Competitor pricing is the single most watched thing in change detection, and the most badly served. The information is public and sitting on a page anyone can load — the only hard part is looking often enough, which is exactly what most tools charge you for by the check.
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How do you monitor competitor prices automatically?
Point a change detector at the competitor's pricing page, select the region that holds the price rather than the whole page, and choose how often to check. When the text in that region changes, you get an alert with the old and new values side by side and a screenshot of the page. No scraping code, no API, and nothing to maintain when they redesign.
Almost every business says it monitors competitor pricing. In practice most of it is somebody opening three tabs on a Monday morning, which means a competitor can change price on a Tuesday and have nine days of advantage before anyone notices. By the time it surfaces, it usually surfaces through a lost deal rather than through research.
The fix is not complicated. Pricing pages are public, they are HTML, and a change detector can compare today's version against yesterday's down to the word. What has historically made this expensive is not the technology but the billing model: most change detection is sold by the check, and checking often is the entire point.
This guide covers doing it properly — picking the right part of the page, choosing a frequency that is actually useful, avoiding the false alarms that make people switch alerts off, and knowing which pricing pages cannot be watched this way at all.
Not page count. Frequency. This is the part that catches people out when they build a business case.
Most change detection tools sell a monthly allowance of checks. It sounds generous until you do the arithmetic: a single page checked every fifteen minutes consumes about 2,900 checks a month. One page. On a plan with a 1,000-check monthly allowance, you cannot watch one competitor at fifteen-minute intervals for a full month, let alone twenty-five of them.
That is why so many price monitoring projects quietly degrade to daily checks. Daily is not monitoring — it is a report. If your competitor runs a weekend promotion and pulls it on Sunday night, a daily check may never see it happened at all.
The alternative model is slots rather than credits: a plan says how many pages you may watch and how often, the schedule runs indefinitely, and nothing is deducted. Twenty-five pricing pages checked every five minutes is a fixed monthly cost, whether that month is quiet or frantic.
Work out your intended frequency before comparing prices. A tool that looks cheaper per page is often several times more expensive once you multiply by how often you actually need to look.
| Checking one page every… | Checks per month | What that costs on a metered plan |
|---|---|---|
| 5 minutes | ~8,640 | Beyond most mid-tier monthly allowances, for one page |
| 15 minutes | ~2,900 | Exceeds a 1,000-check plan roughly three times over |
| 1 hour | ~720 | Most of a 1,000-check plan, for a single page |
| 1 day | ~30 | Cheap, and too slow to catch a weekend promotion |
The single decision that determines whether these alerts are useful or ignorable.
A pricing page contains a navigation bar, a cookie notice, testimonials, a footer and often a live chat widget. Watching all of it means being alerted every time any of it moves. Click the pricing table itself and everything outside it is ignored, which turns a noisy watch into a precise one.
If you care specifically about the entry plan, watch the entry plan's box rather than the whole table. You will get an alert that says the number changed rather than one that says something on the page is different.
Many pricing pages show monthly by default with an annual toggle. The page you are watching is the default view, so an annual-only price change may not appear. If annual pricing matters, watch the annual URL if there is one, or accept the gap knowingly.
Pages that localise pricing by IP will show our checker one currency and you another. Watch the URL that pins a currency where the site offers one, and be aware the figures in your alert are the ones we were shown.
Five minutes is right for a direct competitor in a fast-moving market. Fifteen minutes to an hour is plenty for most B2B software. There is no benefit to checking faster than the rate at which you could actually respond.
A price monitor that cries wolf gets muted within a fortnight, and then it may as well not exist.
Before a watch records its first version, we load the page twice a couple of seconds apart and exclude anything that differs between two immediate loads. Rotating testimonials, carousels, session identifiers and "27 people are viewing this" counters are removed automatically, because nothing that changes between two loads two seconds apart can be a real change.
If a page carries a genuine trickle of small edits, set a minimum change percentage so only substantial edits alert. The smaller versions are still recorded and visible in the history — they just do not email you.
You can require that an alert fires only when particular text appears or disappears. Useful for catching the arrival of a word like "free trial" or the removal of a plan name.
A watch pinned to a region of the page will stop matching when that region is rebuilt. We tell you when a watch has failed rather than silently reporting nothing, which is the failure mode that matters — a monitor that has quietly stopped working looks identical to a competitor who has not changed anything.
Better to know now than after subscribing.
If the number only appears after signing in or completing a form, a public change detector cannot reach it. Nothing hosted can, without you handing over credentials.
Pricing built by a calculator after you pick options is generated per session. There is no stable public page holding the number, so there is nothing to compare.
A page showing a different price to every visitor produces alerts that reflect what we were shown, not what your customers see. Treat that as a signal rather than a measurement.
Some pricing tables are built entirely in JavaScript. We can render those on paid plans, at up to every fifteen minutes rather than every five — a deliberate limit, because rendering a page in a browser is expensive and we would rather cap it than let it degrade everyone else's checks.
Set up an automatic alert for when a competitor changes their pricing.
We load the page and show it back to you exactly as we fetched it.
Select the pricing table, or a single tier if that is all you care about. Everything outside your selection is ignored.
Five minutes for a direct competitor; fifteen minutes to an hour for most B2B software.
Require a minimum change before alerting, so small edits are recorded without emailing anyone.
Email on any plan; Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram, Flock or a webhook on paid plans, so it lands where your sales team already looks.
The first check records a baseline. From then on you hear from us only when that price region actually changes.
Typically about 2 minutes from start to finish.
Uptime monitors, watched pages and heartbeats each get their own allowance, so adding a page watch never costs you a monitor. SSL and domain checks ride along with the monitor they belong to and use nothing extra.
| Plan | Monitors | Watched pages | Heartbeats | Fastest interval | Alert channels | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 1 | 1 | 1 | Every 30 minutes | 1 email address | $0 |
| Founding Member first 20 only | 25 | 25 | 25 | Every 5 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | $5/mo |
| Basic | 10 | 10 | 10 | Every 10 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | $8/mo |
| Growth | 50 | 50 | 50 | Every 5 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | $19/mo |
| Pro | 100 | 100 | 100 | Every 60 seconds | Email + webhook & chat | $34/mo |
Annual billing is cheaper on every paid tier. The pricing page is the authoritative list.
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.
Point a change detector at their pricing page, select the region containing the price, and set a check interval. When the text in that region changes you are alerted with the before and after side by side. No code, no API and nothing to rebuild when they change their site — beyond re-selecting the region if they rebuild that part of the page.
Reading a public web page is what every browser and search engine does, and published prices are published deliberately. We identify ourselves honestly, request pages at a modest rate and follow the same rules a browser does. What you must not do is use monitoring to coordinate pricing with a competitor — that is price fixing, and it is illegal regardless of the tool used to gather the information.
Five minutes for a close competitor in a fast-moving market; fifteen minutes to an hour for most B2B software. Daily is usually too slow — it misses weekend promotions entirely, and a promotion that ran and ended is exactly the thing you wanted to know about.
Because frequency multiplies consumption. One page checked every fifteen minutes uses roughly 2,900 checks a month, which exceeds a 1,000-check allowance three times over on its own. Tools that meter checks make frequent price monitoring expensive, which is why so many projects quietly settle for daily checks that do not catch anything.
$5/month on the Founding Member plan, which covers 25 watched pages at five-minute checks, with 25 uptime monitors and 25 heartbeats in the same account. There is no check quota, so the cost does not change with how often you look.
Not if you select the price region rather than the whole page. On top of that, before the first check we load the page twice and exclude anything differing between two immediate loads, which removes rotating testimonials, carousels and view counters automatically.
Yes, on paid plans, by turning on browser rendering for that watch. Rendered watches check at up to every fifteen minutes rather than every five, because running a real browser is considerably more expensive than fetching a page.
No. If the price only appears after signing in, a hosted change detector cannot reach it without credentials, and we do not ask for them. This is a genuine limitation and worth checking before you subscribe.
A watch pinned to a region will stop matching and we tell you it has failed. That matters more than it sounds: a broken watch and a competitor who has not changed anything produce identical silence, so a tool that fails quietly is worse than useless.
Yes. Every recorded change stores a full-page image of the before and after, with the changed wording highlighted on the after image, alongside a word-level diff.
Yes. Paid plans allow multiple email destinations plus chat channels, and team seats give colleagues their own login — 3 on the $5 plan, 10 on Growth and 25 on Pro.
A scraper needs writing, hosting, and rewriting every time the target site changes. This needs a URL and a click. The trade-off is that a scraper can extract a number into a database, whereas this tells you the page changed and shows you what changed.
Last updated August 4, 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy
The free plan covers one page and needs no card. Paid plans watch 25 pages every five minutes for $5/mo, with nothing metered.