Two press release distributors, two entry packages, one identical number on the price tag. eReleases starts at $399 a release. Newswire.com also starts at $399 a release. If you were shopping on price alone you would flip a coin, and you would be making the decision on the one axis where these two products are indistinguishable.
Everything that matters about this comparison sits behind that number. One of these $399 releases is capped at 400 words and charges you $150 for every extra hundred. The other one gives you unlimited words and unlimited images at the same price. One of them puts your release on the national Cision PR Newswire circuit. The other one, at the $399 tier, does not. Neither of those facts is visible from the price.
I priced both from the companies’ own pricing pages on 9 September 2026 and I have put every figure below with the URL I pulled it from. Nothing here is carried over from an older post or from a third party summary, because press release pricing moves and half the figures floating around this category are two years stale.
Affiliate disclosure. The eReleases links on this page are affiliate links and pay this site a commission if you buy through them. The 24-7 Press Release link further down is also monetised. The links to Newswire.com, PRWeb and EIN Presswire are plain links to those companies and pay us nothing at all. I am telling you that up front because the service that pays us is the more expensive one in this comparison for most real releases, and for a lot of store owners it is not the right answer. The Shopify, Bizee and Hiscox links in the closing section are affiliate links too and they pay this site.
Both price lists, exactly as published
Start with what each company prints on its own page. No interpretation yet, just the numbers.
eReleases, per release
Verified at ereleases.com/pricing on 9 September 2026. These are per release prices, not a subscription.
| Package | Price | Words | Industry target lists | Images |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| eReleases Buzz Builder | $399 | 400 | 1 | 2 |
| eReleases Newsmaker | $499 | 500 | 2 | 2 |
| eReleases PR Pro | $699 | 600 | 3 | 2 |
All three tiers include national distribution through Cision PR Newswire, access to what eReleases describes as more than 100,000 journalists, and WireWatch reporting. PR Pro adds the Cision Influencer List, which is a direct to journalist email send rather than a wire placement.
eReleases also prints a “PR Newswire value” next to each package: $1,145 on Buzz Builder, $1,510 on Newsmaker, and $1,875 plus an influencer list valued at as much as $785 on PR Pro. Those are eReleases’ own marketing comparison against buying the equivalent directly from Cision. They are not an independent valuation and I would not weight them in a buying decision.
Newswire.com, per release
Verified at newswire.com/pricing on 9 September 2026. Also per release. There is no subscription, membership or monthly plan shown anywhere on that pricing page, which is worth stating plainly because Newswire.com has sold subscription style bundles in the past and older comparisons still describe it that way.
| Package | Price | Words and images | Stated monthly reader reach |
|---|---|---|---|
| Newswire.com Starter | $399 | Unlimited | 6 million to 10 million |
| Newswire.com State Distribution | $599 | Unlimited | Not stated as a range |
| Newswire.com Basic | $659 | Unlimited | 75 million to 100 million |
| Newswire.com Feature | $965 | Unlimited | 150 million to 200 million |
Newswire.com states on that page that its prices cover unlimited words and images across the packages. The reader reach figures are the company’s own audience estimates for the networks each tier hits, and like every reach number in this industry they describe potential eyeballs on a syndication network, not people who read your release.
The $399 collision, and what each one actually buys
Here is the comparison nobody makes, because it requires reading past the headline number on both pages at once.
At $399, eReleases puts a 400 word release onto the national Cision PR Newswire circuit and gives you one industry target list. That is a specific, named, expensive distribution network, and it is the entire reason eReleases can charge what it charges. The company resells Cision distribution. It is not the wire itself, and anyone who tells you eReleases “is” PR Newswire has skipped a step, but the circuit your release lands on at that price is the real one.
At $399, Newswire.com Starter puts an unlimited length release with unlimited images onto what the company describes as Digital Journal and its online news and media distribution, with a stated reach of 6 million to 10 million monthly readers. AP News does not appear until the $659 Basic tier. The national wire syndication that eReleases sells at its entry price is not what you are buying at Newswire.com’s entry price.
So the honest framing is this. The two $399 packages are not competing on the same axis at all. One is buying circuit quality and rationing your word count. The other is buying length and flexibility and rationing your circuit. Which one is worth $399 depends entirely on whether the circuit or the release is the constrained part of your launch, and most store owners have never asked themselves that question.
Words and images, where the structures actually diverge
This is where the two price lists stop being comparable and start being opposites.
eReleases prices words. Buzz Builder is 400 words. Every additional block of 100 words costs $150. Adding a second industry target list costs $150. Local saturation costs $150. Image embedding costs $150. A YouTube video embed costs $200. International distribution runs $150 per country or $1,000 for global. If you want eReleases to write the release for you, that is $300. Every one of those figures is per release and every one of them is on the pricing page I linked above.
Newswire.com does not price words at all. Its pricing page says the prices cover unlimited words and images at every tier. If your release runs to 900 words with four product photographs, that is the same $399 as a 300 word release with one.
Run a realistic release through both and the gap opens immediately. Say you have a 700 word product launch release with a short YouTube demo video, which is a completely ordinary shape for an ecommerce launch.
| Line item | eReleases Buzz Builder | Newswire.com Starter |
|---|---|---|
| Base package | $399 | $399 |
| Words 401 to 700 | $300 for three blocks of 100 | Included, unlimited |
| YouTube video embed | $200 | Not published on the pricing page |
| Running total | $899 | $399 |
That is not a criticism of eReleases so much as a description of how its pricing works. The advertised $399 is a floor, not a price, and the add on ladder is the single most useful thing to understand before you buy. I go through the whole ladder in detail in the eReleases pricing breakdown, including a worked example that takes a $499 package past $1,100.
The counterweight is real and I am not going to bury it. That $899 release lands on the national Cision circuit. The $399 Newswire.com release does not. If the circuit is what you came for, you are comparing $899 against $659, because $659 is the Newswire.com tier that names AP News, and even then you are comparing two different networks rather than the same one at two prices.
Buying the national Cision circuit, not the cheapest wire
eReleases starts at $399 for 400 words with national Cision PR Newswire distribution, and first time customers save 30 percent. Keep the release short and the add on ladder never fires. No distributor, including this one, can guarantee a journalist writes anything.
What each one actually distributes to
Reach numbers are the least trustworthy figures in this industry, so ignore them and read the network names instead. Network names are checkable. Reach estimates are not.
eReleases names Cision PR Newswire on every tier. That is the largest commercial wire in the United States and it is the reason the entry price sits where it does. It also names journalist access and WireWatch reporting, and on PR Pro it adds the Cision Influencer List for direct email to journalists.
Newswire.com names Digital Journal and its own online news and media network on Starter, adds AP News and Digital Journal on Basic, and adds AP News, Yahoo, Nexstar and what it describes as major outlets on Feature. State Distribution at $599 targets regional news outlets, local television stations and state digital publications, which is a genuinely different product rather than a cheaper version of the same one.
That State Distribution tier deserves a mention on its own. If your store is regional, if you sell something with a physical showroom or an installation footprint, or if your news is genuinely local, a $599 state targeted release may do more for you than a $965 national one. eReleases sells local saturation as a $150 add on rather than as a package, which is the cheaper route to the same idea if you are already buying eReleases.
The AP News question
AP News shows up constantly in press release marketing and it is worth being precise about what it means, because three companies in this category advertise it at three wildly different prices.
Newswire.com names AP News from the $659 Basic tier. EIN Presswire names AP News, Nexstar Media Group and the USA TODAY Network on every one of its plans, and its entry plan is $149 with a fifteen release bundle that works out at $66.60 a release. eReleases does not lead with AP News at all, because its pitch is the Cision circuit.
What that tells you is that “AP News distribution” is not one product with one price. It describes a family of syndication arrangements of varying depth, and the fact that one company charges $659 for it and another charges $149 should make you suspicious of treating the phrase as a spec. I compared the EIN Presswire structure against eReleases in detail in the eReleases against EIN Presswire comparison, including the bundle expiry clause that quietly raises the real per release price.
The discount and the guarantee
eReleases publishes a 30 percent discount for first time customers. On Buzz Builder that takes a first release from $399 to $279.30, which changes the shape of this comparison for exactly one purchase and then never again. If you are testing the category with a single release, that discount is the strongest argument on this page for starting with eReleases.
eReleases also states that bulk pricing is available at two or more releases. The actual bulk rates are not published, so I am not going to estimate them. If volume is your plan, you have to ask, and you should ask before you buy the first one.
On the guarantee, read the wording carefully. eReleases says it will not distribute your press release until you are satisfied with the copy. That is a satisfaction guarantee on the writing, and it is a real and useful thing. It is not a refund guarantee on distribution and it is emphatically not a guarantee of results. Anybody describing it as a money back guarantee has not read the sentence.
Newswire.com does not publish a first time discount or a satisfaction guarantee on its pricing page. Not published means not published, not absent.
What is not published on either page
Both pricing pages leave gaps, and knowing where the gaps are is most of what protects you at checkout.
| Question | eReleases | Newswire.com |
|---|---|---|
| Word allowance | Published, 400 to 600 by tier | Published, unlimited |
| Cost of extra words | $150 per 100 word block | Not applicable |
| Video embedding | $200 | Not published |
| International distribution | $150 per country, $1,000 global | Not published |
| Volume or bulk rates | Available at 2 or more, rates not published | Not published |
| First time discount | 30 percent | Not published |
| Writing service | $300 | Not published |
The pattern is consistent. eReleases publishes an itemised menu and lets you build your own invoice, which is more transparent than it first appears once you accept that the headline is a starting point. Newswire.com publishes a flatter, simpler package price and says less about what sits outside it. Neither approach is dishonest. They just fail in different directions, and the failure mode you care about depends on how unusual your release is.
Which structure fits which store
Strip the marketing off both and the decision comes down to four questions about your own situation.
How long is your release actually going to be? If you can genuinely say what you need to say in 400 words, eReleases at $399 is a clean purchase and the add on ladder never fires. If your release runs long because you have specifications, pricing tiers or a founder quote you refuse to cut, every hundred words costs $150 and Newswire.com’s unlimited allowance starts winning on arithmetic alone.
Do you specifically need the national Cision circuit? Some situations genuinely require it. Fundraising announcements, anything a regulated counterparty will diligence, anything where a lawyer or an investor will ask which wire it went out on. If that is you, eReleases at $399 is the cheapest published route onto that circuit that I could find, and Newswire.com does not sell it at any tier.
Is your news regional? Newswire.com State Distribution at $599 is a purpose built product for that. eReleases sells local saturation as a $150 add on. Both work. The eReleases route is cheaper if you also want the national circuit underneath it.
Is this one release or the start of a habit? One release, eReleases with the 30 percent first time discount is hard to beat at $279.30. A release every month for a year, and you are in bundle territory, which is where neither of these two is the obvious answer.
Short release, national circuit, one purchase
A 400 word release on Buzz Builder is $399, or $279.30 with the published 30 percent first time discount, and it goes out on national Cision PR Newswire. Write it tight and nothing on the add on ladder fires. Distribution buys placement on a wire, never coverage.
Where a cheaper option beats both
I am not going to pretend this is a two horse race, because for a lot of the people reading this it is not even a race worth entering at these prices.
PRWeb starts at $120 a news release and picks up syndication to what it describes as a network of more than 1,200 websites powered by PR Newswire from its $245 Standard tier. It is a Cision property, which is why the same syndication language appears on both its page and the eReleases page. PRWeb does not publish word counts anywhere on its pricing page, so I cannot compare it to eReleases on length and neither can anyone else.
EIN Presswire starts at $149 for a single release and drops to $66.60 a release on the fifteen release Corporate bundle. Those bundles are annual, and the page states that press releases may be issued within one year from the date of purchase, so an unused bundle expires and the real per release price rises accordingly.
24-7 Press Release Newswire starts at $29 for a simple posting and runs up to $479 for its Mass Media Visibility tier, which is the only one of its packages that names PR Newswire national distribution. That is a genuinely wide ladder and the bottom of it is cheap enough to test with.
If you want the whole category priced side by side rather than two of them, the ranked breakdown of press release distribution services covers every distributor in this post plus the ones that do not publish prices at all.
What neither of them sells you
This is the part that gets skipped in every comparison of this kind, and it is the part that decides whether you should be spending this money at all.
Neither eReleases nor Newswire.com sells media coverage. Neither sells a journalist writing about your store. Neither sells backlinks that will move your rankings, and neither sells an outcome of any kind. What you are buying is placement on a distribution network. Whether a human being reads it, cares about it and writes something is entirely outside the contract, and any service that implies otherwise is selling you something it cannot deliver.
The syndicated copies of your release that appear on aggregator sites are typically not the kind of links that carry weight, and a wire placement is not a substitute for a pitch. What distribution genuinely does buy you is a permanent, citable, dated record of your announcement in places that journalists and buyers search, and for some businesses that is worth $399 by itself. Just be clear that is what you are buying.
If you have not written the release yet, write it before you shop for distribution, because the length of the finished draft determines which of these two is cheaper for you. The guide to writing an ecommerce press release a journalist will actually open covers the structure and the headline, and it is honest about when the right answer is not to buy distribution at all.
Running the business behind the store
A press release is only worth sending if there is a real business behind it, and the fastest way to have news worth announcing is to be selling something with enough margin that a launch matters. Our list of high ticket niches is the starting point most store owners should work through before they spend anything on distribution.
If you are earlier than that, the explanation of what high ticket dropshipping actually is covers the model, the margins and the reasons it survives when thin margin dropshipping does not.
Supplier relationships are the part that decides whether you have anything worth announcing. Our step by step guide to finding high ticket suppliers walks through sourcing, approval and the terms that matter.
Before you put a company name in a boilerplate paragraph, make sure the company exists properly. Our guide to business formation for high ticket dropshipping covers entity choice and the filings that come with it.
The stack most of our readers run is straightforward. Shopify runs the storefront. Bizee handles the LLC filing and the registered agent.
Once you are shipping real orders and taking real money, Hiscox is the general liability cover most small stores end up on.
If you would rather have the whole thing built for you, we offer a done for you high ticket dropshipping build and launch service.
Frequently asked questions
Is Newswire.com cheaper than eReleases?
At the entry tier they are identical at $399 per release. Newswire.com becomes cheaper the longer your release is, because its packages include unlimited words and images while eReleases charges $150 for every additional 100 word block above its 400 word Buzz Builder allowance. A 700 word release with a video embed is $899 on eReleases Buzz Builder against $399 on Newswire.com Starter.
Does Newswire.com use PR Newswire?
Its pricing page does not name PR Newswire on any tier. It names Digital Journal on Starter, AP News and Digital Journal on Basic, and AP News, Yahoo and Nexstar on Feature. eReleases distributes through Cision PR Newswire on all three of its packages.
Does Newswire.com sell a monthly subscription?
Not on the pricing page I checked on 9 September 2026. Every package listed there is priced per release. Older comparisons that describe Newswire.com as a monthly subscription product are describing a structure that is not on the current page.
What is the cheapest way onto the national Cision circuit?
Of the services that publish prices, eReleases Buzz Builder at $399 is the cheapest package that puts a release on national Cision PR Newswire distribution, and $279.30 with the published 30 percent first time discount. PRWeb picks up PR Newswire powered syndication to more than 1,200 websites from $245, but that syndication network is not the same product as the national circuit.
Does eReleases publish bulk pricing?
No. eReleases states that bulk pricing is available at two or more releases but the rates are not published. You have to ask for them, and it is worth asking before you buy a single release at full price.
Will either service get my store media coverage?
No distributor can promise that, and neither of these does. You are buying placement on a distribution network. Whether a journalist reads your release and writes about your store is not something any wire service controls or guarantees, and any service that hints otherwise is overselling.
If the Cision circuit is what you need
Three packages at $399, $499 and $699, all on national Cision PR Newswire, with a published 30 percent first time discount and a satisfaction guarantee that covers the copy only. Bulk rates exist at two or more releases but are not published, so ask before you buy.
Related Articles
eReleases Pricing 2026: The Add On Ladder That Doubles the Headline
How Much Does a Press Release Cost in 2026? Every Wire Priced
eReleases vs EIN Presswire 2026: $399 a Release or $66.60
eReleases Alternatives 2026: Same Wire, Very Different Prices
How to Get Press Coverage for a Product Launch: The Six Week Timeline
Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.
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