Yes..don't pay. I have seen one of my friends (CEO & Founder of a paint company) paying for press releases and get nothing out of it. May be that's attributed to bad press release write ups or a couple of other reasons. Finally, he targeted a few PR sites that offered to host his releases for free. I wouldn't say that this worked great, but he got enough coverage than his paid attempt, as his PR began featuring in many PR hosting sites. Further, if you wanna submit press releases (no automated submissions!!) pertaining to wireless or chemical technologies, feel free to visit http://wireless.e-techherald.com/ or http://chemical.e-techherald.com/. Cheers, Giga
Not paying will only be effective if you're manually distributing the release to journalists on your own (very time consuming), or if you're able to get it picked up by AP. Free sites in general won't do much of anything for you. If you're going to use one, go with www.pr.com, b/c they get all of the releases at least listed in Google News, so people may find you via search. Jenn