AI Summary
About
Frase is an agentic SEO and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) platform that researches, writes, optimizes, and tracks content so it ranks on Google and gets cited by AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. The product centers on the “Frase Agent” — a single AI assistant that handles SERP research, content briefs, on-page optimization, site audits, publishing, and AI-visibility tracking through one workflow, positioning Frase as a consolidation play against point tools like Surfer SEO, Clearscope, MarketMuse, Semrush, and Ahrefs.
Frase serves solo content creators, in-house content and SEO teams, agencies, and enterprise marketing organizations. The vendor cites “thousands of teams,” a 4.8-star G2 rating, and reference customers including Andela, ActiveCampaign, Coursera, GitLab, Oracle, Thomson Reuters, and Under Armour. Founded in 2017 by Tomas Ratia (CEO) and Cody Jacques (CTO), Frase is a small, largely bootstrapped company — it raised roughly $947K in 2018 and, per GetLatka, reached about $1.8M ARR with around 16 employees by 2025. Revenue and headcount are not disclosed on its own pricing or enterprise pages.
Frase’s corporate history is unusual for an SEO tool: in October 2022, AI-writing company Copysmith announced it had acquired both Frase and Rytr, bundling the three products under a “Copyrytr” umbrella while letting each keep its own brand. Through that period Frase continued shipping independent pricing changes, and the product is still marketed under the Frase name today.
Positioning has shifted with the rise of AI search: Frase now markets AI-visibility tracking — monitoring how often a brand’s content is cited across leading AI engines — as a first-class capability bundled into every plan, alongside traditional SEO optimization. This GEO angle is the company’s primary differentiation against legacy content-optimization tools.
Pricing summary : How Frase’s tiered subscription with seat and volume add-ons works
Frase uses a tiered subscription model layered with per-seat and volume add-ons. The bill is built from three dimensions:
- Plan tier (flat platform fee): Starter $49/mo, Professional $129/mo, Scale $299/mo, or a custom Enterprise quote. Annual billing cuts each self-serve tier by 20% (Starter $39, Professional $103, Scale $239 per month).
- Seats: Each tier includes a fixed seat count (1 / 3 / 5 on Starter / Professional / Scale). Additional seats are a flat $29/seat per month add-on.
- Metered volume allotments: Each tier caps AI-optimized articles (10 / 40 / 100 per month), audit pages (50 / 250 / 1,000 per month), and AI-visibility prompts (50 / 200 / 500 per month). When a cap is hit, customers buy add-on packs of articles, audit pages, or visibility prompts without changing plans.
What makes this different: Every plan — including the cheapest Starter — unlocks the full feature set (AI Agent, GEO optimization, AI-visibility tracking, site audits, API & MCP). Tiers gate volume and team size, not capability, so buyers choose a plan by throughput rather than by which features they unlock. There is no free tier; the on-ramp is a 7-day free trial with no credit card.
Pricing by product
Frase platform (self-serve plans)
| Tier | Price (monthly / annual) | Included | Key mechanics |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $49 /mo · $39 /mo billed annually | 1 seat, 10 AI-optimized articles/mo, 50 audit pages/mo, 1 domain, 50 visibility prompts/mo, 1 brand voice, API & MCP | For solo creators; cheapest entry, no free tier |
| Professional | $129 /mo · $103 /mo billed annually | 3 seats, 40 articles/mo, 250 audit pages/mo, 5 domains, 200 visibility prompts/mo, 5 brand voices, 25 reference docs | ”Most teams start here” — featured tier |
| Scale | $299 /mo · $239 /mo billed annually | 5 seats, 100 articles/mo, 1,000 audit pages/mo, 10 domains, 500 visibility prompts/mo, multi-channel + data exports | For agencies and high-volume teams |
| Enterprise | Custom | Everything in Scale plus SSO/SAML, white-label portal, dedicated account manager, custom SLA, SOC 2 Type II, 8 AI platforms tracked, volume pricing | Sales-led; quoted on team size, volume, and support |
Add-ons (apply to any paid plan)
| Add-on | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Additional seats | $29 /seat /mo | Beyond the 1 / 3 / 5 included on Starter / Professional / Scale |
| Additional articles | Add-on pack (rate not publicly listed) | Bought from the dashboard when the monthly article cap is reached, no plan change |
| Additional audit pages | Add-on pack (rate not publicly listed) | Tops up the 50 / 250 / 1,000 monthly audit-page allotment |
| Additional visibility prompts | Add-on pack (rate not publicly listed) | Tops up the 50 / 200 / 500 monthly AI-visibility prompt allotment |
Sales motions across products: PLG / self-serve for Starter, Professional, and Scale (sign up online, 7-day trial, add-ons self-served from the dashboard); sales-led for Enterprise.
Hidden costs : what Frase teams actually pay once seats and volume add-ons stack
The advertised tier headline understates what a growing team actually pays, because seats above the included count and volume overages are billed separately — a quieter version of the bill-shock dynamics that hit AI products when usage outruns the base plan.
A 6-person content team on Professional (annual)
| Line item | Monthly cost |
|---|---|
| Professional plan (3 seats included, annual) | $103 |
| 3 additional seats (@ $29/seat) | $87 |
| Additional articles + audit-page add-ons | varies |
| Base monthly total (before volume add-ons) | $190+ |
A team that doubles the included headcount nearly doubles its Professional base before buying any extra articles or audit pages — so seats, not the plan fee, often drive the bill at team scale.
Want to estimate your own Frase bill? Use the Frase pricing calculator to model your monthly cost based on plan tier, seats, articles, and audit pages.
Pricing evolution : from content-optimization tool to agentic GEO platform
Frase has rebuilt its packaging roughly once a year, and — unusually — has changed its value metric four times in five years: document credits → articles → search queries → SEO/research documents → today’s bundle of articles, audit pages, and visibility prompts. The throughline is a small, bootstrapped team chasing whatever unit best matched the product of the moment, from a 2020 dual-product (content + on-site Answer Engine) tool to a 2026 agentic SEO and GEO platform.
Cadence
| Quarter | Price changes | Product / SKU additions | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 Q4 | 0 | 0 | Earliest archive: two products — Frase Content (Basic $44.99 / Growth $114.99) and Answer Engine ($199.99, 500 answers/mo). Value metric is the document credit. |
| 2022 Q1 | 1 | 1 | Answer Engine pulled from the main page; Solo $19.99 tier added; SEO Add-On holds at $35/mo. Brackets the Oct 2022 Copysmith acquisition. |
| 2023 Q1 | 1 | 0 | Metering flips from document credits to “Articles/month”; Solo cut $19.99 → $14.99; SEO Add-On renamed the Pro Add-On ($35/mo). |
| 2024 Q2 | 1 | 2 | $0 Free Trial plan added; metric changes again to “search queries/mo”; API Add-on launches at “from $50/mo”; prices rounded (Solo $15 / Basic $45 / Team $115). |
| 2025 Q1 | 0 | 1 | Solo tier removed; first true Enterprise plan added (Book a Demo); metric relabeled “SEO documents”; API Add-on drops to $40/mo. |
| 2025 Q1 | 0 | 1 | Pay-as-you-go “Rank-Ready AI Documents” launches at $3.50/doc (volume ladder to $1.67/doc) — Frase’s first true per-unit usage pricing; standalone Pro Add-on folded in. |
| 2026 Q2 | 1 | 1 | Full GEO repackaging: Starter $49 / Professional $129 / Scale $299 (20% off annual), +$29/seat, metered visibility prompts and audit pages; every plan ships the full AI Agent. |
Tracked range: 2020-11 to 2026-06. Snapshots between 2025-03 and 2026-06 rendered as JS skeletons in Wayback, so the exact month of the GEO repackaging is unknown; quarters not listed were verified stable across the readable snapshots.
Notable changes
- 2022-10 — Copysmith announced the acquisition of Frase and Rytr, forming the “Copyrytr” multi-product group (PR Newswire, 2022-10-06).
- 2023-01 — Value metric changed from document credits to articles; Solo cut to $14.99/mo; the $35/mo SEO Add-On was renamed the Pro Add-On (Wayback 2023-01).
- 2024-04 — A $0 Free Trial plan and a new API Add-on (“from $50/mo”) were added; the value metric became search queries (Wayback 2024-04-07).
- 2025-03 — Pay-as-you-go “Rank-Ready AI Documents” launched at $3.50/doc with a volume ladder down to $1.67/doc — the first genuinely per-unit usage meter in Frase’s history (Wayback 2025-03-21).
- 2026 — Repackaged into Starter / Professional / Scale / Enterprise with metered AI-visibility prompts and audit pages, marking the pivot from a content-optimization tool to an agentic SEO + GEO platform (live page, 2026-06-07).
The metric-churn pattern in detail
Frase is a textbook case of a small team repeatedly re-choosing its usage metric as the product changed underneath it. The unit moved from document credits (2020–2022) to articles (2023) to search queries (2024) to SEO/research documents (2025) before landing on today’s three parallel meters — articles, audit pages, and visibility prompts — in 2026. The most consequential single step was March 2025’s $3.50/doc pay-as-you-go option, which briefly exposed customers to pure per-unit billing before the 2026 repackaging reabsorbed that volatility into capped, add-on-topped tiers. The arc shows both the upside and the cost of metric churn: each change tracked the product more honestly, but four renamings of “what you pay for” in five years is exactly the kind of value-metric instability that makes a tool harder to budget and to compare against steadier rivals like Surfer SEO and Clearscope.
The loudest external signal in Frase’s history is corporate, not community: Copysmith’s October 2022 acquisition of Frase and Rytr drew coverage from PR Newswire and several trade outlets but no notable Hacker News or large-subreddit discussion. A search of Hacker News returned no stories about frase.io (all “frase” hits referred to people named Fraser), and Reddit threads were small and scattered across r/SEO and content-marketing communities — so the pricing changes above were quiet packaging decisions, not publicly contested moves.
What’s unique : capability-flat tiers and metered AI-search visibility
1. Every plan ships the full feature set. Frase gates volume and team size, not capabilities — even Starter includes the full AI Agent, GEO optimization, AI-visibility tracking, site audits, and API & MCP access. Buyers pick a plan by throughput, not by which features unlock.
2. AI-search visibility is itself a metered dimension. Plans cap “visibility prompts/month” (50 / 200 / 500) and the number of AI platforms tracked (2 / 3 / 5 / 8 — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and more), making GEO monitoring a first-class billed unit rather than a bolt-on.
3. Add-ons absorb overage without forcing an upgrade. Articles, audit pages, visibility prompts, and seats are all top-uppable from the dashboard in one click, and Frase explicitly alerts customers when upgrading a tier is cheaper than stacking add-ons.
Strengths & weaknesses
| Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|---|
| Transparent, public self-serve pricing for three tiers | No free tier — entry requires a $49/mo paid plan |
| Capability-flat plans (every feature in every tier) simplify choice | Add-on per-unit rates (articles, audit pages, prompts) not publicly listed |
| Flat, predictable $29/seat add-on is easy to budget | Seats above the included count can quickly outweigh the plan fee |
| Add-ons avoid forced tier upgrades and bill shock | Volume caps (articles, audit pages) make heavy use lumpy and add-on-driven |
| AI-visibility tracking bundled into every plan differentiates on GEO | Enterprise pricing fully gated — no published floor |
Billing UX : self-serve add-ons, instant pro-rated plan changes
- Monthly / Annual toggle — a pricing-page switch flips all tiers between monthly and annual (20% off) pricing, with each card showing the annual per-month rate and the yearly savings ($120 / $312 / $720).
- Dashboard add-on purchase — additional articles, audit pages, and visibility prompts are bought directly from the dashboard in one click, with no plan change required and no service interruption.
- Per-seat add-on — extra seats beyond the included count are added at a flat $29/seat from account settings.
- Add-on vs. upgrade alerts — Frase notifies customers when upgrading to a higher tier is more cost-effective than continuing to buy add-ons.
- Pro-rated plan changes — upgrades, downgrades, and add-on adjustments take effect immediately with pro-rated billing, changeable anytime from account settings.
- 7-day free trial, no credit card — every plan starts with a full-access trial that requires no card up front.
Strategic wins : packaging decisions that reduce buyer friction
1. Capability-flat tiers turn the buying decision into a volume question
By shipping every feature in every plan, Frase removes the “which tier unlocks X?” friction that plagues feature-gated SaaS. Buyers compare throughput numbers instead of feature checklists, which shortens evaluation — a pattern worth studying alongside usage-based packaging fundamentals.
2. Flat $29/seat add-on keeps team expansion predictable
A single, flat seat price across all paid plans makes headcount growth easy to forecast and removes the per-tier seat-price confusion common in seat-plus-usage models and broader usage-based SaaS and AI pricing structures.
3. Metering AI-search visibility productizes the GEO trend
By making “visibility prompts” and “AI platforms tracked” billed dimensions, Frase converts the emerging demand for AI-search monitoring into recurring, expandable revenue rather than a free differentiator — a sharp example of choosing the right usage metric aligned to a new buyer need, and a direct response to the value-metric problem in AI pricing.
Areas to improve : pricing transparency gaps to close
1. Publish add-on per-unit rates
The pricing page promises article, audit-page, and visibility-prompt add-ons but does not list their per-unit prices, leaving prospects unable to model overage cost. Publishing these rates (even as “from $X per pack”) would let buyers self-qualify and reduce sales friction.
2. Reconsider the absence of a free tier
With no free plan, Frase’s only on-ramp is a 7-day trial — short relative to the time SEO results take to materialize. A capped freemium tier or longer trial could widen the product-led funnel against free-to-start competitors.
3. Surface an Enterprise price floor
Enterprise is entirely “talk to sales.” A published starting band would help larger buyers self-qualify before committing to a demo.
4. Stabilize the value metric
Frase has changed what it charges for four times since 2020 — document credits, articles, search queries, and now articles/audit-pages/visibility-prompts (see the Pricing evolution chronology). Each change tracked the product, but frequent metric churn erodes the muscle memory buyers build around budgeting and makes year-over-year comparison hard. Committing to the current trio of meters for several cycles — and grandfathering existing customers cleanly when it must change — would convert a history of churn into a credibility asset, the kind of discipline that underpins durable usage-based SaaS and AI pricing.
Key takeaways
- Capability-flat tiers simplify the buy. Putting every feature in every plan and differentiating only on volume turns tier selection into a throughput comparison, shortening evaluation.
- Flat seat add-ons beat per-tier seat pricing for predictability. A single $29/seat rate across plans makes team-growth cost trivial to forecast.
- You can meter an emerging trend. Frase turned AI-search visibility into billed “visibility prompts,” converting a differentiator into expandable revenue.
- Add-ons reduce bill shock — but only if rates are visible. Self-serve top-ups avoid forced upgrades, yet unpublished per-unit prices undercut the transparency benefit.
- No free tier raises the bar on trial conversion. Without freemium, the 7-day trial must do all the qualifying work, so trial-to-paid mechanics matter disproportionately.
UBP implications
- Capped allotments with add-ons are a soft form of usage-based pricing. Frase shows how to get usage-aligned revenue (more articles, more pages, more prompts cost more) without exposing customers to pure per-unit metering and its budgeting anxiety.
- New AI-search behaviors create new value metrics. “Visibility prompts” and “AI platforms tracked” are net-new units born from GEO — evidence that usage-based pricing keeps generating fresh meters as buyer workflows change.
- Transparency is the cost of the add-on model. An overage-and-add-on structure only delivers its predictability promise if the per-unit rates are public; hiding them reintroduces exactly the uncertainty UBP is meant to remove.
Sources
- Frase pricing page (accessed 2026-06-07)
- Frase for Enterprises (accessed 2026-06-07)
- Frase blog (accessed 2026-06-07)
Bottom line
Frase prices itself as a capability-flat, volume-tiered SEO and GEO platform: $49 / $129 / $299 a month (20% off annual) buys the same full AI Agent at three throughput levels, with a flat $29/seat add-on and dashboard top-ups for articles, audit pages, and visibility prompts. The model is clean and predictable where it counts — but the unpublished add-on rates and absent free tier are the two seams a sharper pricing page would close.
Want to compare Frase against other content and marketing pricing? Browse the pricing blueprint.
Pricing timeline : Major events on a vertical axis
Each milestone below corresponds to a public pricing change, product launch, or material adjustment. Major events use a filled marker; minor adjustments use a faded one.
GEO repackaging: Starter/Professional/Scale/Enterprise with metered AI-visibility
Frase repackaged into three self-serve tiers — Starter $49, Professional $129, Scale $299/mo (20% off on annual: $39/$103/$239) — plus a sales-led Enterprise plan. Every tier bundles the full AI Agent, AI-visibility tracking, site audits, and API/MCP; tiers scale volume (AI-optimized articles 10/40/100, audit pages 50/250/1,000, visibility prompts 50/200/500, domains, seats). Extra seats are a flat $29/seat; articles, audit pages, and visibility prompts are dashboard add-ons. The exact 2025→2026 transition month is not preserved in Wayback (snapshots after 2025-03 rendered as JS skeletons).
Pay-as-you-go 'Rank-Ready AI Documents' at $3.50/doc — first true per-unit usage pricing
By Mar 2025 Frase added genuine usage-based pricing: 'Rank-Ready AI Documents' billed pay-as-you-go from $3.50/doc with a volume-discount ladder ($3.50 → $2.75 at 5 → $2.00 at 20 → $1.67 at 30, custom above), no subscription required. Plans were Basic $45 / Team $115 / Enterprise (Custom); the standalone Pro Add-on dropped out, folded into the per-document model. Source: Wayback snapshot 2025-03-21.
Solo tier removed; Enterprise plan added; metering becomes 'SEO documents'
By Jan 2025 the Solo tier was gone, leaving Free Trial $0 / Basic $45 / Team $115 plus a sales-led Enterprise plan (Book a Demo) — the first appearance of a true Enterprise tier on the main page. Metering was relabeled 'SEO documents/mo' (30 / unlimited) with unlimited AI words and per-site page tracking. Pro Add-on $35, API Add-on $40. Source: Wayback snapshot 2025-01.
Free Trial $0 plan added; metering shifts to search queries; API Add-on appears
By Apr 2024 a $0 'Free Trial' plan (1 user, 1 search query, no credit card) became the on-ramp, prices were rounded (Solo $15 / Basic $45 / Team $115; annual $12/$38/$97), and the value metric changed again to 'search queries/mo' (10 / 30 / unlimited). A new API Add-on appeared at 'starts at $50/mo'; the Pro Add-on held at $35/mo. Source: Wayback snapshot 2024-04-07.
Metering shifts from document credits to articles; SEO Add-On renamed Pro Add-On; Solo cut to $14.99
By Jan 2023 the value metric flipped from 'document credits' to 'Write + Optimize N Articles/month' (Solo 4 / Basic 30 / Team unlimited) plus an AI-words cap (4,000/mo). Solo dropped from $19.99 to $14.99/mo ($12.66 annual). The $35/mo SEO Add-On was renamed the Pro Add-On and rebundled around the AI Writer. Source: Wayback snapshot 2023-01.
Answer Engine dropped from main pricing; Solo $19.99 tier added
By Feb 2022 the Answer Engine / Frase Answers product was no longer on the main pricing page (moved to a sales demo), leaving a content-only ladder: Solo $19.99/mo (7 document credits), Basic $44.99/mo (30 credits), Team $114.99/mo (unlimited, 3 seats at $25/extra). The SEO Add-On stayed $35/mo. This snapshot brackets the Oct 2022 Copysmith acquisition that formed 'Copyrytr.' Source: Wayback snapshot 2022-02-15.
Document credits + Answer Engine (two products)
Earliest archived Frase pricing ran two product lines side by side. Frase Content (the SEO optimizer) priced Basic $44.99/mo (30 documents/mo, 1 user) and Growth/Team $114.99/mo (unlimited documents, 3 users at $25/extra), while Answer Engine added a $199.99/mo tier with 500 answers/mo ($50 per extra 100 answers) for on-site question answering. Value metric was the document credit. Source: Wayback snapshot 2020-11-01.
- · Frase has no free tier — entry is a paid Starter plan at $49/mo (every plan offers a 7-day free trial with no credit card instead).
- · Every Frase plan, including the cheapest Starter, includes full AI Agent access, API & MCP access, and AI-visibility tracking — plans differ only in volume and team features, not capabilities.
- · Frase meters AI-search visibility itself: plans cap 'visibility prompts/month' (50 / 200 / 500) and the number of AI platforms tracked (2 / 3 / 5 / 8) across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini.
Questions & answers
- How much does Frase cost?
- Frase has three self-serve plans billed monthly: Starter $49, Professional $129, and Scale $299. Annual billing saves 20%, making them $39, $103, and $239 per month. Enterprise pricing is custom.
- Does Frase have a free plan?
- No. Frase does not offer a free tier. The lowest paid plan is Starter at $49/mo, but every plan includes a 7-day free trial with full feature access and no credit card required.
- How much are extra seats on Frase?
- Additional seats cost $29/seat per month. Starter includes 1 seat, Professional includes 3, and Scale includes 5; any seats beyond those are billed at the $29/seat add-on rate.
- What happens if I exceed my Frase plan limits?
- You can buy add-ons anytime — additional articles, audit pages, or visibility prompts — with no service interruption and no plan change required. Frase alerts you when upgrading is more cost-effective than buying add-ons.
- How much does Frase save with annual billing?
- Annual billing saves 20% on all plans — $120/year on Starter, $312/year on Professional, and $720/year on Scale.
- What is included in every Frase plan?
- Every plan, including Starter, includes full Frase AI Agent access, SEO + GEO content optimization, AI-visibility tracking, site audits, SERP research, brand voice profiles, and API & MCP access. Plans differ in volume and team features, not capabilities.