Free plans, free trials and free tools
A free plan is a product you can use indefinitely within limits. A free trial is the paid product for a fixed number of days, usually with a card or a sales call at the end. A free tool answers one question, such as whether ChatGPT mentions you, and is there to introduce you to the paid thing. All three are useful, but only a free plan lets you run PR for nothing.
What is free, and for how long
| What you need | Free option | How long | Where it runs out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monitoring your coverage and sector | Agentcy Free (one brand); Google Alerts | No limit | Trade press coverage, relevance scoring, story grouping (Alerts); 30 tracked pieces a month (Agentcy) |
| A place to keep journalist contacts | Agentcy Free (500 contacts); a spreadsheet | No limit | Finding new contacts; 500 then 1,000 on Core |
| Sending tracked pitches from your own mailbox | Agentcy Free (50 a month) | No limit | 200 on Core, unlimited on Pro |
| A monitoring and database suite | Trials: Brand24 and Prezly 14 days, CoverageBook 30 days, Semrush AI PR Toolkit 7 days | Days | The trial ends; Muck Rack, Cision and Meltwater offer a demo, not a trial |
| Coverage reporting | CoverageBook trial (30 days); a spreadsheet | Days | Reporting is paid everywhere after the trial |
| Checking AI visibility | Agentcy's checker; HubSpot AI Search Grader | One-off | Weekly tracking and accuracy checks are paid |
| Sending a release | Your own email | No limit | Wires charge per release; free distribution sites reach nobody |
Trial lengths are from each vendor's pricing page on 13 October 2026; see what PR software costs for the sources.
Who a free plan suits
It suits a founder or a one-person marketing team at a B2B company who wants to see its coverage and its sector's news in one place and pitch a handful of journalists a month. That's a real PR programme, and plenty of companies run it for a year before they need more.
It stops being enough when a second person needs a login, when you want help drafting or when the board starts asking what ChatGPT says about you.
Where Agentcy fits
Agentcy's free plan has no time limit. One brand gets news intelligence and the Morning Briefing, a 500-contact journalist CRM, press lists and 50 tracked sends a month, and you sign up with a company email address. Paid plans start at $269/month. Start free.
Questions
Is there a free journalist database?
There's no serious free journalist database, because the database is the most expensive part of every PR suite and nobody gives it away. What you can get free is a CRM to keep the journalists you find yourself. Agentcy's free plan holds 500 contacts in five press lists, and if you bring your own lists, we'll enrich them. Paid databases start higher, with the Semrush AI PR Toolkit's 600,000-plus profiles from $149 a month (13 October 2026). ResponseSource works the other way round and sends you journalists' requests, from £625 a year per category.
Is there free media monitoring?
Free media monitoring mostly means Google Alerts, which costs nothing and misses most trade press, with no relevance scoring or story grouping. Agentcy's free plan doesn't find your coverage for you, since media monitoring is on Pro, but it does read your sector's news for one brand, scores each article for relevance and sends the Morning Briefing before the day starts. You can log up to 30 pieces of your own coverage a month on it. Brand24 gives a 14-day trial with no card, and Muck Rack, Cision and Meltwater offer a demo and no trial at all.
Can I send a press release free?
You can send a press release free by emailing it yourself to the journalists who cover your sector, which is where most coverage comes from anyway. Free distribution sites such as PRLog and openPR exist, but almost nobody who'd write about you reads them. A paid UK wire costs from £85 a release at ResponseSource, or £675 for ten, plus VAT. On Agentcy's free plan, 50 sends a month go from your own mailbox, and every open and click is recorded against the contact.
Is there a free AI visibility checker?
Free AI visibility checkers exist, though regular tracking costs money unless you host it yourself. Agentcy's checker asks AI assistants the questions a buyer in your category would ask and shows whether you're named, which competitors appear instead and which sources the answers cite. It gives the first result without an email address. HubSpot's AI Search Grader gives a one-off score for free. One check is a snapshot, because assistants vary their answers from run to run, and the cheapest paid tracker we found is Rankscale Essentials at $20 a month billed yearly.
What is the catch with a free plan?
The catch with a free plan is the limits, while a free trial has a clock and often a sales call at the end. Agentcy's free plan has no time limit and needs no card, and caps what you can do instead. It covers one user and one brand, 30 pieces of coverage a month, 500 contacts and 50 tracked sends. You need a company email address, because the plan sets itself up from your domain. Once a second person needs a login, you'll need Core.
Try it on one brand, free
You can set up one brand in an afternoon and see what it finds. Paid plans are monthly, and you can stop whenever you like.