Why we built Promlo for HK and TW SaaS founders
AEO tooling has been priced for US enterprise marketing departments. There's a different audience that needs the same data more, gets it cheaper, and runs the company on it.
The first time I tried to evaluate an AEO tool from Hong Kong, the cheapest serious option was $499 a month and the checkout flow politely refused my HK corporate card. The trial sign-up form had a "Country" dropdown that ended at "United States" and "Other." I closed the tab.
That moment is the entire reason Promlo exists.
The category was built for the wrong customer
The current Answer Engine Optimization category was designed for marketing departments inside Series-B companies in San Francisco. The pricing, the integrations, the case studies, the vocabulary — all of it assumes a buyer who controls a six-figure marketing budget and incorporates in Delaware.
That buyer is real, and they're well-served. But they're not the only buyer. The other buyer is a small SaaS team — five engineers, no full-time marketer — selling globally from Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, or Lisbon. They live or die by organic discovery. ChatGPT and Perplexity already pre-filter their pipeline. They need AEO data more urgently than the enterprise buyer does, and they have an order of magnitude less budget to spend on it.
What changes when you design for that buyer
Three things, and the rest follows from there:
Price has to start with a 2. $29/month, not $299. Anything higher and the tool becomes "I'll buy it when revenue is bigger" — which means never, because their revenue is contingent on the visibility the tool would help them improve.
Billing has to take their card on the first try. Stripe with USD, not ACH. Stripe's HK and TW corporate card flows are clean; we standardized on them on day one.
The product has to be in their language. Not Google-Translated 繁中 retrofitted six months after launch. Bilingual UI, bilingual prompts, bilingual docs from the first commit.
What we're not
We're not the cheapest version of the established tool. We don't claim feature parity with the high-end enterprise vendors and we don't try to compete on per-seat upsells.
We're the version designed for a team that's shipping internationally on a small budget and needs the answer-engine signal to actually move. The 6-LLM coverage, the citation analytics, the AI-ready content drafts — those are table stakes for the category. The thing we worked hardest on is making the tool fit the buyer who needed it most and was furthest from being able to use the existing options.
If that's you, start free. Five prompts, thirty runs a month, no credit card. The Free tier isn't a trial — it stays free as long as the limits work for you.