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Rocket sells AI strategy reports for far less than consulting

Rocket wants to move AI up the stack. Instead of helping people write code faster, the Indian startup is pitching an AI strategy reports tool that helps them decide what to build in the first place, with consulting-style

Image: TechCrunch

Rocket wants to move AI up the stack. Instead of helping people write code faster, the Indian startup is pitching an AI strategy reports tool that helps them decide what to build in the first place, with consulting-style reports, product plans, and competitive research generated from a prompt.

The Surat-based company launched Rocket 1.0 on Tuesday, bundling research, product building, and competitive intelligence into one workflow. That puts it in a different lane from the flood of vibe-coding tools from Cursor, Replit, Lovable, Claude Code, and Codex, which make software creation easier but leave the strategy question untouched.

Rocket’s bet is straightforward: code is becoming cheap, but judgment is still expensive. That argument has a real audience, especially among founders and small teams that can now build quickly but still need help with pricing, unit economics, and go-to-market plans.

What Rocket 1.0 actually produces

In testing ahead of launch, TechCrunch found that the platform turned simple prompts into PDF product requirement documents that looked more like consulting decks than chatbots. Rocket says the system can also surface competitor changes, website updates, and traffic trends, drawing on more than 1,000 data sources including Meta’s ad libraries, Similarweb’s API, and its own crawlers.

That mix sounds useful, and also a little dangerous if users treat the output like gospel. Some of the analysis appeared to be assembled from existing pricing models, user behavior patterns, and competitive signals rather than independently verified facts, which means the reports still need a human sanity check before anyone bets real money on them.

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Rocket 1.0 pricing undercuts old-school consulting

The startup’s subscription tiers start at $25 per month for application building, rise to $250 for strategy and research, and go up to $350 for the full platform with competitive intelligence. Rocket says the $250 plan can generate two to three “McKinsey-grade” research reports alongside product builds, which is the kind of line that makes consultants wince and founders do the math.

  • $25 per month: application building
  • $250 per month: strategy and research, including two to three research reports
  • $350 per month: full platform with competitive intelligence

Rocket’s growth story and the unanswered question

Rocket says it raised a $15 million seed round in September from Accel, Salesforce Ventures, and Together Fund. Since then, it says users have grown from 400,000 to more than 1.5 million across 180 countries, with 20% to 30% of customers coming from small and medium-sized businesses and gross margins above 50%.

Those numbers suggest strong demand, but the sharper question is whether buyers want strategy generated by AI or just strategy that looks expensive. If Rocket can keep the reports useful enough to trust, it has a shot at becoming a cheaper pre-build layer for startups and SMBs; if not, it risks becoming another impressive demo that founders use once and then quietly ignore.

Ava Chen

AI Editor

Ava covers the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, from foundational models and research labs to the real-world economics of intelligence. With a background in computational linguistics, she cuts through the hype to find out what actually works. She firmly believes that benchmarks are just marketing until reproduced in the wild.

via TechCrunch

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