Tools I Use to Run a Solo PR Agency

I run a PR agency by myself: no employees, no contractors, no office. The whole operation lives on a laptop in Zurich and seven tools that together cost $364 a month, about $4,370 a year. That number surprises people more than anything else about this business, because a single client project usually covers the entire year’s overhead.

People assume this requires a team. It doesn’t. It requires the right systems, and the real investment isn’t the software bill: it’s knowing which free tools to combine, what to automate, and where human judgment still can’t be replaced. Below is every tool I use, what it costs, and whether it earns its place in the stack.

The Stack at a Glance

Total monthly cost: $364. That’s less than what most agencies spend on their Muckrack subscription alone.

The Tools That Actually Matter

Ahrefs ($200/month)

This is the one tool I would not cancel under any circumstances. I use Ahrefs every single day for:

• Checking domain ratings of target publications
• Analyzing competitors’ backlink profiles to find journalist contacts
• Tracking new backlinks to see where our placements landed
• Content gap analysis for campaign ideation
• Mining referring domains to discover publications I didn’t know existed

Could I use Semrush or Moz instead? Probably. But Ahrefs’ backlink data is the most comprehensive I’ve found, and the “Referring Domains” export is critical for our competitor mining workflow.

Claude / AI Coding Partner ($20/month)

This is the tool that changed everything. I wrote a detailed post about this, but the short version: I use AI in my terminal to build automation scripts, dashboards, and data pipelines. It doesn’t do the PR work. It builds the infrastructure that makes the PR work faster.

Before AI, I would have needed to hire a developer to build the tools I use daily. Now I describe what I need in plain English and iterate on it in real time. That’s not hype. That’s how our 27,000+ journalist database and our entire dashboard ecosystem got built.

LinkedIn Premium (~$55/month)

Most people waste LinkedIn Premium on vanity metrics. I use it for three specific things:

1. Advanced search filters to find journalists by publication, role, and location
2. InMail messages to reach journalists I can’t find emails for
3. Profile views data to see which journalists are looking at my profile after pitches go out (a surprisingly useful engagement signal)

The Tool I Cancelled

Olivia Brown AI ($250 GBP/month) – Cancelled

I tried a dedicated PR AI tool for a few months. It promised automated journalist targeting and pitch optimization. The reality: generic outputs that needed so much editing they saved no time. The targeting suggestions were no better than what I could do with Ahrefs and our own database.

Lesson learned: specialized PR AI tools are not there yet. A general-purpose AI that helps you build your own tools beats a domain-specific product that does a mediocre job on tasks that require human judgment.

What I Built Instead of Buying

Most agencies buy software. I build it. Instead of paying for off-the-shelf tools, I built four things tailored to exactly how I work.

Pitch CRM

Prowly and Muckrack charge $500 to $1,000/month for media relationship management. I built my own CRM that tracks 1,050+ journalist contacts across six tabs: contacts, pitches, outreach log, analytics, campaigns, and settings.

It does exactly what I need and nothing I don’t. No feature bloat. No paying for 50 features to use 5.

Cold Outreach System

Instead of paying for an outreach automation platform, I built one that cross-references multiple data sources and handles sequencing. It matches enriched lead data against our LinkedIn connections to identify warm paths in before cold-emailing.

Campaign Results Dashboard

Client-facing reports used to take me 2 hours per client per month. Now the data flows automatically from the CRM to a presentation-ready dashboard that exports as a PDF or shares as a link.

LinkedIn Outreach Dashboard

After analyzing our 7,000+ LinkedIn message history, I built a dashboard that tracks engagement patterns, identifies the best contacts to re-engage, and flags people to avoid. It even tracks which communication styles work best by region.

The Tools I Evaluated and Rejected

Not every tool earns a spot in the stack. Three products looked promising on paper and didn’t survive contact with how I actually work.

• Prowly ($300+/month): We tried their API. CORS restrictions made integration impossible. The journalist database overlapped 60% with contacts we already had. Not worth the premium for the incremental 40%.
• Hunter.io ($49+/month): Good for email finding, but our 265-domain email pattern map does the same job for free. Hunter becomes useful only for publications we haven’t mapped yet.
• Mailchimp for outreach ($20+/month): PR outreach is not email marketing. Journalists can tell when they receive a mass email from a marketing platform. We send personalized emails from a regular inbox.

The Real Cost of Running a Solo PR Agency

Adding it all up:

Under $5,000 a year in overhead. A single project covers the entire year’s operating costs with room to spare.

This is why solo agencies are going to eat into the market share of bloated firms. The tool gap has closed. A solo practitioner with the right stack can deliver the same quality of work as a 10-person agency, without needing $30,000 a month in payroll before taking their first client.

What I Would Tell Someone Starting Today

1. Start with Ahrefs and an AI coding partner. Those two tools plus free data sources cover 80% of what you need.
2. Build before you buy. If a task is repetitive, write a script for it instead of paying for a SaaS tool. The script does exactly what you need. The SaaS tool does 100 things, 95 of which you’ll never use.
3. Invest in your own data. Your journalist database, your placement history, your outreach data. This is your moat. No competitor can replicate it because it’s built from your specific experience and relationships.
4. Keep overhead low. Every dollar you don’t spend on tools is a dollar you can invest in better data, better research, or just take home as profit.

None of this works if you’re trying to out-volume bigger agencies. Reactive PR rewards precision, not headcount: 25 well-targeted pitches from someone who knows the beat outperform 200 generic ones from a junior account exec. That’s the real reason a one-person shop can compete here, and why a spreadsheet and a free data source are enough on day one. You don’t need Cision or Muckrack until you’ve outgrown what free tools can do.

Lean operations, premium results. That’s the Presslei model. See what it looks like in practice.

About the Author

Salvador Jovells

Founder of Presslei. 12+ years in ecommerce SEO across international markets. After a decade of link buying for Hockerty and Sumissura, I reverse-engineered 5,272 earned media placements and founded a reactive PR agency that builds authority through data-driven stories journalists actually want to publish. Based in Zurich.

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