7 HARO Alternatives for SaaS Link Building in 2026 (Tested)

HARO died and came back in the same breath. Cision shut the service down on December 9, 2024 after the Connectively rebrand failed to catch on, and Featured acquired the brand and relaunched it as a free email digest on April 22, 2025 at helpareporter.com. If you run marketing for a B2B SaaS company, stop hunting for one identical replacement. The single inbox model is gone. The winning stack in 2026 is MentionMatch for B2B only queries, the free Featured tier for volume, and Qwoted free for high authority targets. You upgrade to Qwoted Pro at $149 a month only when the two hour delay on the free tier starts costing you placements.

Key takeaways

• HARO shut down December 9, 2024. Featured relaunched it April 22, 2025 as a free digest sending three query emails a day.
• Featured approves 18 to 20 percent of pitches. Qwoted approves around 6 percent on tier one publications, but those placements carry more authority.
• Speed decides who gets picked. The first ten pitches in a journalist inbox win most placements.
• AI generated pitches flooded every platform after the relaunch. Human written, credentialed, fast responses now stand out more than ever.
• Earned journalist placements feed both classic rankings and AI citations. Google extended spam policies to AI Overviews in May 2026, so bought mentions count as spam while earned quotes count as authority.

What actually happened to HARO

Peter Shankman founded Help a Reporter Out in 2008. It became the default way for experts to earn press mentions and links. Cision bought it, rebranded it to Connectively, and then shut the whole thing down on December 9, 2024 as the company shifted focus to its CisionOne platform.

Featured, the company behind Terkel, bought the HARO brand and brought it back on April 22, 2025 as a free email newsletter at helpareporter.com. Three query digests go out every day. The service has sent more than 100 million emails in the past year. Then on June 2, 2026, Featured relaunched Connectively as the dashboard version of the same idea. HARO stays the free email digest. Connectively is the platform.

There is one problem with the relaunch. AI generated responses flooded the platform almost immediately, and users openly complain about weak quality control. Journalists noticed. Many moved toward verification gated platforms where a real human with real credentials stands behind every pitch. A roundup of HARO alternatives ranks Featured, Qwoted, and SourceBottle as the top three replacements, and that shift toward verified experts is the whole reason you need a stack of platforms instead of one.

The 7 HARO alternatives worth your time

1. The relaunched HARO digest

The original, back from the dead. Three digests a day, free, at helpareporter.com. Queries span every industry, which means SaaS queries sit next to restaurant openings and pet product launches. Use it as a monitoring layer. Scan fast, pitch only the queries where you hold genuine expertise. Volume is the strength here. Precision is not.

2. Featured.com

Featured is the company that now owns HARO, and its own platform is the highest volume alternative. The free tier allows around three answers a month. Paid plans run $29 to $79 a month, and Featured Pro costs $99 a month billed monthly or $49 a month per seat billed annually. The approval rate sits at 18 to 20 percent, roughly triple Qwoted on tier one publications. If you want the most placements per hour of effort, start here. One caveat from practitioner testing: Featured wins on volume and price, not on the authority of each individual placement.

3. Connectively

Featured relaunched Connectively on June 2, 2026 as the platform version of HARO. Same journalist query model, but inside a dashboard instead of your inbox. Pick it if you prefer managing pitches in one place rather than digging through email digests. The query pool overlaps heavily with the HARO digest since Featured operates both.

4. Qwoted

Qwoted runs a network of more than 130,000 vetted experts and skews hardest toward finance, tech, and B2B. That skew is exactly why SaaS teams should care. The free Basic plan allows two pitches a month, but new requests sit behind a two hour delay before you can see them. Qwoted Pro removes the delay and costs $149 a month billed monthly or $99 a month billed annually. A detailed breakdown of Featured and Qwoted pricing confirms the key detail: journalist requests often close the same day, so that two hour delay is the entire argument for paying. Approval on tier one publications runs around 6 percent, far lower than Featured, but a Qwoted placement in a top tier outlet carries serious weight. Save your two free pitches each month for the highest authority targets on your list.

5. Source of Sources

Peter Shankman, the founder of the original HARO, built this as a free recreation of what HARO used to be. Email blasts go out three times daily. Zero cost, old school format, no platform to learn. It will not match Qwoted on journalist quality, but as a free layer in your stack it costs nothing to monitor.

6. MentionMatch

Formerly Help a B2B Writer, now owned by Superpath. This one is free and strictly B2B, SaaS, and marketing queries. No sifting through consumer queries. For a SaaS team with limited outreach hours, that focus is worth more than any feature list. Every query you see is one you could plausibly answer.

7. SourceBottle

The free alternative with its strongest footprint in Australia and the UK. If your SaaS sells into those markets or you want press links from those regions, add it to the rotation. Query volume is lower than the big platforms, but so is competition per query.

The platforms side by side

Platform	Cost	Free tier	Best for
HARO digest	Free	3 digests daily	High volume monitoring
Featured.com	$29 to $79 per month	3 answers a month	Placement volume
Connectively	Varies	Digest based	Dashboard workflow
Qwoted	$149 per month	2 pitches a month, 2 hour delay	Tier one authority
Source of Sources	Free	3 emails daily	Classic HARO feel
MentionMatch	Free	Full access	B2B only queries
SourceBottle	Free	Full access	UK and AU press

The SaaS playbook we actually run

Do not spread yourself across all seven. Run three. MentionMatch stays open all day because every query is B2B relevant. Featured free covers your three monthly answers on the highest fit queries you see. Qwoted free holds your two monthly pitches in reserve for tier one targets only. An independent comparison of HARO alternatives reaches the same verdict: Qwoted wins on journalist quality while Featured wins on volume and price, so you use each for what it does best.

Speed is the top conversion factor. Being among the first ten pitches in a journalist inbox significantly increases your odds. Set up instant alerts. Answer the same day, ideally within the hour. Keep a file with your credentials, headshot, and two sentence bio so a pitch takes minutes, not an afternoon.

Write like a human because the robots already tried. After the relaunch, AI generated pitches flooded every platform. Journalists now skim for signs of a real expert: a specific opinion, a number from your own data, a credential that checks out. Give the quote only you could give. Generic advice gets deleted. If you want this done for you, our digital PR service runs journalist outreach as a managed program, and you can see the kind of results it produces in our breakdown of digital PR campaigns that earned triple digit link counts.

Why earned placements matter more in 2026

Google March 2024 spam policies introduced site reputation abuse rules that killed parasite SEO guest post farms. The August 2025 spam update strengthened SpamBrain detection of thin manipulative content. Manufactured links keep losing value while earned editorial links keep gaining it. Then in May 2026 Google confirmed its spam policies cover AI Overviews and AI Mode too. Buying inauthentic brand mentions to manipulate AI citations is now classified as spam. An earned journalist quote is one of the few assets that feeds both your classic rankings and your AI citations at once. Before you budget, read our breakdown of link building costs so you know what each placement type should cost.

Where HARO alternatives fit in a SaaS digital PR programme

None of these platforms replaces a digital PR programme on its own. Journalist request platforms, HARO included, are one channel inside it: they supply demand you can answer today, while original data campaigns create the stories journalists come to you for. The SaaS teams that win treat the channels above as the fast layer and pair them with the campaign formats in our digital PR campaign examples.

That pairing matters for pr for saas because expert quotes alone rarely earn links on commercial pages. A quote gets your name cited; a cited study gets your product pages linked. Run both, measure them separately, and let the response sprint discipline from our tier 1 mentions process keep quality high on the fast layer.

Frequently asked questions

Is HARO still active?

Yes. Cision shut it down on December 9, 2024, and Featured relaunched it as a free email digest on April 22, 2025 at helpareporter.com. Three query digests go out daily.

Is Featured.com free?

There is a free tier with around three answers a month. Paid plans run $29 to $79 a month, with Pro at $99 monthly or $49 per seat annually.

Which HARO alternative is best for SaaS link building?

MentionMatch for B2B only queries, Featured for volume, and Qwoted for tier one authority. Run all three free tiers before paying for anything.

How fast do I need to respond to journalist queries?

Same day at minimum, within the hour if you can. Journalists often close requests the day they post them, and the first ten pitches win most placements.

Journalist outreach compounds. Every placement earns links, and every link makes the next pitch more credible because your name starts appearing in search results. If you want a team running this playbook for you every week, talk to us and we will map your expertise to the queries most likely to convert.