Media database pricing in 2026: what 13 PR contact databases charge

By Jan Suski. I go deep on every review, checking every number against its source and digging up details other coverage misses, a habit from six years of SEO and link building for tech companies. Bylines at Surfer, Brand24, and Senuto. How the scoring works.

Published 6 October 2026Prefer this source on Google

^*Meltwater filed its G-Cloud prices in sterling. Converted at $1.3276 per pound, derived from the ECB reference rates of 6 October 2026 (1.1269 dollars and 0.8488 pounds per euro).

Media database pricing splits at about $6,000 a year. Below that line, the Semrush AI PR Toolkit (the product Prowly became), Anewstip, Prezly and Qwoted publish rates from $0 to $499 a month. Above it, Cision, Muck Rack, Meltwater, Onclusive and Notified quote every deal by hand, and the public numbers come from Vendr's tracked contracts: medians from $12,625 to $25,800 a year.

This report checked 13 vendors' pricing pages, terms of service and Vendr listings on 6 October 2026. It covers the four pricing models, what each published plan gates, what moves a quote, the auto-renewal clauses that set the year-two bill, and where contact accuracy fits into the price.

It's written for a solo PR consultant, an agency running several client accounts and an in-house comms team pricing a journalist database before the first sales call. Teams evaluating a shortlist can read the tables alone, and every figure links to the vendor's own page, its terms, or Vendr's header stats.

How media database pricing works

Four pricing models cover the category, and most vendors sit in exactly one of them.

• Quote-only annual contracts priced per seat: Cision, Muck Rack, Meltwater, Onclusive, Notified, Roxhill, Agility PR Solutions and Propel. Muck Rack's pricing page says its price "depends on a few factors specific to your team including the number of users".
• Monitoring and database sold as one bundle: Meltwater's pricing post says media relations is "Included at every tier", with journalist databases and press distribution from Starter up.
• Self-serve plans with a card checkout: the Semrush AI PR Toolkit from $149 a month, Anewstip from $200 and Prezly from €100^* (about $113).
• Free and freemium entry points: Anewstip Free, Qwoted Basic and the free editions of general CRM software, where teams create media lists by hand.

Inside each model, tiers scale with user needs and feature depth. Semrush keeps media monitoring to its Pro and Business plans and competitor coverage tracking to Business alone. Flat-rate plans with unlimited core access cluster at the bottom of the market: Prezly's Essential plan carries "Unlimited stories & campaigns" for one user at €100^* a month.

Organization size and seat count set most of the number. Cision's CisionOne FAQ prices on "users, features, and service levels". Meltwater's pricing page names "the breadth of sources and regions you want to monitor, volume of data and workflows, number of users, integrations, onboarding and support needs, and contract terms", the whole cost model in one sentence.

Machine learning and AI features in the price

Every vendor in this report markets artificial intelligence, and the AI rides inside the plan price. Semrush builds its AI-cited media search into the $149 Base plan. Cision lists "AI-powered pitching" inside its Journalist Outreach package, and Prowly's product page promises "real-time media updates with AI summaries" for monitoring. The 13 pricing pages carry zero separate line items for a machine learning feature.

Quote-only media databases and Vendr's tracked contracts

Five quote-only vendors carry a Vendr marketplace listing with header stats. Vendr builds them from anonymized purchase data, and they're the closest thing these vendors have to a rate card. Our market intelligence platform pricing report reads Vendr data the same way.

Figures marked ^* are Vendr tracked annual contract values from anonymized purchase data. Vendr marketplace header stats for Onclusive, Notified and the three vendors linked above, checked 6 October 2026. Vendr shows no purchase count or savings figure for Onclusive and Notified, and its Notified listing covers investor relations and PR products together.

Cision and Muck Rack land $375 apart at the median, and Meltwater and Notified sit near double that. Muck Rack has the tightest spread, $12,860 from its lowest tracked contract to its highest; Meltwater's runs $51,618. Average savings against the first quote run from 15.23% on Meltwater to 25.53% on Cision, so the opening number moves.

Cision

Journalist Outreach is the database package in the CisionOne platform. Its request page lists "Trusted, up-to-date journalist contacts", "AI-powered pitching" and "Outreach performance metrics and reporting" with no price beside any of them. The database page claims "more than 600,000" media profiles, "curated, reviewed, and validated by our in-house team of media research experts".

Vendr's 107 tracked purchases put the median at $12,625, with a low of $3,150 and a high of $30,368. Cision also owns Brandwatch, after it closed that acquisition in June 2021, and our Brandwatch pricing report covers that separate social media bill. The Cision pricing report goes through all four CisionOne packages, PR Newswire's per-release fees and both sets of renewal terms.

Muck Rack

Muck Rack's pricing page shows three tiers for brands and three for agencies (Starter, Standard and Premier) without a dollar figure on any of them. Read between the lines and the tier names map to seats and modules: the page says Muck Rack customizes proposals on "user count and selected modules". Muck Rack's sales process ends in a customized proposal, and Vendr's 80 tracked purchases put the median at $13,000, inside a range of $8,000 to $20,860.

The terms of service bill annual plans in advance and state "We do not provide refunds or credits for partial years of service". Cancelling means emailing your Customer Success Manager, and price changes "take effect at the start of the next subscription period". Monthly billing is the request that comes up in Muck Rack reviews:

"It's expensive for we small biz owners. Is love it if we could pay monthly and only for the features we specifically use."

Meredith E., President, Entertainment, switched from Cision, Capterra, 16 January 2026

Meltwater

Meltwater is the one quote-only vendor that publishes floors on its own domain. A 9 July 2026 post on its blog puts Starter "from $10,000/year" and Pro "from $25,000/year", and Vendr's median of $25,800 across 126 purchases lands $800 above that Pro floor.

The journalist database gets its own price in one public document: a G-Cloud 14 rate card Meltwater filed with the UK government in May 2024. It lists "Press distribution & journalist database" covering "450,000+ journalists, bloggers etc." at £6,480^* a year for the UK and £7,880^* for global, about $8,603 and $10,462. The tier-by-tier breakdown sits in our Meltwater pricing report, and the ownership history in the Meltwater acquisition report.

Onclusive and Notified

Onclusive's Vendr median is $13,706, with tracked contracts from $9,539 to $24,585. It sells a "Media Contacts & Events Database" next to monitoring that pulls coverage from multiple sources, which its homepage sizes at "3M+ online sources", "70K+ print outlets" and "6K+ broadcast channels".

Notified tracks higher: a $25,050 median and a $5,670 to $55,624 range. Its site FAQ says Equiniti Group acquired the company in May 2025, and its PR platform sells a "Media Contacts Database" beside investor relations services, which Vendr folds into the same listing.

Roxhill, Agility PR Solutions and Propel

Three more vendors keep every price under the radar and publish only plan structures:

• Roxhill: Core, Boutique, Enterprise and Premium, with 1, 3 and 5 database logins on the first three and logins priced on application on Premium.
• Propel: Essentials for 1 user, Pro for up to 4 and Premium for up to 7, each with unlimited contacts and 10, 25 or 50 media monitoring alerts.
• Agility PR Solutions: media relations, monitoring and intelligence services, with pricing routed to a "Speak to an Expert" form.

Self-serve media databases with published prices

Five vendors let a buyer read a price before talking to sales, and their entry plans run from $0 to €220^* a month.

Key features each published plan gates

Every price in this table is the vendor's own list price, read off its pricing page on 6 October 2026. ^*Prezly and Mynewsdesk publish prices in euros only. At the ECB reference rate of $1.1269 per euro on 6 October 2026, €100 is about $113, €250 about $282 and €220 about $248.

Annualized, Semrush Base costs $1,788 and Semrush Business $5,988, while Anewstip Standard costs $2,400 and Anewstip Professional $4,800. Cision's $12,625 median buys about seven years of Semrush Base.

Prowly's own site now reads "Prowly is now the Semrush AI PR Toolkit", and the plans live on the knowledge base of Semrush, a company better known for SEO and ads research. Base lets a user create media lists and send targeted campaigns, Semrush says Pro "Unlocks more advanced workflows", and Prowly's page lists follow-ups scheduled "based on recipient behavior". Our Semrush pricing report covers the main Semrush subscription.

Trials show where the limits bite, and a buyer can't fully test the data during one. Semrush's 7-day trial restricts "Sending emails" and "Viewing and exporting contact information", and every paid plan "includes usage limits for features like sending emails, exporting contacts, and monitoring the media". Anewstip's free plan caps a buyer at 2 lists of 100 contacts with no email or phone access.

Prezly sells itself as "a dedicated outreach CRM", and its plans cap the contacts you store: 5,000 on Essential and 10,000 on Standard. Every plan includes Full Analytics, and Enterprise adds single sign-on and 24/7 support. Mynewsdesk keeps its "Full journalist database" on the PR Distribution plan, which is price on request, while its Media Monitoring plan covers podcasts, radio, TV and social media channels such as YouTube and TikTok.

Qwoted is the free door into reporter requests: Basic allows 2 pitches a month and Pro raises that to 35 for $149. Press release distribution is a separate bill from wire services on most of these tools; PRWeb, the self-serve wire Cision owns, charges $120 to $480 per release across four packages on its pricing page.

What drives a media database quote

Seven inputs set the number on a quote-only order form, and Meltwater's G-Cloud card is the one public price document that shows several of them.

1. Seats, sold as user accounts or logins. Meltwater's base licence costs £22,800^* a year for 10 users and £32,700^* for 15, so the five extra users cost £9,900^*, or £1,980^* each.
2. Regions. The same card charges £6,480^* for a UK journalist database and £7,880^* for global, so a database covering one market costs about 18% less.
3. Monitoring. Meltwater's broadcast, print and podcast add-ons run £2,950^* to £5,700^* a year, and Cision quotes three monitoring packages beside Journalist Outreach. Our media monitoring tools ranking compares that side, and the social listening pricing report covers the social media add-on.
4. Real-time alerts. Semrush keeps media monitoring, sold with real-time updates and AI summaries, to Pro at $279 a month, $130 more than Base.
5. API access. CisionOne integrates with the Slack and Microsoft Teams apps for live notifications, puts Google Analytics data beside mention volume, and returns mention lists and a stream inventory "in JSON and CSV formats" through a REST API built for connecting monitoring data to internal systems and data pipelines.
6. Data licensing. A licence to show that data to clients costs more: Perigon, a news API vendor, prices its full commercial licence from $24,000 a year. Teams that feed coverage data into BI dashboards should price the API line before signing.
7. Contract length. Meltwater's pricing post lists multi-year terms among the factors that change the price, and Muck Rack's terms keep "all fees for the full multi-year contract term" due after a mid-term cancellation.

Auto-renewal, notice windows and cancellation terms

Annual terms are par for the course in quote-only media databases, as in most SaaS contracts, and Cision, Meltwater and Muck Rack all renew themselves automatically.

Sources: Cision General Terms clause 10.3, Meltwater mCommunity renewal article and pricing FAQ, Muck Rack terms of service and the Semrush AI PR Toolkit knowledge base, all public documents checked 6 October 2026.

Cision's 5% clause applies unless the prior term was promotional, the client subscribes to different or additional services, or the parties agree otherwise. At 5% a year, a $12,625 platform contract becomes $13,256 in year two and $13,919 in year three, a bitter pill to swallow for a team that budgeted flat.

Meltwater's renewal article on its customer community says "unless an auto-renewal contract is canceled at least 60 days before the end of the term, this Agreement will automatically renew". One Capterra reviewer describes how that plays out:

"I stated this when I got the renewal invoice and was told that I had to put it in writing 60 days prior to the auto-renewal in order to cancel the contract."

Verified Reviewer, VP Marketing & Communications, Mechanical or Industrial Engineering, Capterra, 1 June 2022

A CEO at CourseMaven Education Management rated Meltwater 1 out of 10 on TrustRadius in April 2017:

"They bury a 60 day auto-renewal in their terms of use, which is normally reserved for how to interact with the site not business terms."

Janet Van Pelt, CEO, CourseMaven Education Management, TrustRadius, 24 April 2017

Notice windows put the ball in your court. The date that matters sits 30 or 60 days before term end, and it goes in a calendar on signing day. Cancel Semrush, and the 90-day project deletion sends a lapsed workspace back to square one.

Switching vendors is a data migration. Prezly lists a contact importer on every plan, and Roxhill runs a "Switching Media Database?" page beside its media database onboarding.

Contact accuracy and data freshness

Database size is the accuracy proxy vendors publish. Cision claims more than 600,000 media profiles, Meltwater's G-Cloud card 450,000+ journalists and bloggers, and Anewstip "around 1 million journalists and media outlets" built from a social media and news archive of "More than 200 million articles and 1 billion tweets". Muck Rack's homepage calls its product "the industry's most accurate media database" with no count beside it.

Freshness decides if those profiles earn back the fee. Cision's 2025 State of the Media survey of more than 3,000 journalists in 19 markets found 86% say "they'll immediately reject a pitch that isn't aligned with their beat or audience". That's an overwhelming share, and a stale beat field sends a pitch straight into it. Every contact record is data that ages, because reporters change outlets, beats and email addresses between renewals.

Profile enrichment is the other half of the price. Prowly's page promises targeted media lists "with audience and traffic data", and Cision's Journalist Outreach package lists a "Talking About" search across what each reporter covers.

Users on both sides of the Cision and Meltwater price band report decayed records. An account director who left Cision for Meltwater over price wrote on Capterra:

"Often, every contact at a specific publication will be listed with the same generic contact email that's listed on the publication's website, making Meltwater's services essentially useless."

Verified Reviewer, Account Director, Marketing and Advertising, Capterra, 10 September 2019

The same reviewer put Meltwater's hit rate for "accurate, current contact information" at "about half the time". A museum marketing director wrote on Capterra in January 2019 that Meltwater "tends to have a good amount of media contacts that are out of date but that seems to be an issue accross the board."

Muck Rack reviews on Capterra describe the same decay:

"For the most part, Muck Rack does a good job of updating when reporters change jobs but there are times where the emails are old and don't work."

Verified Reviewer, Assistant Content Marketing Manager, Writing and Editing, Capterra, 30 August 2021

A PR account executive who moved to Muck Rack gave the reason in one line in November 2020: "The Contacts were not regularly updated on Cision." A real estate principal on a short Muck Rack contract wrote in September 2023 that "There was a high bounce back rate and never once did anyone ever respond." Bounce rate in the first campaigns is the red flag to check before a 30- or 60-day notice window closes.

Price the database per useful pitch, then. Anewstip Standard's 1,000 pitches a month cost $0.20 each at $2,400 a year, and Professional's 5,000 a month cost $0.08 each at $4,800. A list where half the beats are wrong halves the pitches that reach the right desk, which doubles the cost of each useful one.

Data quality also tracks the price tier. Cision, which advertises an in-house research team, sits in the quote-only tier at a $12,625 median; Anewstip builds its profiles from published articles and tweets and sells them from $2,400 a year. Better data quality costs about five times as much at the median.

What a solo PR, an agency and an enterprise comms team budget

Solo PR consultant: $0 to $2,400 a year

A solo practitioner can start on Anewstip Free or Qwoted Basic at $0, then move to Semrush Base at $1,788 a year or Anewstip Standard at $2,400. PRWeb's $120 Basic release is a drop in the bucket next to a $12,625 Cision median. Vendr's lowest tracked Cision contract, $3,150, sits $750 above Anewstip Standard, though the Cision median runs five times that Anewstip price.

Agency with three to five seats: $4,800 to about $16,400

Agencies pay for seats, client accounts, client reporting and collaboration across a client team. For example:

• Anewstip Professional: $4,800 a year for up to 5 users and unlimited lists of up to 5,000 contacts each, with the custom Partners plan above it for agencies that outgrow 5 seats.
• Semrush AI PR Toolkit Business: $5,988 a year, adding what Semrush calls "a strategic and competitive intelligence layer" with share-of-voice insights. Our competitive intelligence pricing report prices the standalone tools for that job.
• Muck Rack at Vendr's $13,000 median, or Roxhill's Boutique and Enterprise tiers with 3 and 5 logins, both by quote through a sales call.
• Prezly Standard at €3,000^* a year (about $3,381) as the CRM layer that stores client campaigns and contacts, which takes a Muck Rack median stack to about $16,381.

Enterprise comms team: $30,000 to $57,000 and up

For example, Meltwater's G-Cloud card prices a 10-user base licence plus the global journalist database at £30,680^* a year, about $40,732. Vendr's tracked highs sit at $30,368 for Cision, $55,624 for Notified and $56,993 for Meltwater. Enterprises that go the whole hog on regions, broadcast and social media monitoring and API access land at the top of those ranges, and Meltwater's pricing post puts its Enterprise tier above every one of them.

Comms operations teams at larger organizations also pay for the platform's support tier and the analytics around it, and both sit in the quote. Meltwater lists "onboarding and support needs" as a price input, so the data and reporting a team wants on day one belong in the first conversation with sales.

Building a free media list with a CRM and Zoho Analytics

A free CRM gives a solo PR a contact store built from scratch, and the beat research a database vendor sells stays manual. These tools were built to track customer interactions, so each journalist becomes a contact record in a CRM system with a custom beat field you create yourself. Five free editions cover the basics, from 1 to 15 user accounts:

• Zoho CRM: free for 3 users, with contact management, follow-up reminders, workflow automation and mobile apps.
• HubSpot CRM: free for up to two users, "with no expiration date".
• Bitrix24: free for 1 to 2 users, with 5 GB of storage and a basic CRM for deals and contacts.
• EngageBay: free for teams of up to 15 members and 250 contacts, with a "360 degree contact view".
• Zoho Analytics: a free data analytics plan for 2 users and 10,000 rows, with unlimited reports and dashboards for coverage reporting.

Paid CRMs start low and sell customer pipelines by the seat. Freshsales Growth costs $9 per user a month billed annually on its pricing page, with the Freddy AI agent sold as an add-on at $49 per 100 sessions, and Pipedrive, which has no free plan, starts at $14 per seat on Lite.

The trade is data preparation. Coverage exports have to be cleaned, deduplicated and joined to the contact list before any data analysis shows a trend, and that data preparation process is the hours a paid platform replaces. The steps transform a raw export into rows that connect each journalist to the coverage they wrote, and Zoho Analytics can then create dashboards from that data.

Zoho says Zoho Analytics can "import billion rows of data" and uses incremental fetch to bring in "only the new and updated records", per its database connector page. Zoho Analytics integrates with 50+ business applications, Zoho CRM among them, and ships Ask Zia, an assistant that can answer questions about the data typed in plain language. Seat-by-seat prices for Zoho, HubSpot and other CRM vendors are in our CRM software cost report.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a media database cost?

Published plans run from $0 (Anewstip Free) to $499 a month (Semrush AI PR Toolkit Business). Quote-only databases cost $12,625 a year at Cision's Vendr median, $13,000 at Muck Rack's and $25,800 at Meltwater's.

Which media database is the cheapest?

Anewstip Free costs $0 and hides email addresses and phone numbers. The cheapest paid plan with contact details is Semrush AI PR Toolkit Base at $149 a month, $51 under Anewstip Standard.

Can I create my own media database for free?

Yes, inside a free CRM. Zoho CRM's free edition covers 3 users and HubSpot's free CRM covers 2, and Zoho Analytics adds free dashboards for 10,000 rows of coverage data.

Does Muck Rack publish its pricing?

Muck Rack quotes every deal. Its pricing page lists Starter, Standard and Premier with a request form, and Vendr's 80 tracked purchases put the median at $13,000 a year.

What's the best software to store journalists' names and contact details?

A PR CRM such as Prezly stores up to 5,000 contacts for €100^* a month. A full media database such as Cision or Muck Rack adds the journalist research on top, from a $12,625 median a year.

Bottom line

Media database pricing runs on two price lists: published plans that top out at $5,988 a year, and quote-only contracts whose Vendr medians start at $12,625. The jump between them buys a research team's claims on contact freshness, bundled monitoring and, for agencies, more seats.

The year-two bill comes from the terms. Cision's 5% uplift and 30-day window, Meltwater's 60 days and Muck Rack's no-refund clause decide what a team pays once the first invoice clears, and the notice date belongs in a calendar on signing day.

Price any shortlist per useful pitch. A database that cuts corners on beat data and sends half its pitches to the wrong desk costs double its sticker, at $2,400 a year or at $25,800.