Here is the direct answer. A free openPR release buys you a dated, permanent, Google-indexed page on a German portal that has been running since 2004, and it buys you no followable link to your own website. Both halves of that sentence are load-bearing, and the second half is not what the sales copy implies.
On 13 October 2026 I pulled live release pages, pricing pages and robots files off both openPR domains and read the raw markup rather than the marketing. What follows is what I saw, with anything unverified flagged as such.
What openPR actually hands you for free
The legal operator is Einbock GmbH, Prinzenstraße 1, 30159 Hannover, registered at Amtsgericht Hannover under HRB 209511, with Sebastian Einbock named as chief executive. The footer reads ”© 2004 - 2026 openPR” and the English site adds “made & hosted in Germany.” Twenty-two years is real longevity in a category where portals vanish. I could not verify the ownership chain before Einbock GmbH from any independent source, so treat the earlier history as unestablished.
The free tier is not one tier. It is two, and they differ wildly. The English FAQ at openpr.com states you may “publish 1 press release per 30 days for free,” which is twelve a year. The German openPR FREE page offers “2 Pressemitteilungen pro Jahr.” Same brand, same company, six times the allowance on the English side. Check which domain you signed up to.
The German free spec is published in full: at least 1,700 characters of main text, a maximum of three links, an image of at least 1,200 by 750 pixels, an optional YouTube video and a press contact. Publication takes up to 24 hours, working days only.
Then the detail most people miss. Changing or deleting a release you already published costs 10 euros plus VAT, on both domains, every time. A free wire with a paywalled undo button is a different product from a free wire.
Scale claims do not reconcile. The English homepage counter, read from the raw HTML, showed 4,512,958 press releases by 285,235 authors. The German marketing pages that same day claimed “über 1 Million” releases with “200.000+ Autoren.” Probably different archives, but nothing on either site says so.
One thing the portal does better than its rivals: it names its editors. The German team page lists Sebastian Einbock as chief editor alongside Joanna Einbock, Michael Holthaus (on the team since 2009), Christian Landsmann (since 2017) and Jens Oberheide (since 2018). Five named staff with published biographies is more editorial accountability than any other free wire offers.
Your three allowed links are not links
The FAQ is unambiguous: “Up to 3 links are allowed in every press release.” That sentence is true and almost meaningless.
Take release 1326677 on the German side, a coaching announcement published on 13 October 2026. The press contact block ends with what looks like a link to the company website. In the markup it is a span carrying the classes intext-a, opr-li and click-to-go-x, with a data-url attribute pointing at opr.li plus a 32-character hash and the real destination parked in a second attribute, data-openpr-url. No anchor element. No href. A crawler sees orange text and a click handler.
The English releases behave the same way. On an IPTV announcement published at 10:53 that morning, the advertiser’s domain appeared four times in the body, and all four were the same span pointing at the same opr.li hash. Zero anchors in the article body across the four releases I pulled.
So what are the nofollow tags on those pages? Furniture. One English release carried exactly seven, sitting on the image lightbox, the Facebook, X, WhatsApp, LinkedIn and email share buttons, and a Google News search link. A German release had thirteen, adding the PDF export plus the paid edit and delete buttons. Not one was attached to a publisher’s own link, because there is no publisher link to attach one to.
I then requested the redirect hop myself. The opr.li URL returns an HTTP 302 to the destination and ships this response header: x-robots-tag: noindex, nofollow, noarchive. Even a crawler that executed the JavaScript and followed the hop gets told, at the protocol level, to pass nothing.
State this precisely, because the German sales page does promise “wertvolle Backlinks für Ihr Ranking.” That line sits under the Top50 portal service, which pushes your release to third-party sites such as firmenpresse.de, presseecho.de and portalderwirtschaft.de. It is not a claim about the portal’s own pages. Fair enough. But if you bought a tier expecting equity from openPR itself, you bought a tracked click.
The robots files complete the picture. Both domains disallow SemrushBot, AhrefsBot, DataForSeoBot, BLEXBot, PetalBot, Yandex and archive.org_bot, and openpr.de adds CCBot and MJ12bot. Both allow ClaudeBot with a crawl delay of 3 seconds. Every page carries meta robots index, follow, noarchive with a self-referencing canonical. Translated: Google may index the page, nobody may cache it, the AI crawler is welcome, and the two tools you would use to audit your own backlink are locked out at the door.
Is openPR’s search footprint growing or shrinking?
Both, depending which domain and which year. I pulled Semrush’s monthly rank history for each wire on 13 October 2026.
In the US database, openpr.com showed 129,843 ranking organic keywords and 309,589 in estimated monthly organic traffic for September 2026. That is not a straight line. The same report puts the keyword count at 515,352 in July 2025 and at 37,761 in February 2024, when estimated traffic fell to 1,809 visits. The portal fell off a cliff over the winter of 2023, rebuilt hard through 2025, then shed three quarters of its keyword footprint again by September 2026 while estimated traffic rose. That is a site repeatedly rewritten by algorithm updates, not a compounding asset.
The German picture is cleaner. In Semrush’s German database, openpr.de held 214,871 ranking keywords against 24,120 estimated monthly traffic in June 2023. By September 2026 it was 109,352 keywords and 59,403 traffic. Half the keywords, two and a half times the traffic. The German side is losing long-tail chaff and gaining real visibility, the opposite trajectory to its English sibling.
Against the other free wires in the US database for September 2026, the gap is not close. openpr.com showed 129,843 keywords and 309,589 traffic, einpresswire.com 99,251 and 50,973, prlog.org 28,222 and 12,922, pr.com 24,173 and 14,865, and 24-7pressrelease.com 23,035 and 20,768. By organic footprint, openPR is the largest free press release portal in this set by a wide margin.
Hold that at arm’s length. It describes how visible the portal is, not how visible you become by publishing on it. Given that the in-text destination is a span behind a nofollow redirect, those are separate questions with separate answers.
Count the prices before you count the reach
English credits, read off service.open-pr.com on 13 October 2026 and all excluding VAT: one credit 49 euros, ten 169 euros, thirty 199 euros, fifty 229 euros, one hundred 349 euros, five hundred 399 euros. One credit equals one submission, so the big pack lands at roughly 80 cents a release. Unused credits lapse after three years. A credit buys the right to submit more often than once per 30 days. It does not buy a link, editorial review or placement.
The German menu is a full product line. A single extra release costs 57 euros. BUSINESS is 47 euros a month and FLATRATE 97 euros a month, both on twelve-month minimum terms billed annually. Premium distribution, meaning 48 hours of prominent placement plus an email push, costs 97 euros. The Top50 portal push costs 47 euros, distribution through the partner press1 costs 147 euros, and AI translation plus publication on the English portal costs 59 euros. A release written by the in-house journalist costs 199 euros, proofing 119.90 euros, the AI tool bundle 497 euros a year and media monitoring 397 euros a year.
Now the part that should make you pick up the phone before you pick a package. On 13 October 2026 the same bundle, Super-PR-Sparpaket I, was 497 euros reduced from 687 on its own landing page, 299 euros reduced from 390 on the services page, and 269 euros in the openPR FREE FAQ. Three prices, one product, one day. Nothing says which is current.
Audience figures wobble the same way. The hero band on the openPR FREE page claims 3 million visitors a year. The FAQ further down that page says about 2 million. The tariff page says 1,800,000 in the last twelve months. The journalist list reads “bis zu 2.500” in one place and “ca. 2.400” on the same page. None of these are outrageous. They are just not the same number.
And be clear what the journalist channel is on the English side. The page labelled “Journalists” at openpr.com is a newsletter signup: subscribe and you get “a daily email containing all press releases from the previous day,” filtered by up to twenty categories. That is an opt-in digest of everything, not a pitch to a named desk. The German Premium push goes to people who registered for specific categories, and the press1 option publishes its channel sizes honestly: 1,900 recipients for IT and telecoms, 2,100 for entertainment, and 260 editorial systems for general interest.
Use the portal for the one job it does well
Five checks settle this before you spend on any free wire. Read the release body’s markup and confirm an anchor element exists. Request the outbound redirect and read its x-robots-tag header. Open robots.txt and note which audit crawlers are blocked. Compare the package price on the landing page against the services page. Then ask which journalist count is current. Run those five and openPR answers honestly, which is more than most portals manage.
There is a legitimate use here, and it is narrow. If you need a dated, permanent, indexable public statement on a German domain with twenty-two years of history, a named editorial team and an open door to ClaudeBot, two free releases a year is a reasonable deal. Regulatory notices, appointments, event announcements, anything whose job is to exist and be findable. For that, it works.
What it is not is media coverage, and it is not a link. For contrast, Instant Press’s own catalog runs 1,016 publications at a median selling price of $1,500, mean Domain Authority 62.3, 96 percent Google-indexed and about 80 percent carrying no sponsored tag. The difference is not the price. It is whether the finished page carries an editorial byline and a real anchor element.
Editorial filtering on the free tier is light. Among the newest English releases on the morning of 13 October 2026 sat an IPTV subscription piece that repeated “visit the official website is : https://xtreamo.com” four times, alongside a dozen near-identical market-research summaries. That went live through the same queue your announcement uses.
Which brings me to the example openPR puts forward itself, and the one worth studying. Its tariff page points to release 1032859, “Ribery Gold Steak für alle!!!”, filed by DelikatEssen Discounter GmbH & Co. KG for the BEST BEEF butcher shop in Berlin. The portal says over fifteen daily and national outlets ran the story, naming Spiegel Online, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Berliner Morgenpost. The release page shows 2,357 views. Read it and the lesson lands: a Berlin butcher reached Spiegel because he gilded a steak for 50 euros, not because he filed on a free wire. The wire was the stationery. The gold leaf was the story.