What media monitoring actually costs in 2026

If you want the price of most media monitoring platforms, you cannot look it up. Cision, Meltwater, Muck Rack, Brandwatch, Onclusive, Notified and Agility PR publish no rate card. The price appears after a sales call, and it depends on how you negotiate, not on a menu.

The prices are still knowable. Procurement platforms publish anonymized contract data, and buyers report what they pay in reviews. Here is what that data shows in 2026.

What companies actually pay

All figures below come from Vendr, a procurement platform that aggregates real contract data, except where another source is named.

• Meltwater — across 160 contracts, the median is $25,000 per year. Small-business contracts average about $16,200 per year. Enterprise contracts average about $69,600.
• Cision — the median across 100+ contracts is about $12,600 per year. Small-business contracts average $9,565. Reported deals range from $3,400 for a stripped-down media database to over $150,000 for the full suite (Vendr).
• Muck Rack — annual contracts only; there is no monthly option. Reported contracts run from $3,500 to over $40,000 per year, with a typical entry configuration (1–3 seats, core database) around $5,000 per year (Prezly's pricing guide, Spendhound).
• Brandwatch — reported deployments run from $800 to $15,000 per month. Most teams land between $10,000 and $18,000 per year; large deployments reach $150,000 (Vendr).
• Onclusive — reviewers on G2 report costs of $4,000 per month and up.

One more number from Vendr: buyers who negotiate get 15–30% off the first quote. Read that in both directions. Negotiating saves real money — and the first quote was higher than it needed to be by the same amount.

The contract changes the real price

Four terms decide what you actually pay over time. None of them appear in the quote.

1. Auto-renewal with a notice window. Reviewers on TrustRadius and Trustpilot describe Meltwater contracts that renew automatically unless cancelled in writing 60 days before the term ends. Miss the window and you are committed for another year.
2. Built-in escalators. Annual price increases of about 5% are written into many enterprise contracts. Muck Rack customers report renewal increases of 5–12% (Rephonic).
3. Multi-year discounts. The advertised discount for a 2–3 year commitment is 10–25%. The commitment is the product being sold: the discount ends, the contract does not.
4. Metering. Enterprise pricing scales on seats, modules, active queries and mention volume. The configuration that fits your team today is not the configuration you will be quoted for next year.

The affordable tier has its own limits

Self-serve tools publish prices, which is better. The limits sit inside the tiers.

The cheap tiers meter three things: keywords, mention volume, and update frequency. Brand24's Individual plan is $249 per month ($199 billed annually) and includes 3 keywords, 2,000 mentions per month, and data updated every 12 hours. Real-time monitoring starts at the Pro plan: $499 per month ($399 billed annually).

The update frequency is the limit that matters in PR. On a 12-hour cycle, a story that starts at 9 in the morning can reach you at 9 at night.

The affordable tier is also shrinking. Mention sold self-serve plans starting at $41 per month until 2025. After its acquisition, those plans were discontinued; new customers get one Company plan, billed yearly.

Five questions to ask before you sign

1. What is the cancellation notice window, and is it written in the contract itself or in referenced terms?
2. By what percentage does the price rise at renewal?
3. What is metered — seats, keywords, mentions — and what happens when you hit the cap?
4. Does the quoted tier include real-time updates, or a delayed cycle?
5. Is the quoted price a list price, or a discounted price that resets at renewal?

If a vendor cannot answer these in writing, the answers are not in your favor.

What Clairwire costs

$150 per client per month. The price is on the pricing page, not behind a sales call. One plan includes all sources, AI analysis on every mention, crisis alerts, daily briefs, and unlimited team members. Billing is monthly. You cancel in the app, any time, with no notice period, and every charge has a 14-day money-back guarantee.

An agency monitoring five clients pays $750 per month — $9,000 per year, about a third of the median Meltwater contract. An independent publicist with two clients pays $300 per month.

We publish the price because the alternative — quotes, notice windows, escalators — costs buyers money in ways they only discover later. The numbers above are the evidence.

Contract figures reported by Vendr, Prezly, Spendhound, Rephonic and G2 as of August 2026. Brand24 and Mention prices checked on their public pricing pages on August 30, 2026.