7 Best Hey Press Alternatives for Startup Founders in 2026

Hey Press's core feature was journalist discovery by topic, letting founders find relevant press contacts without paying for an enterprise database. That feature no longer exists as an independent product. Anewstip does the same job, still exists, and still tells you its price up front: a free plan with real search access, not just a signup gate.

The difference from a static contact list is the signal layer. Anewstip indexes over 200 million articles and a billion tweets, so a search surfaces journalists based on what they have written and posted recently rather than what their masthead said last year. The free plan includes two media lists and basic search; Standard at $200/month unlocks 1,000 pitches, email and phone access, and 20 alerts. A $99/month solo PR pro discount plan is available to eligible applicants, and API access ships on Professional ($400/month, billed annually) and Partners tiers.

For a founder who liked what Hey Press used to offer and just wants it to still work, Anewstip is the closest match in this list. It is not identical: Twitter-based signals lose value as journalists spend less time there, and the pricing page 404s on a direct URL. But between the free tier and the $99/month discount plan, it is the most direct proactive-search replacement without going through JournoFinder.

Hey Press's own FAQ made a point of separating itself from HARO: Hey Press was outbound, helping you find and pitch a journalist directly, while HARO-style tools are inbound, putting journalist queries in front of you. Hey Press called the two complementary, not interchangeable. Now that the outbound half is gone, the inbound half still stands on its own, and Source of Sources is the plainest version of it.

Peter Shankman, who built HARO before selling it to Cision, runs Source of Sources as a free digest: up to three emails a day with journalist queries, no login, no dashboard, no search or filtering. You reply straight to the journalist from the email. The only enforcement is a strict no-spam rule; pitch off-topic and Shankman removes you from the list with no appeal.

This will not replace what Hey Press did. There is no way to search for a journalist by topic, no analytics, and no way to know if your query volume is any good before you subscribe. But it costs nothing and takes thirty seconds to join, which makes it a reasonable standing channel to run alongside a paid discovery tool like Anewstip, rather than a substitute for one.

Hey Press served founders anywhere who wanted press without an agency. SourceBottle accepts sign-ups from any country, but most of its journalist call-outs and media relationships run through Australia. A founder outside that market gets the free inbound half of what Hey Press offered, just with thinner call-out volume than a US- or UK-focused tool.

The free Expert Profile gets you listed in a searchable directory and onto the call-out alert emails at no cost. What sets SourceBottle apart is the paid layer above that: a human on SourceBottle's team actually reads incoming call-outs and pitches your profile for you, rather than leaving you to spot and respond on your own. No Pitch No Pay costs $25 per pitch with a cap of three a month, Unlimited Pitches is $65/month, and Agency at $130/month covers up to five Expert Profiles.

For a founder who liked that Hey Press did the finding for them, SourceBottle's pay-per-pitch model is the closest equivalent on the human side: you are not paying a subscription for quiet months. Just weigh the Australian skew before counting on it as a primary channel if your market is the US or Europe.

Hey Press never ran a marketplace. Qwoted flips the mechanic entirely: journalists and podcasters post what they need, and you respond, so the founder is not searching for a journalist at all, just watching for a matching request. It is a genuinely different model from what Hey Press offered, not a copy of it.

The free Basic plan includes the expert database, daily opportunity emails, and real-time alerts, though free-tier alerts arrive with a two-hour delay versus paid tiers. Pro at $149/month removes that delay and raises the pitch cap to 35 a month. Teams adds an admin dashboard and white-label presentation for agencies, at custom pricing. There is no API on any tier, and Qwoted has run since 2017, built by people from media backgrounds.

A founder testing the marketplace model can sit on Basic for a while before deciding whether the two-hour alert delay is costing them stories. It is not a replacement for proactive outreach the way Anewstip or Press Hunt are, but as a second channel that requires almost no ongoing effort, it earns its spot.

Hey Press positioned itself explicitly for founders doing their own PR, not corporate PR departments, with testimonials pulled from startup founders rather than agency directors. Featured occupies almost the same audience today, but wrapped in an AI chat interface with a scope Hey Press never had even at its peak: journalist requests, podcast bookings, speaking opportunities, bylined articles, and AI-search visibility tracking, all in one place.

The free tier is real, and pricing is transparent at $29/month Lite and $79/month Pro, both billed annually, with the daily AI usage allowance being the main thing that scales between tiers. GEO Visibility, which tracks how your brand and expertise show up in AI-generated search responses, ships on every plan including free, not gated as an enterprise add-on. Automated workflows run in the background and alert you by email, Slack, or SMS on paid tiers.

What Featured does not do is proactive outreach: it surfaces inbound opportunities rather than helping you search for and cold-pitch a journalist the way Hey Press once did. For a founder who wants one dashboard that covers earned media and AI-search visibility together, Featured is probably the closest thing to a modern successor in spirit to what Hey Press was trying to be, even though the underlying mechanic is inbound, not outbound.

Press Hunt is the scaled-up, paid version of what Hey Press used to do for founders: describe who you want to reach and get back a list of matching journalists. The gap between them is the checkbook. Hey Press leaned on being accessible and low-friction for founders; Press Hunt charges $249/month with no free trial and only a limited preview of results before you pay.

What that price buys is scale and speed: 580,000+ journalist profiles and 10,000+ podcasts, searchable by interests, industry, outlet, and social activity, plus AI-powered list generation that turns a plain-language description like "startup journalists who cover Series A raises in fintech" into a targeted list. Bulk selection and unlimited CSV export are included at the Startup tier. There is no outreach, pitch tracking, or CRM built in, and no API on any plan, so exported lists still need a separate email tool.

Worth the price if you need a big, fast database and can absorb $249/month before you have proof it works. Skip it if you are pre-revenue and want the free, lean approach the original Hey Press was built around; Anewstip or Source of Sources fit that budget better.

Hey Press's own listing calls out no newsroom or content publishing capability as a straight weakness. Prezly is built entirely around the piece Hey Press never had: a permanent, branded, indexed newsroom where every press release you publish keeps earning organic views from Google and AI search engines long after the pitch campaign ends, plus a CRM to track the journalist relationships you build along the way.

Prezly does not include a media database, so it is not a discovery tool the way Hey Press was; you bring your own contacts and Prezly manages them. Essential runs 100 EUR/month for one user and one site with up to 5,000 contacts, and includes a 14-day free trial with no credit card. Standard at 250 EUR/month adds a custom domain, white-label newsrooms, localization, and 10,000 contacts. Full campaign analytics and coverage tracking are included on every paid plan, not held back for Enterprise.

Not a fit for a founder who just wants to find journalists, which is the exact problem Hey Press used to solve. It is the right next step once you already have a contact list, built through Anewstip or Press Hunt or years of relationship-building, and want somewhere permanent to publish and a system to track what happens after you hit send.