Agency Plan or Brand Plan in 2026: How We Decide Which Promptwatch Plan a Client Runs On
A decision guide for agencies: when a client lives in the Promptwatch agency workspace, when it needs its own Business or Professional plan, and how seats, roles, and audit logs change the answer.
Most of our clients live in our agency workspace. A few hold their own Promptwatch plan and invite us in. For a long time we treated that as a billing question. It isn't anymore. The plan lineup listed in Promptwatch's llms.txt on 21 October 2026 splits features between the agency tiers and the brand tiers in a way that decides what we can actually deliver for a given client.
So we now make the call at onboarding, client by client, with a short set of questions. Here's the guide we use.
What the agency workspace gives a client
The three self-serve agency plans are Kick-off ($199 a month), Growth ($399), and Scale ($799). All of them include:
- Unlimited projects, pitch projects, and prompts, plus 10 team seats.
- All AI models and Agent Chat, with 1,000, 2,500, or 6,500 Agent Credits a month depending on the tier.
- Country, state, and city tracking, and Ads Radar for sponsored placements in ChatGPT Search, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode.
- Crawler logs, visitor analytics, content gap analysis, the site audit, custom reports, Data Studio, and MCP plus API access.
What scales between tiers is the shared pool. Kick-off has 10,000 responses, 500K visitor events, and 10M crawler logs. Growth has 25,000 responses, 2M visitor events, and 25M crawler logs. Scale has 65,000 responses, 15M visitor events, 100M crawler logs, and audit logs.
For a typical B2B or local client, that's everything we need to track, diagnose, and report. City tracking and Ads Radar on every client is the part that surprises people, because on the brand side both start at Business.
What it doesn't give a client
Three things are not on the agency plans, and we're explicit about them in proposals.
The automated Content Agent isn't there. That's the pipeline that plans, writes, and publishes on a schedule, with a publishing calendar, monthly budget, publish windows, and a review inbox. It's listed for Business and Enterprise only. AEO articles aren't included on agency plans either, and neither is Shopping Insights, which covers ChatGPT shopping carousels and Alexa product results.
The knowledge base is also listed on Professional and Business but not on the agency tiers.
None of that stops us doing content work in the agency workspace. Content gap analysis tells us what to write, our team writes it, and WordPress publishing is available to every organization. What's missing is the automation and the included article allowance.
The brand plans, side by side
| Essential | Professional | Business | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price per month | $95 | $245 | $579 |
| Projects / seats | 1 / 1 | 2 / 2 | 5 / 5 |
| Prompts / responses | 50 / 6,000 | 150 / 18,000 | 350 / 42,000 |
| Location tracking | Country | Country | Country, state, city |
| AEO articles per month | Not listed | 5 | 10 |
| Automated Content Agent | No | No | Yes |
| Shopping Insights and Ads Radar | No | No | Yes |
| Crawler logs | Not listed | 25M | 100M |
| Audit logs | No | No | Yes |
Professional is the one people misread. It has more responses than Kick-off and 5 AEO articles, but it's country-level only, with no Ads Radar and no Shopping Insights.
The questions we ask
We work through these in order. The first yes usually settles it.
Does the client sell products that AI shopping results could show? If an ecommerce client needs to know whether its products appear in ChatGPT shopping carousels, that's Shopping Insights, and Shopping Insights means Business. Running that client in our workspace would leave out the one report they care about most.
Does the client want publishing on a schedule without us drafting each piece? Some in-house teams want the Content Agent filling a calendar while their editors approve from the review inbox. That needs Business, or Enterprise if they also want managed content workflows. One caveat for Framer sites: there's no per-item publish, so going live redeploys the whole Framer site. We check the client's release process before we promise anything scheduled.
Who should own the data and the bill? Some clients want the account, history, and invoices in their own name, often because procurement or an agency change is on the horizon. Then they hold a brand plan and invite us as editors with access to their project. We don't know of a documented way to move a project's history between organizations, so we settle ownership at onboarding rather than mid-engagement.
Does the client need city tracking or Ads Radar and nothing else from Business? Then the agency workspace is the cheaper home by a distance. A regional services client gets city-level results and sponsored-placement capture on our plan without anyone paying $579 a month for it. We covered the per-client arithmetic in how we price a GEO retainer.
Is it a country-level client with modest content needs? Agency workspace, almost always. We'd only steer them to Professional if they specifically want their own account and the 5 included AEO articles.
Does the client need SSO, custom prompt and crawler volume, or a dedicated success manager? That's an Enterprise conversation, and we bring Promptwatch's team into it.
Seats, roles, and audit logs
Seat count catches agencies out. The agency plans include 10 team seats for the whole workspace, not per client. We plan those for our own team first and give client logins sparingly. Most clients are better served by a scheduled PDF report carrying our white-label branding than by a login they'll use twice. Promptwatch also lists a white-label workspace and client portal for agencies, without naming a plan, so we confirm what's included before promising a portal to a client.
Where a client does get a login, roles keep it contained. Promptwatch has owner, editor, and viewer roles with project-level access, so a client viewer sees their own project and nothing else in the workspace. For clients who build their own dashboards, a scoped API key does the same job for data: project-level and read-only, feeding their Looker Studio without exposing other projects.
Audit logs are the question that sends some clients to their own plan. The audit log shows who changed what across the team, API keys, and Agent Chat, and only owners can see it. It's listed on Business, Agency Scale, and Enterprise. If a regulated client's compliance team asks who edited a prompt set last quarter, Kick-off and Growth can't answer that from the product. Scale can, and so can the client's own Business plan.
How it usually shakes out
For our roster, the pattern is simple. Service businesses, B2B companies, and regional clients live in the agency workspace, where city tracking, Ads Radar, crawler logs, and visitor analytics come with every project. Ecommerce clients and teams that want scheduled publishing hold their own Business plan, and we work inside it. Large organizations with SSO and procurement requirements go to Enterprise.
What we avoid is deciding by price alone. A client parked on the cheapest option that leaves out Shopping Insights or the Content Agent ends up with a program that can't answer its main question.
Whichever plan a client lands on, the work runs on the same Promptwatch project structure: prompt tracking with personas and locations, citation analytics, and Agent Analytics crawler logs tying each page's crawls to its citations. That's why we can mix agency-workspace clients and brand-plan clients on one team without changing how we report. If you're unsure which setup fits your brand, write to hello@1001seomedia.com and tell us what you sell and where.