PR has always been about who has access to what.
Featured connects one of its users with a journalist or publisher every 6 seconds. Its agents deliver more than 100,000 media pitches a month and have sent over 100 million Help A Reporter Out (HARO) emails in the past year, all supported by an engineering team of three.
The cost of managing infrastructure by hand
Before Vercel, infrastructure work pulled Featured's team away from product development. Hosting lived on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AI features depended on custom provider integrations, and long-running, multi-step jobs ran on separate orchestration infrastructure. Each layer worked, but each one added operational overhead for a three-person team supporting multiple brands.
One platform for compute, AI primitives, and model access
The migration started with a forcing function: Featured needed to launch 374 Sanity sites at once, and every Elastic Beanstalk deploy had to be manually spun up, migrated, and torn down. Vercel collapsed each site launch into a single-click deploy, and the team went on to migrate their entire app and agents onto the platform.
Under the hood
All 374 sites now ship from one platform, with rollouts across all three brands happening centrally instead of one cluster at a time.
A single abstraction handles all of Featured's model traffic across 17 models, turning provider swaps into a configuration change instead of a rewrite.
Long-running jobs, monitoring media around the clock, qualifying opportunities, and combining signals into pitches, moved off custom orchestration onto Workflow SDK.
In hindsight, doing each one of those by hand was kind of crazy.
Chat became the product
As users kept choosing conversation over navigation, Featured made chat its primary interface, delivered through eve, Vercel's open-source agent framework. The useEveAgent hook brought durable sessions, streaming, tool calls, and approval prompts out of the box, with model calls routed through AI Gateway. What would have been a months-long rebuild became a week-long replace and refactor.
What's next
Featured is building toward being the AI layer for public relations, the same way dedicated agent platforms have emerged for legal and finance. The team's advice to other founders building in the agentic era: know that your data is your moat, and lean on tested abstractions like Vercel instead of reinventing security and infrastructure by hand.