HARO Alternatives (2026): What Actually Replaced It

The short answer to does HARO still exist is yes, though not in the form most people remember, and is HARO free right now is also yes, with no login required.

HARO (Help a Reporter Out) connects journalists who need expert quotes with the sources who pitch them, and whether the search was for HARO alternatives or the longer help a reporter out alternatives phrasing, the market reshuffled twice since its original heyday: every price below is checked today, not copied from an old roundup.

It opens with what actually happened to HARO, then groups every real alternative into three buckets: free feeds, paid pitch platforms and guaranteed placement, so the platform chosen fits the reader's own volume and budget.

Is HARO actually gone? The verified timeline

HARO shut down as Connectively on December 9, 2024, then came back as a free service under new owner Featured.com in April 2025.

"Gone" and "current" are both wrong answers here, depending on which HARO someone means.

The ownership chain explains why:

• 2008: Peter Shankman founds HARO.
• June 2010: Vocus, Inc. acquires HARO.
• 2014: Vocus merges into Cision.
• 2024: Cision rebrands the platform Connectively.
• December 9, 2024: Cision discontinues Connectively permanently.
• April 16, 2025: Featured.com acquires HARO from Cision and revives it as a free service.

Recommending Connectively today means recommending a service that no longer exists. Searching for connectively alternatives is searching for the wrong thing entirely: the service to compare against is the free, revived HARO, not its discontinued predecessor.

That free, revived HARO is what people mean today, open to both sources and journalists in the same daily-email format the original ran on.

It is not Connectively. And, as the pricing section below explains, it is not Featured.com's own paid product either.

Plenty of teams built a b2b seo strategy around the backlinks HARO pitches used to produce, which is exactly why this timeline matters before choosing anything below it.

Should you just go back to free HARO?

Free HARO is enough for a source who needs a handful of placements a month and can tolerate missing most queries.

It stops being enough once the daily digest's lack of filtering becomes the bottleneck. The price was never the real constraint.

The revived HARO costs nothing and asks nothing beyond reading an email. Its format is the catch: one daily digest, every query for every industry, with no filtering by topic, deadline or relevance.

A source pitching a handful of times a month can skim that digest and find what fits. A source who needs a specific volume, or who loses real time scanning irrelevant requests, is paying in attention what a paid platform charges in dollars.

Every paid platform in this guide sells filtering, and only filtering, as its reason to exist over free HARO. So the rule is simple: start free, and evaluate a paid tier only once a named need, a volume target or a niche the daily digest keeps missing, isn't being met.

That logic holds at any budget size, which is the same reasoning behind keeping seo on a small budget instead of buying tools before a specific, proven need for them exists.

HARO alternatives at a glance (verified pricing)

Across every platform here with a public price, verified against the vendor's own page in September 2026, paid entry tiers run $39 to $149 a month.

Every number below states whether that's a monthly or an annual-billed rate.

Billing basis matters because Featured.com's own page hides it. The page defaults to showing the annual-billed rate, $29/mo for Lite and $79/mo for Pro, and never renders the true month-to-month price, $39/mo and $99/mo, in static HTML; that figure sits only in the page's own embedded pricing data.

SourceBottle's paid tiers work the same way: $65/mo or $650/yr for Unlimited, $130/mo or $1,300/yr for Agency, where the annual price is 2 months free rather than a separate rate.

Qwoted offers no annual discount at all, and ProfNet publishes no public pricing at all, requiring direct contact for a quote. ResponseSource sells annual subscriptions exclusively, with no monthly plan available.

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Line up the three verified, month-to-month entry tiers: Featured Lite at $39, SourceBottle's paid tier at $65, Qwoted Pro at $149.

The paid platforms themselves range from $39 to $149, a far wider spread than the one between SourceBottle's $65 median and Presscart's $100 floor. A filtered feed and one guaranteed placement are closer in cost than the headline prices suggest.

Getting the billing basis wrong changes which of these platforms actually looks cheaper, which is exactly the kind of number a saas seo strategy budget line needs right before choosing a HARO alternative.

Free HARO-style feeds

Source of Sources, SourceBottle, MentionMatch and manual social-media monitoring are the four free HARO alternatives.

They cost nothing beyond time, and they don't differ by quality. They differ by who they're built for.

Pick by audience fit, not by free versus paid.

Source of Sources

Peter Shankman, HARO's original founder, launched Source of Sources as a free email newsletter after the 2024 shutdown.

It runs the same multiple-times-daily rhythm the original HARO used, delivered straight to an inbox, with no login and no cost.

SourceBottle

SourceBottle is built around Australia and New Zealand submissions, though it also takes global requests with region and industry filters.

That regional base is why it belongs in a different bucket than the other free options here.

A source outside the US or UK shouldn't default to the US-heavy paid platforms further down this list. SourceBottle is the one built for that reader specifically, with the free and paid tiers listed in the pricing table above.

MentionMatch

MentionMatch, not Help a B2B Writer, is the current name. Superpath acquired and renamed the tool, announcing the deal on December 8, 2022.

It's the same free tool, just renamed and under different ownership, and that distinction is worth stating plainly.

MentionMatch stays free for both writers and sources today. A premium tier was announced as planned at acquisition, but no pricing page exists for it, and the live homepage shows no paid tier. It's built for B2B requests specifically, SaaS, marketing, finance, tech, which is its real differentiator against the general-purpose feeds above.

Social media as a manual DIY feed

Journalists post source requests directly on X and Bluesky under hashtags like #journorequest, a manual, unfiltered version of the same demand HARO built a product around.

Reddit threads tagged haro alternatives reddit repeat the same advice: check a vendor's own pricing page directly, not a summary someone posted months ago.

That international gap is one more reason to check what rank higher on google without backlinks options exist alongside journalist outreach, since these free feeds are one lever, not the whole strategy.

Paid pitch platforms

Qwoted, Featured's paid tiers, ResponseSource, ProfNet and Dot Star Media all keep the reactive HARO model: pitch a journalist's request and wait.

The differences are price, stated at its correct billing basis, region and how much filtering the plan buys.

Paying for one of these doesn't buy a higher response rate. It buys less time spent filtering irrelevant requests, at a cost verified per platform below.

Qwoted

Qwoted's Basic tier is free: 2 pitches a month, with a 2-hour response delay before a pitch goes live.

Pro removes that delay, raises the cap to 35 pitches a month and adds pitch intelligence, for $149/mo flat, with no annual discount offered.

Qwoted's Pro tier costs $149 a month flat today, not $99, a lower figure that's still circulating. Qwoted's Teams tier is custom-priced. Framed as haro vs qwoted, the real comparison is free-and-unfiltered against $149/mo and fully filtered, not a feature fight over which platform is better.

Featured.com

Featured.com now owns and operates the free, revived HARO email digest described earlier.

Its paid Lite and Pro tiers are a separate product: Featured describes itself as "your co-pilot for PR," covering journalist requests, podcasts, speaking events, awards, backlinks and social-media creator opportunities.

Monitoring HARO-style feeds is one use case listed under the Lite tier, not the product itself. Every paid tier includes every feature; the tiers differ only in how many AI-usage credits the account gets per day, not in what's unlocked.

That leaves one real difference between Lite and Pro: the credit ceiling, and the $39/mo versus $99/mo price gap ($29/mo versus $79/mo if billed annually).

ResponseSource

ResponseSource runs the Journalist Enquiry Service, a UK-focused platform sold as an annual subscription only, starting at £625 per category per year across 25 available categories.

There's no monthly option to fall back to.

ProfNet

ProfNet is a PR Newswire service connecting journalists with expert sources, running longer than any other platform in this list.

It operates as a straightforward pitch-and-wait model under PR Newswire's ownership.

Dot Star Media

Dot Star Media delivers journalist alerts directly into Slack or Teams instead of an inbox, aimed at UK-oriented teams who want requests inside the tools they already use daily.

Its price wasn't independently re-verified for this guide, so none is stated here.

A b2b seo checklist usually treats earned coverage as one line item among many, distinct from broken link building's separate tactic, and these five platforms are where that line item actually gets bought and paid for.

Guaranteed-placement platforms

Presscart is the one platform in this set that sells a guaranteed, published placement instead of a chance at one.

It trades HARO's price, free, and its uncertainty, for a fixed cost and a fixed outcome.

Presscart

Presscart lets a source choose the outlet, pay a set price, and get a published article, with a refund or a swap if the placement doesn't run.

That's a different transaction than everything above it: no pitch, no waiting to see if a journalist picks the request, no daily digest to scan.

Presscart's pricing:

• Per placement: $100 to $5,000+, depending on the outlet
• AEO Starter package: from $950
• Recurring AEO program: $5K-7K/mo, 4-month minimum

Presscart isn't a better version of Qwoted, it's a different bucket entirely: certainty bought with a fixed cost, instead of a chance at coverage bought with pitching time.

Anyone deciding between the two is really deciding how much certainty is worth, the same trade-off behind most google ranking factors decisions that weigh a guaranteed tactic against a probabilistic one.

How to choose: match the bucket to your situation

Start with free HARO or Source of Sources for occasional pitching, and move to a paid pitch platform once volume or filtering is the bottleneck.

Use a guaranteed-placement platform only when the deadline or the outlet matters more than the price.

Journalist outreach is one lever in a growth plan, not the whole plan.

Mission Growth is an AI-led SEO and GEO growth service: AI catches the signal, our experts make the move, and you see the result. The platform chosen from the table above should feed into that kind of strategy, not stand in for one.

Digital PR sits inside a broader seo roi calculation, alongside every other channel competing for the same budget.

The state of HARO reshuffled twice since most people last checked it: it died as Connectively in December 2024, and it came back free under Featured.com in April 2025, with every price in this guide checked against the vendor's own page this month.

Start with whichever bucket above matches the current situation, then confirm the price on the vendor's own page before committing a budget line to it.