Competitor Monitor - SaaS Pricing, Changelog & Messaging

Track your competitors' SaaS pricing pages, changelogs and homepages, and get only what changed since your last run: a price that went up, a plan that appeared or vanished, a new release, a rewritten headline. Each change comes back as a typed signal with its before and after, ready for a brief or a Slack alert.

Two things to know first. The first run only records a baseline, so changes start on the second. And pages are read by rules, so a page that shows a different price on different loads can read as a change that never happened, and is billed as one.

Input	Competitor names with their pricing, changelog, homepage and docs URLs
Output	One row per page that is new, changed or failed, with typed signals and every field that moved, plus one brief row per run
Ceiling	No page cap: every URL you list is checked, within the run's time limit
Speed	A few seconds a page, and 5 to 35 seconds for a page that only appears after its scripts run
Account needed	None on the sites you watch. Pages behind a login cannot be watched
Price	$10.00 per 1,000 pages checked ($0.01 each) on the Free plan, a little less on paid plans, plus $0.015 per change, $0.035 per signal a language model wrote and $0.30 per brief. The free plan's $5 a month covers about 500 page checks

🔍 What SaaS Competitor Monitor does

It reads up to four pages for each competitor:

Page	What it reads
Pricing (pricingUrl)	Plan names, prices, buttons and features, and plans added or removed
Changelog (changelogUrl)	Release entries
Positioning (homepageUrl)	The main headline, the hero text and the primary button
Integrations (docsUrl)	New integrations named on the page

Every page is compared with the copy saved on your last run. That copy lives in a key-value store called saas-competitor-change-monitor-state, in your own Apify account, one record per competitor and page. Records are keyed by the competitor's name, so two tasks using the same name share one history, and renaming a competitor starts its history again.

A page that cannot be read comes back failed, is not charged, and the last good copy stays the baseline. Pages that only fill in after scripts run are drawn in a browser, which waits until the text stops growing. A page still drawing after 30 seconds fails, unbilled.

Each signal carries a "why it matters" line. With Generate AI insights on, which is the default, a language model writes that line for every changed page and the signal says ai_written: true. Switch it off and built-in rules write it instead, for free.

When page reading is improved, a page saved by the older reader shows as new once, so a better reading is never billed as a change.

📋 What data you get from each page check

What you get	Field
Which competitor and which page	target_key, competitor, page_type, url
Whether the page is new, changed, unchanged or failed	status, sync_status
The typed changes, each with a before, an after and a why-it-matters line	signals
Whether a model or the rules wrote that line	signals[].ai_written
Every field that moved, by path	change_records
On the brief row: how many signals the run found, and a link to the HTML brief	signal_count, brief_url

▶️ How to track competitor pricing changes

1. Open SaaS Competitor Monitor and click Try for free.
2. In Competitors, replace the Acme example with your own: a name and the URLs to watch.
3. Choose What to watch. Untick Generate weekly competitive brief on runs where you do not want the $0.30 brief, and Generate AI insights if the rules' line is enough for you.
4. Paste a Slack or Discord address into Webhook URL (optional) if you want alerts.
5. Click Start once to record the baseline, then put the same input on a schedule.

There is no sample row: the first run is the baseline.

💰 How much does it cost to track competitor pricing?

$0.01 per page checked, which is $10.00 per 1,000 checks on the Free plan, a little less on paid plans. On top of that: $0.015 per page that changed, $0.035 per signal whose line a language model wrote, and $0.30 per brief. The free plan's $5 a month covers about 500 page checks, fewer once changes and briefs are added.

Every page read is charged, changed or not. A failed page is not. A signal the rules wrote costs nothing, so with Generate AI insights off a change costs $0.015 however many signals it carries.

The brief is billed on every run it is on for, a quiet one included, so a daily schedule with the brief on is $2.10 a week in briefs alone. Switch it on for one run a week instead.

If you set a maximum charge for a run, it checks only the pages it can still pay for, leaves the rest for the next run, and skips the brief if it no longer fits.

📥 What you give it

{
  "competitors": [
    {
      "name": "Acme",
      "pricingUrl": "https://acme.com/pricing",
      "changelogUrl": "https://acme.com/changelog",
      "homepageUrl": "https://acme.com",
      "docsUrl": ""
    }
  ],
  "watch": ["pricing", "changelog", "positioning", "integrations"],
  "onlyNewSinceLastRun": true,
  "weeklyBrief": true,
  "generateAiSignals": true
}

Field	Default	What it is
competitors	none, required	Each competitor: a name, plus pricingUrl, changelogUrl, homepageUrl and docsUrl. Leave a URL empty to skip that page. The form arrives with an example called Acme; replace it.
watch	all four	pricing, changelog, positioning, integrations. Which pages to check.
weeklyBrief	true	Writes a Markdown and an HTML brief of the run's signals. It is $0.30 on every run it is on for.
onlyNewSinceLastRun	true	Rows only for pages that are new, changed or failed. Off, every page checked gets a row.
generateAiSignals	true	A language model writes the "why it matters" line on each changed page, $0.035 a signal. Off, the rules write it, free. Unchanged pages never reach the model.
webhookUrl	empty	A Slack, Discord or other webhook. It gets a short summary, and only on runs that found a signal.
proxyConfiguration	leave it alone	Leave it as it is, or add your own servers here if you want pages fetched through them.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a test run on 30 September 2026. Before that run the saved Starter price had been edited down to $12, so Ghost's live $18 came back as a rise. The model's line is cut short:

{
  "target_key": "ghost::pricing",
  "competitor": "Ghost",
  "page_type": "pricing",
  "url": "https://ghost.org/pricing/",
  "status": "changed",
  "sync_status": "ok",
  "signals": [
    {
      "competitor": "Ghost",
      "signal_type": "price_change",
      "detail": "Starter: $12/month → $18/month (+50%)",
      "before": "$12",
      "after": "$18",
      "why_it_matters": "Entry price up 50% to $18/month ...",
      "page_type": "pricing",
      "url": "https://ghost.org/pricing/",
      "detected_at": "2026-09-30T19:44:32.138987+00:00",
      "is_new": false,
      "is_changed": true,
      "ai_written": true
    }
  ],
  "change_records": [
    {
      "target": "ghost::pricing",
      "change_type": "modified",
      "path": "tiers.Starter.price",
      "before": "$12",
      "after": "$18",
      "detected_at": "2026-09-30T19:44:32.139226+00:00"
    },
    {
      "target": "ghost::pricing",
      "change_type": "modified",
      "path": "tiers.Starter.price_amount",
      "before": 12,
      "after": 18,
      "detected_at": "2026-09-30T19:44:32.139226+00:00"
    }
  ]
}

And the brief row from a run on 30 September, with its link cut short:

{
  "type": "weekly_brief",
  "generated_at": "2026-09-30T02:33:59.840901+00:00",
  "signal_count": 0,
  "brief_kv_key": "weekly-brief-html",
  "brief_url": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/.../records/weekly-brief-html?signature=..."
}

Field	How to read it
target_key	<competitor>::<page>, where the page is pricing, changelog, homepage or docs.
status, sync_status	new, changed, unchanged or failed; and ok or failed for the reading itself.
signals	The typed changes: price_change, plan_added, plan_removed, feature_moved, cta_change, positioning_shift, new_integration or changelog_entry, each with detail, before, after and why_it_matters.
ai_written	true when a language model wrote the why_it_matters line. Those are the signals charged $0.035. A rules-written line says false and is free.
change_records	Every field that moved, by path, such as tiers.Starter.price, with its before and after.
signal_count, brief_url	On the brief row: how many signals the run found, and a link to the HTML brief. The Markdown version is in the run's key-value store under weekly-brief.

🧾 Reading the output

There is no sample row and no error code. Every row is either a page or the brief:

Row	How to spot it	Charged
A page seen for the first time	status: "new". No signals: this is the baseline	as a page check
A page that moved	status: "changed", with change_records and usually signals	a page check and a change, plus $0.035 for each signal with ai_written: true
A page that did not move	status: "unchanged". Only written with onlyNewSinceLastRun off	as a page check
A page that could not be read	status: "failed". url is empty and competitor holds the lower-case short name, so go by target_key; the run log says why	no
The brief	type: "weekly_brief"	$0.30

Not every change becomes a signal. A field that moved without matching a rule shows up in change_records only, and still counts as a change. For news you would act on, keep the rows where status is changed.

💡 What people use it for

• Knowing the week a rival raises a plan, before a customer brings it up on a sales call.
• Keeping a battlecard's pricing column honest without anyone opening five pricing pages on Monday.
• Reading a competitor's releases in one weekly brief instead of following four changelogs.
• Catching a homepage rewrite, which can be the first public sign they are chasing a different buyer.

🚧 What it does not do

• No pages behind a login. A page that answers with an error or a holding screen instead of content comes back failed too.
• No screenshots or visual diff. It compares the text and structure it reads.
• No perfect reading of pricing pages. Plans are found by rules. Scored on 40 real pricing pages, it found 135 of 144 plans. It can mistake a menu item or a calculator for a plan, miss a free plan shown only as the word "Free", and read only part of a tabbed plan layout.
• No archive. Only the latest good copy of each page is kept. The dataset of each run holds what changed on that run.
• The model does not find changes. The rules do. The model only writes the "why it matters" line on what they found.
• It is not an official tool of any platform or company named on this page. Dami's Studio is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.

🧭 Which competitor monitor do you need?

If you want	Use
Changes on a rival SaaS site's pricing, changelog, homepage and docs	This one
Price and stock moves on a rival's product pages	Product Price & Stock Monitor
New reviews of a rival's app, sorted into bugs, billing and feature requests	App Review Triage
A rival's Facebook and Instagram ads	Meta Ad Library Scraper
The ads a rival runs on LinkedIn	LinkedIn Ads Scraper
What a rival's site runs on, from DNS records to its tech stack	Domain Inspector

❓ Questions people ask

Why did the first run report everything as new?

There was nothing to compare against yet. The first run saves a copy of each page, and from the second run on you get real changes.

Where does it keep last week's pages?

In the saas-competitor-change-monitor-state store in your own account. Delete it to start over, and the next run builds a fresh baseline.

Will I be charged when nothing changes?

For the page checks, yes, and for the brief if it is on. A change is only charged when a page reads differently from last time.

How do I get competitor price alerts in Slack?

Put your Slack incoming-webhook address in webhookUrl. Discord and other webhooks work the same way. Nothing is sent on a run that found no signal.

Can I call it from code or connect it to an AI assistant?

Yes. The API tab has ready-made code for Python, JavaScript and the command line. For Claude, ChatGPT or another MCP client, connect https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,dami_studio/saas-competitor-change-monitor. Either way the run happens on your Apify account at the same price.

Is it legal to monitor a competitor's website?

It reads public pages, the ones any visitor sees, and nothing behind a login. Apify's write-up on the legality of web scraping is a good starting point, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the run ID and the competitor URL that misbehaved, and say what the page showed that the row did not.