SaaS Pricing Page Monitor

Monitor public SaaS pricing pages for deterministic plan and price candidate changes without browser automation, logins, cookies, screenshots, or LLM calls.

What it does

• Fetches public HTTPS pricing pages with strict byte and target limits.
• Extracts visible plan-like price candidates such as $19/mo, €49/month, Custom pricing, or Contact sales.
• Stores a normalized baseline snapshot per target and baselineKey.
• Compares each new run with the previous baseline.
• Outputs changed pages by default, or all pages when includeUnchanged=true.

Good use cases

• SaaS founders tracking competitor pricing-page changes.
• Agencies monitoring client and competitor price pages.
• Product marketers watching plan packaging changes.
• RevOps and research teams collecting lightweight pricing evidence.

Input

• targets: public HTTPS pricing page URLs or bare domains/paths, for example example.com/pricing.
• maxTargets: safety cap, maximum 25 targets in v1.
• includeUnchanged: include pages that have not changed since the previous baseline.
• baselineKey: namespace for schedules, clients, or competitor sets.
• maxChars: maximum HTML characters parsed by the deterministic extractor.
• maxBytes: maximum upstream bytes read per page before streaming is cancelled.
• includeRawContext: include short visible-text snippets around each price candidate.

Example input:

{
  "targets": ["https://example.com/pricing"],
  "maxTargets": 10,
  "includeUnchanged": false,
  "baselineKey": "competitors-weekly",
  "maxChars": 60000,
  "maxBytes": 524288,
  "includeRawContext": true
}

Output

Each dataset item represents one checked pricing page that changed, or one included unchanged page when includeUnchanged is enabled.

Important fields:

• normalizedTarget: normalized public HTTPS pricing page URL.
• status: ok, partial, or error.
• changed: whether the current pricing candidate snapshot differs from the previous baseline.
• previousPriceCandidates: plan/price candidates from the previous baseline.
• currentPriceCandidates: plan/price candidates from the current page.
• changeTypes: status and/or price_candidates.
• snapshotHash: stable SHA-256 hash used for future comparisons.
• warnings: non-fatal warning codes such as no_price_candidates, non_html_content_type, or upstream_body_truncated.

Example dataset item:

{
  "normalizedTarget": "https://example.com/pricing",
  "checkedAt": "2026-07-06T01:25:31.000Z",
  "status": "ok",
  "changed": true,
  "previousPriceCandidates": [],
  "currentPriceCandidates": [
    { "planName": "Pro", "priceText": "$19/mo", "context": "Pro $19/mo For growing teams" }
  ],
  "changeTypes": ["status", "price_candidates"],
  "snapshotHash": "...",
  "warnings": []
}

Pricing

This Actor uses Apify Pay Per Event with one custom event:

Event	When it is charged	Candidate price
checked-pricing-page	Before each public pricing page is fetched and checked, including unchanged checks that may be omitted from output	$0.0012

That equals $1.20 per 1,000 checked pricing pages. Pricing is page-based rather than dataset-item based because unchanged checks still consume runtime while includeUnchanged=false omits unchanged dataset rows.

The current price is conservative for the first live cost-smoke. Reprice only after 1/10/25 target Apify cloud runs prove platform cost share stays below the 20-25% target.

Limitations

• Public HTTPS pricing pages only.
• No browser rendering, screenshots, login pages, cookies, or private-network fetching.
• No LLM normalization in v1; output is deterministic evidence, not canonical price intelligence.
• Static HTML only. JavaScript-rendered prices may be missed.
• Candidate extraction is heuristic and should be treated as monitoring evidence, not financial advice.
• Third-party product and company names belong to their owners. This Actor is unofficial and not affiliated with monitored sites.

Recommended workflow

1. Run once with a stable baselineKey to create the first baseline.
2. Schedule repeat runs with the same baselineKey.
3. Keep includeUnchanged=false for compact change-only datasets.
4. Enable includeUnchanged=true when you need an audit trail of all checks.
5. Review warnings before treating a page as fully monitored.