Press release rate cards: the fees beyond the base price

On a normal release the add-ons cost more than the distribution. On the 2024 PR Newswire card — the only tier-one card a buyer can read without a sales call — a company logo is $595, an image, video or audio file is $490 each, a PDF attachment is $490, and every extra 100 words on the national circuit is $325 on top of the $1,020 base. Membership is $305 a year, flat. None of that appears in a headline price.

A wire's headline price buys 400 words of plain text. Everything a modern press release actually contains — the extra 500 words, the company logo, one image, a PDF — is metered separately, and on the one tier-one rate card that is public those line items cost more than the distribution.

The add-ons, from the only card you can read

Cision publishes no pricing on its own site, but its official 2024 Domestic Pricing Guide is hosted publicly as a PDF by the Independent Book Publishers Association. These are its flat add-on charges.

A logo costs $595. Not a designed logo — the file you already own, displayed beside your own announcement.

What a normal release actually totals

A 900-word announcement with a logo and one image, sent on the US1 National circuit, in the first year:

The distribution is $1,020 of that, about a quarter. The remaining three quarters is metering. Add the AP News placement at $310 and the total reaches $4,345 — for one announcement. The identical placement is published at $52.20 further down the wholesale ladder, which tells you what the $310 is really pricing.

Word count is the biggest multiplier, and the least discussed

Every circuit meters. US1 National charges $325 per additional 100 words; Top Markets $235; Regional $205; Metro $175; even the cheapest state or local circuit charges $170. The base rates those overages sit on top of are in the full circuit table. A release that runs to 1,000 words rather than 400 costs more in overage on the national circuit than the entire base rate.

Two things follow. First, "$1,020 national" describes a release shorter than this section. Second, a word cap is a rate card by other means: 24-7PressRelease's $479 tier advertises PR Newswire national distribution and caps you at 375 words, which is how a $479 price and a $1,020 price can both be true.

One correction worth carrying: most articles about wire pricing still quote an older Cision card — $195 to $249 membership, $805 national, $245 per additional 100 words. Those numbers were accurate once. The figures above are the ones on the 2024 PDF.

The membership and subscription line

PR Newswire's $305 annual membership is charged before a single release goes out. Elsewhere the same idea appears as a subscription: ACCESS Newswire sells Budget, National and US Premium plans at $920, $1,150 and $1,525 a month for one release a month (10% off quarterly, 20% off annually). Presswire in the UK sells unlimited annual distribution at $2,700 for the UK, $4,000 for North America and $6,550 globally.

Convert to cost per release before comparing anything. ACCESS National at $1,150 a month for one release is $1,150 a release, against $865 for the same tier bought outright — the subscription is worth it only above one release a month, which is precisely the buyer it is designed for.

The vendors that do not meter at all

This is the genuine structural difference in the mid-market, and it is easy to miss because it appears as an absence.

• ACCESS Newswire publishes $475 Budget, $865 National and $1,205 US Premium with unlimited words and images and no multimedia fees.
• Newswire.com sells its $965 Feature tier with unlimited words and images.

For a 400-word release with no assets, metered and unmetered vendors are comparable. For a 900-word release with a logo and two images, they are not remotely comparable, and the base rate you were quoting each other is the least informative number in the conversation. These are different circuits reaching different places, so this is not a like-for-like saving — the point is that what is metered matters more than what is quoted.

Restricted industries: nobody surcharges, they gate

No wire publishes a line item called a restricted-industry surcharge or a legal review fee. We looked for one specifically and there is none. What exists instead:

• PR Newswire does not surcharge crypto — it sells crypto as its own circuit. The Global Crypto and Financial Markets Premium circuit is $5,600 for 400 words, about 5.5 times the $1,020 national rate, with overage at $1,500 per 100 words.
• Cannabis is a named PR Newswire vertical on the Top Markets circuit at $790, which is cheaper than the national rate.
• PRWeb bans cryptocurrency outright, in its own words declining content "related to cryptocurrency — digital assets, bitcoin, mining, etc.", and also declines venture and Series A announcements, referring restricted categories to PR Newswire membership.
• Newsfile requires every crypto asset to be listed on CoinMarketCap as a Tracked Listing or ICO before it will distribute, and bans mining rigs, mixers and scam-recovery services.
• EIN Presswire accepts crypto with a transparency gate: full contact details and a postal address on the site or social pages. Cloud mining is banned outright.
• IMCWire places CBD and gaming only on its $1,200 Corporate tier against a $450 Premium — a 2.7-times gate dressed as a tier.
• MarketersMedia excludes blockchain releases from its top Director tier entirely.

Then there is the charge that is not a charge. 24-7PressRelease runs a mandatory compliance review for cloud mining, staking and yield offers, speculative NFTs and trading bots, and may demand government photo identification, incorporation documents, a WHOIS ownership match and proof of licensing. Submissions that fail "may be delayed, rejected, or permanently blocked", and its published terms say, of exactly this verification demand, that refunds will not be issued. That is a 100% fee on a rejected release, and it appears on no rate card.

For the hardest categories, the practical planning rule is to budget two and a half to three times a normal release and to treat availability, not price, as the binding constraint. Which desks refuse the category outright settles the question before any budget does.

What no rate card prices at all

Your link. Not one wire's price list says whether the outlets that republish your release will keep the link to your site, strip it, or mark it so it passes no search-engine credit. We have opened live pages where all three happened, on the same masthead, depending only on which wire fed it.

Nor does any card price how long the page stays up. Both of those are the actual deliverable, and both are sold as though they were weather. Our own catalogue carries the link status we read off a live page for each outlet, and says "Unconfirmed" where we have not read one.

What we could not find

• Business Wire publishes no rate card. The site is behind a bot shield and its pricing page could not be read at all. The circulating figures — about $760 for 400 words national, $195 per extra 100 words, $425 for the first multimedia item, no membership — come from Prezly, which calls its own table "industry estimates, not gospel".
• GlobeNewswire publishes no rate card. The add-on cluster usually quoted for it (roughly $100 for a logo, $200 for an image, $1,000 to $1,200 for video) appears near-verbatim across four sites that all sell competing distribution.
• Business Wire and ACCESS Newswire publish no content policy at all — sitemaps and candidate URLs were probed directly and neither exists. Both require a sales conversation to learn what they will and will not carry.
• Whether PR Newswire waives the membership fee at volume is quote-gated, and we could not establish it.
• The 24-7PressRelease compliance wording quoted above is not on any public page we could open. Its terms of service carries the verification demand and the refusal of refunds, and that is the page linked; the longer list of documents it may ask for is reported, not linked.

Four questions before you pay

What is the word limit, and the overage rate per 100 words? Are a logo, an image and a PDF extra, and at what price each? Is there a membership, subscription or minimum on top? And if the release is rejected in review, what happens to the money? Ours are answered on the page rather than in a sales call, and the first question has no second half here: our own packages print a band of 250 to 1,200 words and no overage rate, because there is no overage. Over 1,200 words is refused at submission rather than billed, and under 250 is refused too.