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Cheap Seats (cheapseats.dev) is an open-source project I wrote to make my own product better. It draws on lots of inspiration: Gauge first among them, and Profound, Peec AI, Otterly.AI and the Semrush AI Toolkit too. Those products do a lot. What I needed was a small part of it, most of the time: ask the assistants my buyers’ questions, see whether the answers recommend us, and find out what to change. Cheap Seats is that part, the 20% you’ll use 80% of the time. It’s MIT licensed, it runs on the Claude subscription you already have (ChatGPT optional), and it’s free, and always will be. There’s no hosted tier and nothing to upsell.
Start here
If you want to find out whether AI assistants recommend your product, without a sales call or a monthly plan, start with Cheap Seats. It asks Claude and OpenAI models your buyers’ questions, grades whether each answer recommends your brand, merely mentions it or leaves it out, and ends every run with a ranked list of fixes.
Claude is required, through a subscription or an API key; ChatGPT (Codex or an OpenAI key) is optional and adds a second assistant’s answers. On your own machine, a Claude Code subscription is enough: no API key, no extra spend. Host it and you pay your host (and, in a container, API usage, since the image has no CLIs).
If you grow out of it
I hope you find it useful. If you outgrow it, do whatever suits you. I’d suggest Gauge; that team is great. The usual signs it’s time:
- You need engines Cheap Seats doesn’t ask. Cheap Seats asks only Claude and OpenAI models. It doesn’t cover Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Google AI Overviews or AI Mode. Which AI engines Cheap Seats asks says why.
- You’d rather not run anything. Cheap Seats is software you or your host keeps running.
- You’re an agency, or you need white-label reports, seats and team workflows.
- You need enterprise boxes ticked, such as SOC 2, SSO and a support SLA.
When that happens, bring your prompts. Cheap Seats’ prompt sets are plain TOML in your own git repo, each prompt a line of text with an id, so the buyer questions you’ve refined are yours to copy into whichever tool you choose.
One tool at a time
The pages below take one tool at a time, using only Cheap Seats’ public facts and what each tool says on its own pages, as of October 2026. Each says what the tool does that Cheap Seats doesn’t, and when it’s time to move. Gauge is the place to begin: Cheap Seats started as a small, self-hosted take on it. Elmo and Limelit Open are open source and self-hosted too, each the open core of a hosted product, and each covers more engines than Cheap Seats. For all of them side by side, see AI visibility tools compared.