You need PR. You can't justify $30K a month. Here are your real options.

If you're running a growth-stage tech company, you already know PR matters. Investors read press. Candidates Google the company. Customers trust third-party coverage more than your marketing. The data is unambiguous: companies with strategic communications programs raise faster, hire better, and close deals with more credibility than those building in silence.

The problem is access. A top-tier PR agency costs $25,000 to $90,000 per month and takes four to eight weeks to ramp. Even then, you'll spend 15 to 20 hours a month in meetings, briefings, and review cycles. For a Series A company with 20 people trying to ship product, that math rarely works.

So what are the actual alternatives? This guide lays out the real options: what each costs, what each delivers, and where the tradeoffs are.

Option 1: Do it yourself (founder-led PR)

Cost: Your time
Typical output: Inconsistent, opportunistic coverage
Time commitment: 5 to 15 hours per week, if you actually do it

Some founders are natural storytellers and can generate early press through personal network, Twitter presence, and direct journalist outreach. This works for specific moments: a launch, a fundraise, a milestone. It does not work as a sustained program. PR is the task that always loses to product and sales, and most founders know it.

Best for: Pre-seed and seed companies with a founder who has existing media relationships.
Limitation: Not scalable. Stops the moment the founder gets busy, which is always.

Option 2: Hire a junior comms person

Cost: $6,000 to $8,000 per month fully loaded
Typical output: Basic media outreach, social content, press release drafting
Time commitment: Management overhead (hiring, training, 1:1s, review cycles)

A common move at Series A: hire a marketing generalist who "also does comms." The reality is that a junior hire takes six months to ramp, needs constant direction, and produces output that reflects their experience level. They can maintain a basic cadence but rarely have the strategic depth or media relationships to drive tier-one coverage.

Best for: Companies that need ongoing content and basic media coordination, with a senior leader who can provide strategic direction.
Limitation: You're paying for capacity at a junior level. The strategic gap persists.

Option 3: Freelance or fractional PR consultant

Cost: $5,000 to $15,000 per month
Typical output: Strategic guidance, media outreach, pitch development
Time commitment: 5 to 10 hours per month of your time

An experienced freelance PR consultant brings senior judgment without agency overhead. The good ones have deep media relationships and can drive meaningful coverage. The tradeoff is capacity: a solo consultant is one person, and their bandwidth is finite. They can be strategic, or they can be prolific. Rarely both.

Best for: Companies that need senior strategic guidance and have internal capacity to execute.
Limitation: Single point of failure. Coverage, competitive monitoring, content, and awards are more than one person can sustain.

Option 4: PR tools and software (DIY with technology)

Cost: $500 to $3,000 per month for tools (Cision, Muck Rack, Propel, Prowly, etc.)
Typical output: Media databases, monitoring dashboards, pitch templates
Time commitment: 10 to 20 hours per week to actually use them

PR tools give you access to journalist databases, media monitoring, and workflow management. They make individual tasks faster. They do not do the work. You still need someone to define the strategy, write the pitches, build the media lists, track the coverage, and connect it all to business outcomes. Tools optimize fragments of the workflow. They don't replace the expertise behind it.

As we wrote in our analysis of what AI is actually changing in PR: tools optimize fragments of work. Infrastructure reshapes how work moves. Most PR tools are the former, not the latter.

Best for: Companies with an experienced comms person who needs better infrastructure to work faster.
Limitation: Tools without expertise produce activity without strategy. Ninety-one percent of PR professionals use generative AI, but 50% cite it as a top challenge (Cision Inside PR 2026). The tools exist. Making them work as a system is the hard part.

Option 5: AI-native PR agency

Cost: $8,000 to $15,000 per month (Shadow)
Typical output: Full-service PR: strategy, media relations, content, awards, competitive intelligence, AI visibility
Time commitment: Less than 2 hours per month

This is the category Shadow created. An AI-native PR agency delivers the full scope of a top-tier firm, not by assembling a team of 6 to 8 people on your account, but by deploying AI agents that execute end-to-end PR workflows with human oversight at every decision point. The agents do the work. Humans oversee, approve, and handle the moments that require judgment and relationships.

Shadow is trusted by some of the best PR agencies in the world, firms serving companies like OpenAI, Netflix, and Roblox. That same standard of strategic rigor is what Shadow brings to every direct client engagement. The result: agency-grade output, live in a week, at a fraction of the cost, with virtually no ramp time.

Best for: Growth-stage tech companies that need full-service PR but can't justify a traditional agency retainer. Founders who want coverage tied to pipeline, not impressions.
Limitation: Journalist relationships at the deepest level (the kind built over years of in-person trust) are still a human strength. Shadow handles this through its agency network and by surfacing opportunities that human relationship-holders can act on.

The comparison at a glance

What should a Series A startup budget for PR?

The honest answer depends on what you need. A common starting range for a Series A company:

• Bare minimum (DIY + tools): $500 to $1,500/month in tools, plus significant founder or team time. Suitable for companies that can wait for a sustained program.

• Mid-range (fractional consultant or AI-native agency): $8,000 to $15,000/month for professional-grade PR without traditional agency overhead. This is where most growth-stage companies find the best return: senior-quality output at a price that doesn't require board approval.

• Full-service (traditional agency): $25,000+ per month. Appropriate for companies with the budget and the executive time to manage the relationship. Increasingly rare at Series A.

The question isn't just how much to spend. It's how much of your time you're willing to invest. A traditional agency costs more in dollars and in hours. An AI-native agency like Shadow costs less of both.

Frequently asked questions

Can an AI PR agency really match a traditional agency's quality?

Shadow is trusted by some of the best PR agencies in the world, firms that serve companies like OpenAI and Roblox. The quality standard of the work speaks for itself. When we deliver direct client engagements, the same strategic rigor applies. The quality ceiling is set by the best firms in the industry. The cost floor is set by AI's economics.

What about media relationships?

Shadow maintains a media contact network that refreshes weekly with coverage changes, beat moves, and pitch preferences. For relationship-intensive placements, Shadow surfaces the right opportunities and prepares the materials; human relationship-holders (whether at the client's company or through Shadow's agency network) handle the personal touchpoints.

How fast can Shadow get results?

Shadow is live in a week. Not "onboarded in a week and ramped by month three." Producing work, delivering research, and building strategy within the first week. The persistent context model means Shadow's output gets meaningfully better with every week of engagement: the 50th day is exponentially more informed than the first.

Last updated: February 24th, 2026