SaaS Pricing Delta Tracker (Schema v2.0)

An enterprise-grade competitive intelligence and monitoring tool designed for RevOps, Finance, Procurement, and Product Marketing teams. It tracks plans, pricing points, features, billing intervals, and CTAs across SaaS websites, generating stable identifiers, calculating semantic deltas, and routing suspicious runs through a quarantine gate.

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Key Features

• 3-Tier Cascading Fetcher:
  1. Tier 1 (HTTP-first): Fetches pages using curl_cffi (Chrome TLS fingerprint spoofing) in ~1s. Bypasses WAF blocks on 90% of pages at <0.01 CU.
  2. Tier 2 (Lightpanda CDP): headful client-side JS rendering on-demand.
  3. Tier 3 (Camoufox Playwright Firefox): Stealth Firefox anti-detect browser fallback to bypass Cloudflare Turnstile blocks.
• Polite Domain-Aware Throttling: Limits requests per domain name concurrently and schedules polite delay gaps between successive fetches.
• Stable Plan Hashing (plan_id): Generates stable hashes from immutable properties (canonical_url + section_path + plan_name + period + basis) to prevent updates from collapsing or appearing as false additions/deletions.
• Zero-Plan & Drop Quarantine: Prevents corrupting snapshots with empty or partially failed loads. Quarantines suspicious runs separately rather than overwriting valid database snapshots.
• JSON State Parser: Parses Next.js (__NEXT_DATA__), Remix, Astro, and inline hydration script states before stripping script tags.
• Automated Billing Toggles: Clicks billing controls dynamically inside browser fallbacks to isolate and capture both monthly and annual pricing matrices.
• Severity Classified Webhooks: Rates price updates, feature adjustments, CTAs, and plan changes by severity (critical, major, medium, low) and deduplicates webhook alerts using cryptographic change signatures.

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Input Parameters

The Actor takes the following configurations in JSON:

Key	Type	Description	Default
urls	Array (String)	List of direct pricing pages or domains (e.g. apify.com/pricing).	Required
mode	String	"changes_only" (Output changes only) or "snapshot" (Output all runs).	"changes_only"
webhook_url	String	External HTTP POST webhook endpoint for alert notifications.	null
concurrency_limit	Integer	Maximum concurrent requests globally.	3
max_concurrency_per_domain	Integer	Concurrency limit against a single domain.	1
delay_between_same_domain_requests_ms	Integer	Delay between consecutive page hits to same host.	2000
allow_empty_snapshots	Boolean	Set to true to permit empty database snapshots.	false
confidence_threshold	Float	Gating score threshold (0.0 to 1.0) below which runs are quarantined.	0.3
debug	Boolean	Enables saving raw DOM HTML and headless screenshots on failure.	false
debug_artifact_retention_days	Integer	Lifespan in days before debug artifacts are pruned.	7
alert_deduplication	Boolean	Prevents dispatching repeated identical webhook events.	true

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Output Schema (v2.0)

Each dataset item contains structured plans parsed with confidence metadata:

{
  "schema_version": "2.0",
  "url": "https://apify.com/pricing",
  "timestamp": "2026-07-06T11:04:30Z",
  "event_type": "change",
  "has_changes": true,
  "detected_plans": [
    {
      "schema_version": "2.0",
      "plan_key": "https://apify.com/pricing|General|Starter|monthly|per subscription",
      "plan_id": "8f38c3505c2a12c8ff6a24446e507ea293c39339243760a927d2e0ff5a842cfb",
      "name": "Starter",
      "price": 29.0,
      "price_raw": "29.0",
      "normalized_price": 29.0,
      "currency": "USD",
      "period": "monthly",
      "billing_basis": "per subscription",
      "features": ["Chat support", "Bronze Apify Store discount"],
      "cta": "Choose plan",
      "is_enterprise": false,
      "product_section": "General",
      "product_section_path": "General",
      "confidence": 0.85,
      "confidence_details": {
        "overall": 0.85,
        "price": 1.0,
        "identity": 1.0,
        "section": 0.5,
        "field_coverage": 0.83
      },
      "evidence_text": "Starter $29 per month ... Choose plan",
      "source_selector": "div.pricing-card.starter-card",
      "parse_warnings": []
    }
  ],
  "changes_summary": "Updated price for 'Starter' (General): USD29.0/monthly -> USD39.0/monthly",
  "tier_resolved": "HTTP"
}

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Webhook Delta Payload (v2.0)

Dispatched to webhook_url when changes occur:

{
  "schema_version": "2.0",
  "url": "https://apify.com/pricing",
  "timestamp": "2026-07-06T11:04:30Z",
  "changes_summary": "Updated price for 'Starter' (General): USD29.0/monthly -> USD39.0/monthly",
  "alerts": [
    {
      "severity": "critical",
      "change_type": "price_changed",
      "plan_id": "8f38c3505c2a12c8ff6a24446e507ea293c39339243760a927d2e0ff5a842cfb",
      "plan_key": "https://apify.com/pricing|General|Starter|monthly|per subscription",
      "message": "Updated price for 'Starter' (General): USD29.0/monthly -> USD39.0/monthly",
      "alert_fingerprint": "a4d8c950a7c4ff12a0d182b8c9d0eeff4a39029994c92b21c97aef0e12b7a942"
    }
  ],
  "plans": [...]
}

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Known Limitations

1. Interactive Captchas (Hard Turnstiles): Targets enforcing high-security WAF puzzles (requiring manual checkbox clicking or image puzzle solving) cannot be bypassed headlessly out-of-the-box. These are safely caught by our anomaly check, returning "event_type": "quarantine" rather than reporting corrupt plan removals.
2. Calculator-Only Pricing: Sites with sliders, inputs, or dynamically calculated prices without explicit plan grids (e.g. cloud hosting estimators) cannot be resolved into static cards.
3. Authentication Walls: Pricing hidden behind user log-ins is inaccessible.