PR Agency Pricing Study: 79% Publish No Price at All

Anyone shortlisting a PR agency runs into the same wall: you cannot compare prices, because almost nobody publishes one. That is a widely shared impression. We wanted to know the actual number, so we measured it.

This page is the dataset and the methodology. The four guides it links to apply the findings to specific verticals.

Method

On 25 August 2026 we pulled the US Google top 10 for 19 PR agency search terms, giving 182 ranking positions across 68 unique domains. Every ranking domain was scored with Open PageRank.

For the four core commercial terms (saas pr agency, fintech pr agency, tech pr agency, b2b pr agency) we then did two things by hand. First we classified every domain as an agency, forum, trade publication, software vendor or other. Then we visited every domain classified as an agency and recorded whether any price appeared anywhere public: a rate card, a stated minimum, or a budget band selectable on the contact form.

Two agency websites could not be read, one returning a 403 and one returning no content. They are reported as unchecked and excluded from the percentages rather than counted as publishing nothing, because absence of data is not the same as a measured zero.

Search results are a snapshot and they move. Prices move too. Everything below reflects 25 August 2026.

Finding 1: 79% of PR agencies publish no price

Of the 27 unique domains in the four core result sets, 21 were PR agencies. Nineteen could be checked.

The single agency publishing a full rate card is Altitude Marketing, and it is worth noting what kind of agency that is. Altitude is an integrated B2B marketing agency where PR is one service among many, not a pure communications shop. Productised marketing retainers are simply easier to price publicly than media relations, where the work varies with how newsworthy the client happens to be.

Finding 2: every disclosed price falls between $8,500 and $15,000 a month

Four agencies disclose a number. They are different sizes, in different cities, with different business models, and they land in a remarkably tight band.

Altitude's full published card runs $9,500 to $12,500 for its Organic Growth tier, $12,500 to $16,000 for Digital Acceleration and $16,000+ for Full Integration. 5WPR's bands continue upward through $25K to $50K, $50K+ and $100K+.

Four data points is not a market average and we are not presenting it as one. What it does support is a floor estimate: if the agencies willing to publish start between eight and fifteen thousand a month, the fifteen that decline to publish are not starting materially lower. Annualised, the cheapest visible entry point in this sample is roughly $102,000 a year, and most PR contracts carry a six or twelve month minimum term.

Finding 3: a quarter of the results are not agencies

This one surprised us. Across the four core commercial terms, 9 of 38 top-10 positions (24%) were held by domains that do not sell PR services. By unique domain it was 6 of 27 (22%).

The practical consequence for a buyer is that a meaningful share of the "best PR agency" lists you find were written by companies that do not do PR, and were compiled to rank rather than to match you to a supplier. The trade publications are the useful exception, precisely because they are not bidding for your business.

Finding 4: Reddit ranks more often than any agency

Across the wider set of 19 search terms, reddit.com appeared in the top 10 for 14 of them. No agency came close.

If you are buying, that is genuinely useful: the most consistently available source of unfiltered opinion about PR agencies is a forum, not a directory. If you are an agency, it says something less comfortable about who owns your category in search.

Finding 5: these are not high-authority search results

Across all 68 ranking domains, the median Open PageRank was 3.22. Only 8 of 67 scored domains reached 4.0 or above, while 16 sat below 2.5.

The clearest single illustration: the second-ranking result for tech pr agency is PRovoke Media at an Open PageRank of 1.94, a trade publication weaker than most of the agencies it outranks, holding position with a straightforward ranked list. Authority is not what is deciding these results. Format and specificity are.

Guides by vertical

Nine guides apply these findings to specific verticals, each with the agencies, the published prices where they exist, and the one thing that vertical gets wrong. The later five also record where the pricing pattern above does not hold: crypto inverts it, and healthcare is the only vertical where no agency publishes anything at all.

What this means if you are buying

Go in with a stated budget. Quote-only pricing is priced to your size, so a scoping call without a number from you sets the anchor in the agency's favour. The reason 5WPR and Bolt PR ask for a band on the form before anyone speaks to you is that the band is useful to them.

Treat $8,500 a month as the practical floor for a retainer. Nothing in this sample disclosed less. If your budget is below that, a retainer is not the product you are shopping for, and reading further down the agency lists will not change it.

Annualise and add the term. The cheapest visible entry point is about $102,000 a year, and the commitment on signature is usually the full minimum term rather than the first invoice.

Read past the page title. A quarter of what ranks is not an agency, and some of the most prominent "best agency" lists are published by companies selling software.

If a retainer is not the right product

The gap this data exposes is that there is nothing between doing outreach yourself and an $8,500 a month floor. That gap is the reason MentionAgent exists.

MentionAgent is $99/mo flat. The agent finds relevant posts in your niche, looks up the author's verified email, writes a pitch tied to the specific article, and sends it once you approve it in Telegram. Follow-ups run until someone replies. No credits, no per-contact fees, no minimum term.

It is not a PR agency and does not pretend to be one. You give up media relationships and any route into tier-one press. You keep a flat bill and you read every pitch before it sends. The honest comparison is in AI link building vs hiring an agency.

Using this data

The figures on this page are free to cite and reuse with attribution to MentionAgent and a link to this page. If you are a journalist or researcher who wants the underlying per-domain table, including the Open PageRank score and price status for every agency in the sample, email [email protected].

Limitations, stated plainly. This is a snapshot of one country's search results on one day. The price-transparency sample is 19 agencies, which is small, and it is drawn from agencies that rank well rather than from the market as a whole, so it is likely biased toward firms that invest in marketing. Two agencies could not be checked. Open PageRank is a third-party approximation of domain authority, not a Google metric.

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