They're not bad and I think you can probably get quarterly billing if you push for it, to my mind you should also go for a picture package as apart from the
SEO value it's good for keeping your site content fresh, overall the quality of pictures used is pretty good.
I don't feel it's a 100% hands off option though to be honest, it takes a fair amount of work to get the integration done really well, and then a considerable amount of work in terms of ongoing monitoring, feedback etc to get the articles 100% - but to be fair they expect this and it’s definitely one of those things where you get out what you put in.
From experience whilst similar articles may be used on other sites (around the same subject) they are specifically "re written" for you and dupe content (of article text) is usually less than 40-50% which once you put it into your own page should be far less anyway, and if you are going for a subject area away from finance I should imagine this would be less of an issue anyway.
Know what you mean about the "selling" but to be fair the service post sale is pretty good too which was one thing I was concerned about. Overall I'd recommend them.
Also have a look at:
News generation service - FeedAngel
SelectNews
Also they have bases in Manchester and Canary Warf and if you have a look on Monster there's a few ex Adfero writers for hire (would imagine it's one of those industries with a fairly high staff turnover) which is something we're considering at the moment to cover specific areas as once you get into 100's of article a month the cost is considerable.
We've done a chunk of work on integration of these types of feeds so if anyone’s got any techie questions we may be able to answer them.
We’ve also built a Ruby on Rails application/database system to handle these types of feeds, extract keywords (so as they can be added to meta tags for site search, distributed and associated by keyword etc) as well as keyword linking, dupe content checking etc, etc - this is purely for in house use at the moment but the plan eventually is to launch it for public use, so if there's some interest I could talk to our techies about timescales for releasing this for beta testing - feel free to give me a shout if you're interested.
Cheers