Sprout Social pricing starts at $79 per seat

Sprout Social pricing on 22 Sep 2026 starts at $79 per seat per month on Essentials when billed annually, then $199 Standard, $299 Professional, and $399 Advanced. Month-to-month SKUs on the same page print $99, $249, $399, and $499. Enterprise is a custom quote. A 30-day trial runs with no credit card. Listening and Premium Analytics are unpriced add-ons on Standard and up. The Sprout API is an Advanced-card feature, and the official docs describe OAuth tokens rather than a hosted MCP URL. Trends MCP is not a Sprout replacement for scheduling or Smart Inbox. It is the cheaper public-trend MCP and REST path at $0, $19, $49, or $199 per month of requests, not per seat.

What the published per-seat cards cost

Sprout Social bills per seat, in USD, with annual as the default toggle on sproutsocial.com/pricing. Four named commercial offers sit in the page JSON-LD on 22 Sep 2026, with lowPrice 79.00, highPrice 399.00, offerCount 4, and currency USD. Enterprise is a softwareAddOn with no price.

The comparison grid on that pricing page also assigns 100 monthly Trellis AI-agent credits to every listed seat on Essentials through Advanced. Standard is the first card with a consolidated inbox, keyword and location monitoring, and review management. Professional adds unlimited profiles, message tagging, competitor and paid insights, and Enhance Post by AI Assist. Advanced adds Enhance Reply, sentiment in Smart Inbox and Reviews, helpdesk integrations, customer-care reports, Message Spike Alerts, and the Sprout API.

A one-seat Advanced annual subscription is $4,788 before tax ($399 x 12). A one-seat Standard annual subscription is $2,388. Those figures are seat math from the published rates, not a quote that includes Listening, Premium Analytics, Trellis Plus, extra seats, or nonprofit discounts.

Why the $79 Essentials SKU is easy to miss

The hero row that most commercial pages quote is Standard $199, Professional $299, Advanced $399, plus a Custom Enterprise tile. Essentials sits in a separate "NEW" publishing block at $79 per seat per month, with the monthly counterpart spelled out as "$99 per seat/month billed monthly." Meta description copy on the same URL still says pricing starts at $79 per month.

JSON-LD is the other split. Essentials is the only offer with both annual ($79) and monthly ($99) UnitPriceSpecification rows. Standard, Professional, and Advanced JSON-LD offers carry a single annual price and no monthly unit price, even though the on-page FAQ lists those monthly dollars. Anyone parsing schema alone would understate month-to-month cost for the three larger seats.

The June 10, 2026 plan-picker article on Sprout's site describes Essentials as the newest publishing-focused SKU: five profiles, optimal send times, profile and post-level reporting, and no Smart Inbox. The same article says both Essentials and Standard cap at five social profiles, and that Professional is the first unlimited-profile tier. That cap is the usual reason a five-network brand jumps from $79 or $199 to $299 before add-ons.

How much extra monthly billing actually adds

The pricing-page FAQ on 22 Sep 2026 prints month-to-month rates as Essentials $99, Standard $249, Professional $399, and Advanced $499 per seat. Those match the April 28, 2026 software-pricing section on Sprout's social-media-management cost article. Annual is a one-time upfront charge for the term. The FAQ states that billing with multiple payments during a subscription term does not get the same discount.

The awkward equality: a Professional seat billed monthly is $399, which is the same printed number as an Advanced seat billed annually. Over twelve months that is $4,788 either way, before tax. Standard monthly ($249 x 12 = $2,988) costs $600 more per seat than Standard annual ($2,388). Essentials monthly ($1,188 per year) costs $240 more than Essentials annual ($948). Advanced monthly ($5,988 per year) costs $1,200 more than Advanced annual ($4,788). Professional is the outlier on percentage: $299 versus $399 is about 25% off, while the other three annual cards sit near 20% off their monthly twins.

Sprout Terms of Service, effective May 9, 2025, treat those cycles as auto-renewing. In-app annual plans renew on the Annual Pay Date unless cancelled on the billing page beforehand, with no refund of prepaid unused fees if cancelled mid-term, and with a renewal increase cap of 7% unless different pricing is noticed at least 60 days out (section 5.1.2). In-app month-to-month plans cancel through the billing page and keep access until the next Monthly Pay Date, again with no mid-cycle refund (section 5.1.1). Annual plans that still pay monthly require at least 30 days' notice by email to the success team before term end (section 5.1.3), which matches the FAQ line about multi-payment terms losing the annual discount. Payment methods named on the pricing FAQ are major credit cards and PayPal; the terms also describe invoice and reseller paths.

Which fees sit outside the seat price

Trellis is not a separate product on the four core cards. The pricing FAQ states that every user gets 100 Trellis credits per month that reset automatically, and that Trellis Plus is $28 per user per month on annual billing or $35 per user per month on monthly billing. The same FAQ says credit burn depends on prompt breadth and how much data Trellis retrieves, so the 100-credit bundle is not a fixed number of answers. A longer credit guide is linked from that FAQ as help article 46301649718925; the support host was behind a bot check this run, so those extra credit rules are not quoted here.

Listening and Premium Analytics are each sold as individual add-ons starting at Standard. No dollar amount appeared on the pricing page, JSON-LD, or nonprofit page this run. Employee Advocacy and Professional Services use the same "Standard and up" gate, also unpriced on the public cards. Influencer Marketing is the exception: the pricing page states "No Sprout plan required," and JSON-LD lists it as a softwareAddOn with a 10M+ creator-profile claim and no seat price.

United States 501(c)(3) nonprofits that commit to at least two seats on an annual subscription can buy Professional at $239 per seat per month (the $299 commercial annual rate is struck through) and Advanced at $299 per seat per month (the $399 commercial annual rate is struck through), on sproutsocial.com/pricing/nonprofit-pricing. Essentials and Standard are not on that nonprofit grid. The nonprofit URL's JSON-LD this run is Organization schema only, with no offer prices, so those $239 / $299 figures come from the visible cards, not from structured data.

A 30-day trial still asks for a plan choice up front. After day 30 the pricing FAQ says payment details are collected. Terms section 3.9 limits a Free Trial to internal, non-production, non-commercial evaluation, lets Sprout end it at its discretion, and warns that Content entered during the trial may be permanently lost unless a paid subscription for the same Services is purchased before the Free Trial Period ends. Marketing copy and the contract are not the same document.

Where the Sprout API starts, and where it does not

The Advanced pricing card is the first public SKU that names "The Sprout API and Helpdesk integrations." Sprout's June 10, 2026 plan guide repeats the API as an Advanced capability, alongside Salesforce and Zendesk helpdesk integrations. The public API overview at api.sproutsocial.com/docs is more cautious: access requires "the appropriate plan which enables API access," the API Permissions permission, and acceptance of the Analytics API Terms under Settings > Global Features > API. Authentication is OAuth 2.0 (JWT access tokens) or API tokens. The same overview includes owned profile and post data, messages, publishing posts, media upload, cases, Listening Topics, and a Tableau connector. It excludes paid ad-account data, Listening data from X, and Listening message-level data from Reddit.

That is an owned-account API, not a public trend board. A separate Sprout insights article states the Public API is available to all Advanced plan customers, and that the Tableau connector also needs the Premium Analytics add-on on top of Advanced. None of those pages published a first-party MCP host, a Cursor mcp.json block, or an official transport: "http" URL this run.

Trends MCP is the other shape of "API for social data." Cursor config from docs.md / llms.txt (accessed 22 Sep 2026) is a hosted HTTP server with an explicit transport field:

"trends-mcp": {
  "url": "https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp",
  "transport": "http",
  "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" }
}

The homepage copy-config snippet this run omits transport: "http" while still pointing at https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp. Claude.ai Connectors use a second host on the www site, over OAuth. That split, plus the Cursor JSON, is documented on the MCP server for Cursor and Google Trends MCP for Cursor pages. Sprout's official docs do not publish an equivalent hosted MCP stanza.

When Trends MCP is the cheaper seat for trend data

Sprout wins publishing, Smart Inbox, approvals, reviews, and owned-profile reporting. Hootsuite's JSON-LD on 22 Sep 2026 still starts at $99 per user per month billed annually (Standard), then $199 Professional and $399 Advanced, which undercuts Sprout's Standard $199 annual card if the job is a social operating system. Buffer's public Essentials card this run is $5 per month per channel when billed yearly ($60/year for one channel), which undercuts both if the job is a queue. None of those three are a multi-source public trend API.

Trends MCP HTML /pricing on 22 Sep 2026 lists Free at $0 with 100 requests, Starter at $19 per month (1,000 requests) or $16 per month on the yearly toggle ($192 billed annually), Pro at $49 or $39 ($468 billed annually), and Business at $199 or $159 ($1,910 billed annually). Markdown pricing.md still prints the monthly $19 / $49 / $199 list and "annual billing saves 20%." Yearly-toggle math does not match a clean 20% off those monthly list prices ($19 x 12 x 0.8 = $182.40, not $192). History depth on the HTML cards is 90 days (Free), 1 year (Starter), 2+ years (Pro), and full archive (Business). Keyword alerts are 10 / 50 / 250 on Starter / Pro / Business. Free boards lag 24 hours; paid boards are described as real-time.

That is the job split. Teams that need a Smart Inbox should budget Sprout's per-seat cards and treat Listening as an unpriced extra. Teams that need public Google, TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, Amazon, or Wikipedia boards inside Cursor should budget Trends MCP requests. The social listening tools page and the Hootsuite pricing breakdown cover the adjacent seats. Do not crown Trends MCP best social suite. Do not crown Sprout cheapest trend API.

FAQ

Does Sprout Social have a free plan?

No public free SKU appeared on the pricing page this run. The closest no-charge path is a 30-day trial with no credit card, after which the FAQ says a plan and payment details are required. Terms section 3.9 still treats that trial as non-production evaluation and warns that trial Content may be deleted if a matching paid subscription is not purchased in time.

Is Sprout Social cheaper on annual billing?

Yes on the four named seats. Annual cards are $79 / $199 / $299 / $399 versus monthly $99 / $249 / $399 / $499. Professional is the steepest relative gap (about 25% off monthly). The other three annual cards sit near 20% off. Multi-payment terms during an annual subscription are called out as ineligible for that discount.

Does every Sprout plan include the API?

No. The Advanced card is the first public SKU that names the Sprout API. Official API docs require an API-enabled plan, an API Permissions grant, and accepted Analytics API Terms, then OAuth or token auth. Listening add-on data is a separate product from that owned-profile API, and several Listening slices are called out as missing from the public API.

How does Sprout Social pricing compare with Trends MCP?

Sprout sells per-seat social management. Trends MCP sells monthly request quotas for public trend boards and keyword series, with MCP and REST on every plan including Free. A single Sprout Standard seat at $199/month annual already exceeds Trends MCP Business at $199/month of requests. The products overlap only for teams that used Sprout as a proxy for public conversation data.

Sources (accessed 22 Sep 2026): sproutsocial.com/pricing, sproutsocial.com/pricing/nonprofit-pricing, sproutsocial.com/insights/which-sprout-social-plan-is-right-for-you, sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-management-cost, sproutsocial.com/legal/terms, api.sproutsocial.com/docs, Sprout help article 46301649718925 (linked from the pricing FAQ; body not retrieved this run), hootsuite.com/pricing, buffer.com/pricing, Trends MCP HTML /pricing, pricing.md, docs.md, llms.txt, and homepage copy-config.