How Featured's users make 100K media pitches per month on Vercel

Featured is a PR co-pilot that helps subject matter experts and PR teams identify media opportunities without requiring PR expertise. Users provide their knowledge, and Featured surfaces opportunities across journalist requests, podcasts, awards, and GEO. Founder Brett Farmiloe created the platform after years of struggling to secure press for clients at his digital marketing agency, Markitors. His experience highlighted the inefficiency of traditional PR, which often prioritizes access over expertise.

Featured’s agents now connect users with journalists or publishers every six seconds, delivering over 100,000 media pitches monthly and sending more than 100 million HARO emails annually. Despite this scale, the company operates with just three engineers. Before migrating to Vercel, Featured’s infrastructure on AWS Elastic Beanstalk and custom integrations consumed significant time, pulling the team away from product development and customer-focused features.

The migration to Vercel began when Featured needed to launch 374 Sanity sites simultaneously, a process that would have required manual deployments on Elastic Beanstalk. Vercel’s platform enabled single-click deployments, collapsing a months-long effort into a single day. The team then expanded Vercel’s use to background jobs and AI tooling, migrating their entire application and agents to the platform for centralized management across all brands.

Featured now routes AI model traffic through Vercel’s AI SDK and AI Gateway, standardizing interactions across 17 models and eliminating the need for custom provider integrations. Long-running jobs, such as monitoring media and qualifying opportunities, were moved to Vercel’s Workflow SDK. The team also adopted Vercel’s open-source agent framework, eve, to build a chat-first interface, reducing a months-long rebuild to a week-long refactor while improving user experience.