Lettertrace vs GetCito (2026): two free open-source trackers, and who ends up doing the work
Lettertrace and GetCito both offer MIT-licensed free trackers where you pay the model APIs. GetCito sells a human GEO team from $599/mo. Lettertrace sells nothing.
Lettertrace and GetCito share an unusual starting point: both give away an MIT-licensed AI visibility tracker that runs on your own API keys. After that they split. Lettertrace is only software, free hosted or self-hosted, with an API, an MCP server and a CLI. GetCito's free tier is a thin on-ramp to its real product, a $599-a-month retainer where humans write your pages.
So the honest one-line difference: with Lettertrace, nobody does the work but you. With GetCito, people do it, at agency prices.
Side by side
Lettertrace details were read on lettertrace.com and its GitHub README on 20 October 2026. GetCito details come from our catalog entry, based on getcito.com/pricing fetched on 16 August 2026.
| Lettertrace | GetCito | Promptwatch | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free option | Hosted and self-hosted, MIT; you pay model APIs | Self-host, MIT; you pay model APIs | Explore: 10 prompts, ChatGPT only |
| Paid plans | None | Growth $599/mo, Scale $999/mo, Enterprise custom | Essential $95/mo, Professional $245/mo, Business $579/mo |
| Engines on free | Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity Sonar, a Gemini-based AI Overviews approximation | ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews | ChatGPT on Explore |
| Engines on paid | Not applicable | 4 on Growth; Claude, Copilot, AI Mode, DeepSeek, Meta AI on Enterprise | ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, Llama, DeepSeek, Mistral, Copilot, AI Overviews, AI Mode |
| Refresh | Daily, weekly or custom via cron | Weekly on self-host; daily on Growth | Daily on paid plans |
| How it reads answers | Provider APIs | Not published for self-host | Real UI monitoring plus APIs |
| Who does the fixing | You | Humans on paid plans: writer, strategist, developer, community manager | Content Agents, with your review |
| API / MCP | REST API, MCP server, CLI | Not published | MCP and REST API on paid plans |
| AI crawler logs | No | Not published | Agent Analytics |
| Conversions from AI traffic | No | Not published | Visitor analytics with conversions |
How Lettertrace works
Lettertrace comes from The Letter Company. You add topics, it generates natural prompt variations, and it runs them with your own keys against Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity Sonar or what it calls Google AI Overviews. Brand and competitor mentions are found by word-boundary matching. A second LLM call classifies sentiment and whether you were recommended. You get visibility, share of voice, prominence and sentiment per run, trended over time, plus the sources cited when web search is on. You can map a prompt to a target URL and see whether your page is the one getting cited.
For a developer it's a nice package: a REST v1 API, an MCP server, a CLI on npm that signs in with OAuth 2.1, a Docker image, team seats, and API keys encrypted with AES-256-GCM. Self-hosting runs on Next.js and Supabase via Docker or Vercel. The founder's Product Hunt post puts typical spend at "maybe $3," which is his estimate rather than a measured figure.
The README is more candid than most paid vendors. It explains why Gemini, AI Overviews and Perplexity need their own keys (their grounding doesn't survive a router) and that its "AI Overviews" is a Gemini call with Lettertrace's own forced-search system prompt. In plain terms, that figure is a simulation, not the Overview shown on a Google results page. All answers come from APIs, not the apps people use.
It's also young. The GitHub repository was created on 21 July 2026 and the CLI is at version 0.1.
On our scale Lettertrace is monitor only. It has no recommendations engine and no content tools.
How GetCito works
GetCito sells two different things. The Self-Host plan is a free MIT dashboard covering ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, refreshed weekly, for one domain, with you paying the model APIs. That's narrower than Lettertrace's free offer.
Growth at $599 a month is the product GetCito actually wants to sell. It tracks 50 prompts daily across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews, and includes people: 5 human-written content pieces, schema and technical work on 10 to 15 pages, 10 hours of mention acquisition and 4 hours of Reddit and Quora work. Scale at $999 roughly doubles that, with 100 prompts, 10 pieces, 20 to 30 pages and 8 forum hours, plus quarterly competitor reports. Enterprise is where Claude, Copilot, AI Mode, DeepSeek and Meta AI appear; Grok was listed as coming soon.
On our scale, GetCito's paid plans execute, but the executor is a small agency, not software. That's a legitimate choice. It's also a different purchase from a tool login.
Who should pick which
Pick Lettertrace if you're technical, want a free trend line you can script from a CLI or coding agent, and accept that API answers aren't app answers.
Pick GetCito's free self-host only if ChatGPT and AI Overviews weekly is genuinely enough. Pick GetCito Growth if you want to hand GEO to a team of people and $599 a month fits.
The Promptwatch option
There's a third route between doing everything yourself and paying for humans: software that does the work and lets you approve it. Promptwatch Content Agents plan from a content gap analysis, write GEO content and publish to Webflow, Framer or WordPress, with a review inbox in front.
It also measures the way users see answers. Promptwatch monitors the real UIs of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and others, plus Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, rather than simulating them through an API. Agent Analytics shows which AI crawlers fetched your pages, citation analytics breaks sources down to Reddit and YouTube, and visitor analytics ties AI referrals to conversions.
Professional at $245 a month gives 150 prompts, 25M crawler logs and 15 AEO articles, at well under half the price of GetCito Growth.
Verdict
Lettertrace is the better free tool. GetCito is the right call only if you want to buy people. If you want the work done by software, with proof it moved traffic, Promptwatch is where we'd start.
FAQ
Is Lettertrace really free?
Yes. The code is MIT licensed and the hosted version is free. You pay the AI providers directly for each run's API calls, with no markup.
What does GetCito's $599 plan include?
50 prompts tracked daily on four engines, 5 human-written pieces a month, schema work on 10 to 15 pages, 10 hours of mention acquisition and 4 hours of Reddit and Quora work.
Are API-based trackers accurate?
They measure something real, but not exactly what a user sees in the app. Lettertrace says so itself. Promptwatch monitors the real interfaces: promptwatch.com.