Press Release Service or PR Agency: What Each Costs
A press release service is priced per release, from under €10 to about £300. A PR agency is priced per month, with published retainers starting around £3,000 or €3,000. They do different jobs, so the comparison that matters is what each one buys. All figures below were read from the publisher's own page on 13 November 2026.
The published rates
| Option | Published price | Unit | Publisher |
|---|---|---|---|
| Write and post it yourself | Free | Your time | n/a |
| Pressonify (drafted, published, citation tracking) | €9.95 first release, €49.95 after, €200 for five | Per release | Pricing |
| ResponseSource (UK journalist send) | From £85 plus VAT | Per release | responsesource.com |
| PR Fire (UK journalist send) | £95 plus VAT; £290 with the release written | Per campaign | prfire.co.uk |
| Presswire (journalist send) | £185 for one region, £300 worldwide, plus VAT | Per release | presswire.com |
| Release written by a person | £200 plus VAT (PR Fire); $300 (eReleases) | Per release | eReleases |
| UK agency retainer | From £3,000; median of 61 independent agencies £3,571 | Per month | Essential Content |
| Irish agency retainer | €3,000 to €10,000 (estimate); €3,000 to €15,000 (one agency's rates) | Per month | Comit, CultureHead |
| US agency retainer | $15,000 to $75,000 at one large agency; "$5,000 or $6,000" for some B2B programmes | Per month | 5W, Idea Grove |
Read on 13 November 2026. US wire prices are in our distribution pricing comparison.
How soft the agency numbers are
Treat every agency figure as a guide. We could not find a retainer figure published by an industry body in the UK, Ireland or the US. What exists is:
- Agencies' own rates. Essential Content says its retainers "start at £3,000 per month". CultureHead lists "€3,000 to €15,000 per month". 5W says its retainers "start at around $15,000 per month and run up to $75,000".
- One agency's analysis. Essential Content's median of £3,571 and mean of £4,672.55 come from 61 independent UK agencies, partly estimated, first published in November 2023.
- A stated estimate. Comit gives €3,000 to €10,000 for Dublin and says plainly that it is "purely based on general market knowledge and not on hard research data".
A figure sometimes quoted as a UK industry average of about £4,700 matches that one agency's mean. We could not find it in the industry census it is attributed to.
What each one buys
| Press release service | PR agency | |
|---|---|---|
| Unit | One announcement | A month of work |
| The release | Written by you, by a writer for a fee, or drafted by software | Written as part of the retainer |
| Reaching journalists | A send to a list, or none | Pitching by people who know the reporters |
| Where it lives | A wire page or a release page | Wherever coverage lands |
| Commitment | None | Usually several months |
5W puts the agency model this way: "Press release writing is part of that retainer ... so a company pays for the release and the pitching together rather than buying a standalone document."
Which fits
- Routine news, small budget: a per-release service. If the goal is to be found and cited when people ask AI about you, a structured release page for a small business does that for €9.95 to €49.95.
- A launch that needs coverage: an agency or freelancer for the pitching, with a release page as the reference they link to. See whether press releases get media coverage.
- No time to write: a service that drafts it. See which press release services write the release for you.
- Hoping for SEO links: read whether press releases still earn backlinks before paying anyone.
Related Reading
- Press Release Distribution Pricing Comparison
- Small Business Press Release Distribution: Wires or AI?
- Do Press Release Services Write the Release for You?
- Press Release Distribution for Small Business
Written by the Pressonify team in Dublin. We build the platform described above, publish our own citation data, and correct it in public when it turns out to be wrong.