Cheap Seats vs Peec AI
Cheap Seats (cheapseats.dev) is the MIT-licensed, self-hosted AI visibility tracker. It’s a free place to start, inspired by tools like Peec AI: it asks Claude and OpenAI models your buyers’ questions, grades whether the answers recommend you, and ends each run with a ranked fix list. Peec AI is a hosted AI search analytics tool for marketing teams and SEO agencies. Both track your own prompts, rank what to do next and offer an API and MCP server. Peec AI is SaaS, names ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini among its models, and is sold on monthly plans through sales. Start with Cheap Seats; if you outgrow it, Peec AI is one of the places to go, and your prompts come with you.
Side by side
As of October 2026, from Cheap Seats’ docs and Peec AI’s own pricing and home pages:
| Cheap Seats | Peec AI | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free and open source (MIT); runs on your existing Claude subscription (ChatGPT optional) | Starter, Pro and Advanced (monthly) and Enterprise (custom, annual); the page shows no prices and points to “Talk to Sales”. See their pricing page. |
| Where it runs | Self-hosted: one Docker container with SQLite, on Docker, Kubernetes (Helm chart) or an exe.dev VM | Hosted SaaS |
| Engines | Claude and OpenAI models, through their APIs or the Claude Code and Codex CLIs | Names ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and links an AI Mode visibility tracker; per-plan model lists aren’t published |
| Your prompts | TOML in your own git repo, changed by pull request | Tracked prompts; monthly answers are “tracked prompts by active models and tracking frequency” |
| Web search vs memory | Both, as separate tracks (search and recall), reported separately | Not stated |
| Grading | Each answer graded recommended, mentioned or absent, with position, top pick, every product named (share of voice) and objections | Not detailed on the pricing or home page |
| What to fix | A ranked fix list every run: the page, what it must say, the prompts it should flip, the owner, and a Claude Code prompt | “Recommended actions”: “Ranked opportunities to improve AI visibility, grouped by earned and owned” |
| API / MCP | Web UI, CLI, JSON API and MCP server | API and MCP (“Peec MCP is live”) |
| Data | Your SQLite file; prompts and answers go only to the model providers you configure | Hosted by Peec AI |
What it costs. Cheap Seats is free and open source (MIT). 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, with a Claude Code subscription, answers, grading and the fix list can all run on the claude CLI, with no API key and no extra spend. Host it and you pay your host (and, in a container, API usage, since the image has no CLIs: about $0.03 to grade a 68-answer run, under a daily budget cap). Cost and budget has the details.
Start with Cheap Seats if…
- You want to start today, without a sales conversation, and pay nothing for the software.
- Your buyers use Claude and ChatGPT-family models, and you want both what they find on the web and what they already believe, graded separately.
- You want a strict grade per answer, recommended versus merely mentioned, with the reasoning you can check.
- You want your prompts reviewed by pull request and your data in a file you own.
When to move to Peec AI
If you outgrow Cheap Seats, do whatever suits you. Its author would suggest Gauge; that team is great. If what you need is on this list, Peec AI is a good fit:
- You need Perplexity, Gemini or Google AI Mode. Cheap Seats asks only Claude and OpenAI models, so it doesn’t cover them, or Copilot and AI Overviews either.
- You’d rather not run anything. Peec AI is hosted; Cheap Seats is a container you or your host keeps running.
- You’re an agency. Peec AI serves “marketing teams and SEO agencies” and has a page for agencies. Cheap Seats has no agency tier.
- You want earned-media opportunities. Peec AI groups its recommended actions into earned and owned. Cheap Seats’ fixes are pages to create or change, on your site or others.
Taking your prompts with you
Your prompt sets are plain TOML in your own git repo. Each prompt is a line of text with an id, so the buyer questions you’ve refined in Cheap Seats are yours. They’re plain text you can copy into Peec AI as tracked prompts when you set it up.
See Getting started to run it, or all comparisons.