each paid plan is a quota of AI answers: one answer is one prompt sent to one model. The archived FAQ says that Promptmonitor sends the customer's questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok and Perplexity, records each mention and its position, and scores the result. The cost of the product grows with the number of answers, which is why the plans are priced by answers, prompts and models.

### From a dashboard to an action

A score alone does not tell a customer what to do. The founder-era site listed the pages that AI answers cite, extracted the authors' email addresses and social accounts, and showed SEO metrics for each page, so the customer could decide "whether to outreach or create better content to outrank them". It also generated an llms.txt file, a plain-text summary of a website for AI models.

### Lower prices, then a sale at the top of the interest

According to the archived pages, the entry price was US$99 a month in July 2025 and US$29 a month from September 2025. Stripe data on TrustMRR lists monthly revenue above US$2,000 in November and December 2025, after the newsletter reported months near US$500. The newsletter reported that he listed the product in January 2026, while interest in AI visibility tools was rising, and sold it in nine days.

## How it was built

These details come from the TrustMRR profile (written by the founder), and from the page source of the founder-era site in the Wayback Machine, July 2025 to January 2026. They are grade C, except the Stripe connection, which TrustMRR verifies.

- Next.js and Node.js, as the TrustMRR profile says ("Built with Next.js and Nodejs"). The archived pages load Next.js files.
- Images and plan icons served from Supabase storage.
- Payments through Stripe: the archived pricing data carries Stripe price IDs, and TrustMRR reads revenue from the Stripe account.
- Crisp for live chat support, and Fathom for website analytics, both loaded by the archived pages.
- An affiliate program with a 30% commission run on PromoteKit, linked from the footer.
- A Google Ads tag and a LinkedIn Insight tag in the page source, which measure visitors from those ad platforms; no source says how much was spent on ads.
- Launched twice on Product Hunt and listed on There's An AI For That, whose badges appear on the founder-era home page.

Sources: [1, 3, 4, 5]

## Who tried this before Promptmonitor, and why did they fail?

Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold brands a measure of their visibility, or of what people said about them, on platforms that they did not own. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.

The failed startups come from Loot Drop (https://www.loot-drop.io/), a free database of dead startups, retold here in our own words; Loot Drop describes its entries as AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so they carry no evidence grade.

### Klout (2008 to 2017; funding US$40M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: A score from 1 to 100 that measured how influential a person or a brand was on social networks.
- Why it died: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram built their own analytics, rivals gave more detail, and changes to the platforms' API access limited the data that Klout could collect.
- Record: https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/280-klout

### Salorix (2009 to 2014; funding US$3.3M; cause: Ran Out of Cash)

- Promise: Machine learning that ranked social media conversations, so brands could see the themes and influencers in their market.
- Why it died: Its investors withdrew their support at the same time as leaner competitors with newer AI methods arrived.
- Record: https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1845-salorix

### SumAll (2011 to 2019; funding US$15M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: One dashboard that collected a small business's data from its social media and marketing platforms.
- Why it died: It could not set itself apart from larger analytics products and free tools, and its price did not match what small businesses thought it was worth, so customers left.
- Record: https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/587-sumall

### Isentium (2012 to 2020; funding US$50M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: Sentiment analysis of social media and news, read by natural language processing, to predict markets for traders.
- Why it died: Social media data was noisy and carried compliance risk, competitors offered broader analytics, and it depended on a few large clients.
- Record: https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/255-isentium

## What changed

All four sold a measure of how a brand appeared on platforms owned by someone else. Klout lost its data when the social networks limited API access and built their own analytics. SumAll could not set itself apart from free tools. Salorix and Isentium needed investor money and large clients. Promptmonitor carries the same platform risk: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic decide what their models answer and can change their terms, their prices or the answers themselves, and large SEO suites sell AI visibility reports too, such as Ahrefs Brand Radar, which the current pricing page compares.

Two things differ. First, Promptmonitor had no investors to satisfy and almost no fixed cost: the archived pages show one founder and off-the-shelf services for hosting, chat, analytics and payments. Second, the founder did not need the business to last for years. The newsletter reported that he sold it seven months after launch, while interest in the category was rising, so the platform risk passed to the buyer, who paid US$85,000 for it, as the newsletter reported.

## Can one person copy Promptmonitor now?

**Verdict: The method, yes. The price, not certain.**

Many founders saw ChatGPT appear in their analytics in 2025, and many AI visibility tools now compete (Product Hunt lists Otterly.AI, Writesonic and MentionBird among the similar products), so a late copy of this product meets a crowded market. The method is open to anyone: read your own analytics for a source you cannot explain, build the tool that you need yourself, price it low enough to collect paying users, and sell while the category is rising. The reported price of US$85,000 rests on one newsletter.

1. Look in your own analytics for traffic that no tool explains, and build the tool that explains it for you first.
2. Ship a first version in weeks and launch it where builders look, such as Product Hunt.
3. Charge from the start, and test lower prices when sales stay flat.
4. Connect a payment-processor revenue profile (such as TrustMRR) before you sell, so a buyer can check the numbers.

**What is still open.** Other places where AI models now decide what people see: AI shopping answers, AI answers inside maps and local search, and the AI crawlers that fetch a site's pages.

## What could go wrong for Promptmonitor?

- **What is not verified.** The sale price of US$85,000, the asking price of US$100,000 and the dates (listed 5 January 2026, sold 14 January 2026) rest on one source: the newsletter AI & No-Code Exits, 10 July 2026, which does not quote the buyer or show a document. The months at about US$500 a month are also only the newsletter's account. A reader could look for TrustMRR's own record of the acquisition, a statement by the buyer, or the founder's own post about the sale.
- **The founded date is older than the product.** TrustMRR gives a founded date of 6 April 2023, about two years before Promptmonitor existed. Part of the US$11,297 of all-time revenue may come from an older product on the same Stripe account. The monthly figures from November 2025 match the period when Promptmonitor was the founder's main product.
- **Claims on the site are much larger than the paying base.** The site claimed 1,450 companies signed up in January 2026 and now claims more than 5,000 marketing teams. Stripe showed 38 active subscriptions in January 2026. Sign-ups to a free report are not customers.
- **The models decide the product's numbers.** Every score depends on answers that OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and others generate, and these answers change from one run to the next. If a provider limits automated queries or raises prices, the cost of each AI answer rises with it.
- **Outreach from extracted contacts.** The product extracts authors' email addresses from cited pages so that customers can pitch them. Sending such email in bulk is regulated in many countries, and the customer, not the tool, is responsible for how it is used.

## Sources

1. TrustMRR markdown profile: Promptmonitor, AI Visibility / GEO Tracker (Stripe-verified revenue, last synced 25 January 2026) — https://trustmrr.com/startup/promptmonitor-ai-visibility-geo-tracker.md (grade A). Read the markdown profile, 25 October 2026. The Verification Sources section (Stripe by API key) is grade A; the description and pricing text are founder-written, grade C.
2. AI & No-Code Exits newsletter, 10 July 2026: Stuck at $500 MRR for Months. Sold for $85,000 in 9 Days. — https://nocodeexits.substack.com/p/stuck-at-500-mrr-for-months-sold (grade D). Read in full (post page and the publication's feed). Retells the founder's account. Only source for the sale price, the asking price and the sale dates.
3. Promptmonitor home page, Wayback Machine copy of 8 July 2025 — https://web.archive.org/web/20250708051917/https://www.promptmonitor.io/ (grade C). Read in full, including the page source. Source for the founder-era features, FAQ, prices, company name and the tools loaded by the page.
4. Promptmonitor home page, Wayback Machine copy of 1 January 2026 — https://web.archive.org/web/20260101064558/https://www.promptmonitor.io/ (grade C). Read in full, including the page source. Source for the prices and sign-up claim in the month of the sale.
5. Product Hunt: Promptmonitor product page — https://www.producthunt.com/products/promptmonitor (grade C). Read the page and its embedded launch data: dates, daily ranks, points and the maker.
6. Promptmonitor pricing page, read 25 October 2026 — https://promptmonitor.io/pricing (grade C). Read in full, with the plan data in the page source. Run by the owner after the sale. Source for the pricing table.
7. Promptmonitor home page, read 25 October 2026 — https://promptmonitor.io/ (grade C). Read in full. Source for the current features and claims, and for the purpose check.
8. Promptmonitor pricing page, Wayback Machine copy of 8 September 2025 — https://web.archive.org/web/20250908031137/https://www.promptmonitor.io/pricing (grade C). Read the price section.
9. Promptmonitor pricing page, Wayback Machine copy of 25 October 2025 — https://web.archive.org/web/20251025112639/https://www.promptmonitor.io/pricing (grade C). Read the price section.
10. Promptmonitor terms of service, Wayback Machine copy of 24 December 2025 — https://web.archive.org/web/20251224190014/https://promptmonitor.io/terms-of-service (grade C). Read the sections that name the company and the update date.
11. Promptmonitor terms of service, Wayback Machine copy of 15 May 2026 — https://web.archive.org/web/20260515130900/https://promptmonitor.io/terms-of-service (grade C). Read the sections that name the company and the update date. The live page of 25 October 2026 names the same company.
12. Promptmonitor changelog — https://updates.promptmonitor.io/changelog (grade C). Read in full, 25 October 2026. Shows the releases of March 2026.
13. Promptmonitor home page, Wayback Machine copy of 8 February 2026 — https://web.archive.org/web/20260208012547/https://promptmonitor.io/ (grade C). Read the price section and footer. The footer still names Bootstrapped LLC and links to Remote3.
14. Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups — https://www.loot-drop.io/ (grade C). Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.