changedetection.io is the tool people recommend once they have decided they would rather own their monitoring than rent it. It is open source, self-hostable in a single Docker container, actively developed, and surprisingly capable. The price of all that is that you are now running a service.
Free plan forever · No credit card · Set up in under a minute
Is changedetection.io worth it?
If you are comfortable with Docker, it is the best value in this entire category — self-hosted it is free, unlimited and private, with features that hosted competitors charge well for. If you are not, the hosted plan is reasonably priced but you lose the main reason to choose it, and more polished tools exist at that price.
changedetection.io is an open-source website change detector. You run it yourself — typically one Docker container and a volume — and it watches pages, compares them and notifies you through a very wide range of channels.
There is also a hosted version for people who would rather not run infrastructure, priced from around $8.99/month, which funds the project.
It has grown well past a simple diff tool. It handles JavaScript-heavy pages through a browser fetcher, extracts prices, detects restocks, and supports filters precise enough to ignore everything except the one number you care about.
The feature list is closer to a commercial product than most open-source projects manage.
No page limits, no check quotas, no per-seat pricing. Watch a thousand pages every minute if your hardware allows. Nothing else in this category can say that.
Optional Playwright or Selenium fetching handles pages that build themselves client-side, including ones needing interaction before the content appears.
Purpose-built extraction for prices and stock status, rather than making you write a selector and hope. Genuinely well done and a common reason people adopt it.
CSS, XPath and JSONPath selectors, plus ignore rules, regex triggers and text-only mode. You can get a watch down to exactly one value.
Built on Apprise, so it reaches nearly anything — email, Slack, Discord, Telegram, Gotify, ntfy, webhooks and a long tail of self-hosted services.
Self-hosted means the pages you watch, and the history of how they changed, never leave your machine. For competitive or legal monitoring this can be the deciding factor.
Free if you run it. Modestly priced if you do not. The hidden cost is entirely in your own time.
| Option | Price | Limits | You maintain | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Self-hosted | $0 | Only your hardware | Everything | Docker container plus a volume |
| Hosted | From ~$8.99/mo | By tier | Nothing | Funds the project |
Monitoring vendors change plan limits and prices frequently and without announcement. Every figure here carries a "verify on their site" caveat and you should take it seriously before making a decision on cost.
Being straightforward about it: if you are happy with Docker, changedetection.io is better value than us and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Free and unlimited beats $5/month, and its price-tracking is more specialised than ours.
The argument for paying us is that you are not running anything. There is no container to update, no disk to fill, no backup to forget, and — importantly — our monitoring does not go down when your server does. The same account also covers uptime, certificates, domains, heartbeats and status pages, which self-hosting a change detector does not give you. That is the trade: a small bill against your own time and attention.
Every recorded change is compared word by word and kept with a before-and-after image. This is the real output, shown with worked example data.
Price fell from $49 to $39, and an annual discount was added.
The item is available again and the basket button returned.
A new subprocessor was added in another jurisdiction.
The free plan sends to one email address. Every paid plan adds the chat and webhook channels below, with 2 to 10 destinations depending on the plan. However many alerts you receive, the price does not change — nothing here is metered or charged per alert.
There are no voice calls and no SMS. If a phone call at 3am is a hard requirement, say so before you subscribe — we would rather tell you now than refund you later.
Self-hosted, yes — it is open source with no page or check limits. You pay in server resources and maintenance time. The hosted version starts around $8.99/month.
If you have run a Docker container before, about ten minutes. If you have not, budget an afternoon and remember you are also taking on updates, backups and storage from then on.
Yes, via an optional browser fetcher using Playwright or Selenium. It needs an extra container and more memory, but it handles pages that plain fetching cannot.
Yes, and this is one of its best features — dedicated price extraction and restock detection rather than a generic selector. It is a common reason people choose it.
Not meaningfully. It is a content change detector. Availability, certificate expiry and domain expiry need a different tool.
Around 90, through the Apprise library — email, Slack, Discord, Telegram, ntfy, Gotify, webhooks and many self-hosted services. Broader than any commercial competitor here.
Your monitoring stops, silently. This is the fundamental risk of self-hosting a monitoring tool and worth planning for — ideally with an external heartbeat check watching the watcher.
It is fairly priced and supports the project. But it removes the ownership and unlimited-scale advantages that make the self-hosted version compelling, and at that price it competes with more polished tools.
Last updated August 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy
Free plan, no card. If you are happy with Docker, changedetection.io is excellent and we will not pretend otherwise.