Review
I rarely leave negative reviews, but I felt that I really needed to this time around.
I went all out and ordered the Red package, encouraged by the reviews I had seen here. At this point, I have to assume that the people who left those reviews are using a different service than I got.
First & foremost, the quality of the PRs is horrible. They're obviously written by non-native speakers. I spent far more time correcting their terrible PRs than I would have simply writing my own. I asked for a different writer, I asked for another editor, nothing mattered - the quality was just as poor, no matter who wrote them. I hire writers for 30 cents/100 words who put out much better work than this.
I always corrected the errors, even going to far as to turn on "Track Changes" in Word before sending them back, so that maybe they'd see the problems I was correcting, and not make them next time. Nope. In fact, for one of my first submissions, they submitted the unedited, problem-filled version to sbwire, then sent an email back to me (with the unedited version attached), telling me that my changes had caused sbwire to reject the PR due to "grammatical errors & unnatural language usage." Without going into too much detail, let's just say that's the first time anyone has said anything even close to that about "my" writing in years.
I'll even save them the trouble, and call myself out here - it got so painful & time-consuming to deal with them that I sometimes wouldn't even open their emails for a few days, because I just didn't have time to deal with them. So yeah, I was sometimes unresponsive - at that point, I had written the $45 off as a loss, and was just looking to move on with life.
I will say that their customer service was always polite, if ineffective. They were unable to help me in any way, but they were, at least, always friendly when they attempted to.
Of course, there were no SEO effects to speak of, but that's to be expected with a PR package at this price on a website with any kind of other SEO pointed at it. I never checked on Google news or any other of the releases they promised - I really didn't want to see those crappy PRs actually published about my clients. I assume that they delivered the distribution they promised.
All in all, I've definitely had better experiences with press releases. I can't comment on distribution, but you can definitely find a better writer for the price.
EDIT:
The seller provided me with a full refund, even after I made it clear that it wouldn't lead to the removal of my review. This is more than could be said of some sellers around here, who would attempt to hold a refund ransom in exchange for removal of a poor review. I also appreciate their discretion in not turning this situation into a big fight in their sales thread, but rather handling it privately.