How much does PR cost for startups?

There are a few ways startups pay for PR. Agencies work on monthly retainers. Some agencies and consultants charge per project instead, usually somewhere between $5,000 and $25,000 for a single launch or announcement. You can also do it yourself, which trades money for your own time. Or you can use pay-on-performance, where you only pay when an article actually publishes.

This guide walks through each option, what it costs, and where it fits, so you can pick based on your stage and your budget.

Monthly retainer

This is the most common arrangement. You pay a fixed monthly fee, usually with a three-to-six-month minimum.

For startups, retainers commonly land between $5,000 and $8,000 a month. Large global networks charge far more and are built for enterprise budgets rather than early-stage companies.

A retainer pays for ongoing work: strategy, media list building, pitching, and reporting, month after month. That continuity is the value. It suits companies with steady news to share and a budget that can carry the spend across several months, including the months where nothing publishes. For an early-stage startup with one or two real press moments a year, a year-round retainer can be more than the moment calls for.

Project-based pricing

Some agencies price by campaign instead of by month: one launch, one funding announcement, one push. These typically run $5,000 to $25,000 depending on scope and the firm.

This fits a startup with a single clear moment and no need for ongoing coverage. You're paying for a defined piece of work with a start and an end, which makes budgeting simpler than an open-ended retainer.

Freelance publicists

A freelance publicist works one-on-one, usually for a few thousand dollars a month, and how they work depends almost entirely on who they are. Most lean on the journalist relationships they've built over a career: they take your news, decide which of their existing contacts might care, and email or call those people directly. That means results hinge on whether your story happens to fit their network, and the monthly fee is owed either way, whether or not anything publishes.

Quality varies more here than in any other option. Two freelancers at the same price can deliver completely different results depending on their relationships and how hard they push. So before hiring, ask for their last few placements for companies at your stage, with links you can check, and ask how they'd actually pitch your specific story.

This fits a startup that has a particular publicist in mind, with a track record they've verified and contacts that match the outlets they're targeting.

Doing it yourself

Our co-founder didn't want to pay $10k for PR, so he did it himself. He found 200 of the right journalists and emailed each one a personalized pitch, all by hand, and landed Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and six other outlets.

It worked because the outreach was targeted and personal, not mass-sent. That's the same approach we run at Press Club, except with AI doing the heavy lifting, which lets us reach far more of the right journalists than one person could by hand.

Pay-on-performance (how Press Club works)

This is the model we run at Press Club. There's no retainer and no project fee. You pay only when an article about your company is published. If nothing publishes, there's no cost.

The reason we built it this way is straightforward: with the other models, you pay for the effort whether or not coverage lands, so the risk sits entirely with you. Pay-on-performance moves that risk onto us. We're only paid when you actually get featured, which means our incentive is the same as yours from day one.

Our approach is cold-outreach based. We research the right journalists for your story and pitch them directly. Across our outreach, we see about a 10% response rate from journalists, which is high for cold pitching and comes from tight targeting and relevant, specific outreach rather than mass sending.

We think this is the better fit for most early-stage startups, and here's the honest reasoning. Early-stage companies usually have a small number of real press moments rather than a constant stream of news, so paying year-round for ongoing work often doesn't match the need. Pay-on-performance lines up cost with results: you spend money when, and only when, coverage happens. It's a worse fit if there's no news to work with yet, because there's nothing to pitch, in which case the better move is to wait for a real moment before spending anything at all.

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Press Club helps startups land coverage in outlets like TechCrunch, Forbes, Fortune, and Axios. You only pay when you get featured. See how it works.