Alternate price comparison API: NL, BE and AT prices and price-drop alerts

Compare the same product across alternate.nl, alternate.be and alternate.at, find the cheapest country, and get only the products whose price just dropped. It is built for resellers, system builders, deal communities and AI agents. You get one JSON row per product with all three country prices, shipping, stock, and the savings against your home country.

Alternate sells identical hardware (GPUs, CPUs, motherboards, monitors, peripherals) in three countries at different prices, with different stock and shipping. One SKU, three prices: this Actor puts them side by side and does the maths.

Why use this Actor

• Cross-country spread: cheapest in-stock offer vs the second cheapest, vs the median, and vs your home country.
• Delta mode: remembers the last lowest price per SKU between runs and can return only new products or real price drops. Skipped products are not billed.
• Public pages only: reads Alternate's public product pages and sitemap, about 1 request per second, honest user agent, follows robots.txt.
• No proxies, no browser: plain HTTP requests, small and fast.
• Agent-ready: every input has a clear description and example, so Claude, Cursor, n8n or any MCP client can call it without extra setup.

Quick start

Click Start with the prefilled input. It runs this:

{
  "searchQueries": ["RTX 5070"],
  "maxItems": 5
}

You will see up to 5 graphics cards, each with the NL, BE and AT price, the cheapest country and the saving against the Netherlands. Allow about 6 seconds per product.

What you get per product

Field	Meaning
sku, title, brand, category, mpn, ean[]	Product identity (EAN is a list)
offers[]	One row per country: shopName, priceEur, shippingEur, totalPriceEur, availability, inStock, rating
pricingSummary	Lowest total (price + shipping), its country, median total, second-lowest total, country counts
arbitrageAlpha	spreadVsSecondLowestEur, spreadVsMedianPct, savingVsHomeEur, savingVsHomePct
priceChange	isNew, previousLowestTotalPriceEur, dropPct versus the last run

Market prices are computed over in-stock offers only. An out-of-stock listing is never reported as "the cheapest". If nothing is in stock the summary fields are null.

Sample output (real run)

{
  "sku": "100065780",
  "title": "Ryzen 9 9950X, 4,4 GHz (5,7 GHz Turbo Boost) socket AM5 processor",
  "brand": "AMD",
  "mpn": "100-100001277WOF",
  "ean": ["0730143315272"],
  "pricingSummary": {
    "lowestCountry": "at",
    "lowestPriceEur": 539.0,
    "lowestShippingPriceEur": 8.9,
    "lowestTotalPriceEur": 547.9,
    "medianTotalPriceEur": 549.0,
    "secondLowestTotalPriceEur": 549.0,
    "countryCount": 3,
    "inStockCountryCount": 3
  },
  "arbitrageAlpha": {
    "spreadVsSecondLowestEur": 1.1,
    "spreadVsMedianPct": 0.2,
    "homeCountry": "nl",
    "homeTotalPriceEur": 549.0,
    "savingVsHomeEur": 1.1,
    "savingVsHomePct": 0.2
  },
  "priceChange": { "isNew": true, "previousLowestTotalPriceEur": null, "dropPct": null },
  "offers": [
    { "country": "nl", "priceEur": 549.0, "shippingEur": 0.0,  "totalPriceEur": 549.0,  "availability": "InStock" },
    { "country": "be", "priceEur": 549.0, "shippingEur": 6.99, "totalPriceEur": 555.99, "availability": "InStock" },
    { "country": "at", "priceEur": 539.0, "shippingEur": 8.9,  "totalPriceEur": 547.9,  "availability": "InStock" }
  ]
}

(Offer rows trimmed here for length; the real output also has shop name, offer URL, condition and ratings.)

How to choose products

1. productIds: SKUs or full product URLs. The SKU is the number at the end of an Alternate product URL, e.g. .../html/product/100140531. Most precise and cheapest.
2. searchQueries: words matched against product names from Alternate's public sitemap (Dutch names, all words must match), e.g. RTX 5070, Ryzen 9 9950X. Capped by maxItems.
3. categoryUrls: a category page such as https://www.alternate.nl/CPUs/AMD-CPUs/Socket-AM5. Only the first page (about 17 products) is read, because further pages load dynamically.

Price-drop alerts

Set onlyPriceDrops: true and minDropPct (default 5). Schedule the Actor on the Apify platform (for example every few hours). Each run returns only products that are new or whose lowest total fell by at least minDropPct since the previous run, and you are charged only for those.

Add a webhookUrl (Discord, Slack or any HTTPS endpoint that accepts JSON) to be notified of drops at the end of each run. Alerts cover genuine drops, not first-time discoveries.

State lives in a named key-value store (stateStoreName, default alternate-price-state). Use different names to keep separate watchlists.

Pricing (pay per event)

You pay per product returned (event product-scraped), plus Apify platform usage. The Console price is $4.00 per 1,000 products ($0.004 per product); the price shown on this Actor's page is what counts.

• Free: products skipped by the price-drop filter, and pages that fail or cannot be parsed, are not returned and not billed.
• Cost cap: maxItems (default 50) is the most products one run returns, so it is also your cost cap per run. You can also set a maximum cost per run in Apify; the Actor stops cleanly when it is reached.

Worked examples at $0.004 per product:

Run	Products returned	Event cost
Quick check	5	$0.02
Daily watchlist	50	$0.20
Weekly market scan	500	$2.00
Hourly drop-watch of 100 SKUs, ~3 drops per run	3	$0.012 per run

Speed: each product needs about 6 polite requests (3 countries, one redirect each), so allow roughly 6 seconds per product at the default delay.

Use with AI agents (MCP, Claude, Cursor, n8n, Make)

AI agents can call this Actor through the Apify MCP server. Add this to your MCP client config (Claude Desktop, Cursor and others). You sign in with Apify via OAuth in the browser on first use.

{ "mcpServers": { "apify": { "url": "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=goobertje/alternate-price-watch" } } }

Example prompts and the input each one maps to:

1. "Is the Ryzen 9 9950X cheaper in Belgium or Austria than in the Netherlands right now?"

   { "searchQueries": ["Ryzen 9 9950X"], "countries": ["nl", "be", "at"], "homeCountry": "nl", "maxItems": 3 }
   

2. "Compare product 100065780 in all three Alternate shops and tell me where to buy it."

   { "productIds": ["100065780"], "homeCountry": "nl" }
   

3. "Tell me which RTX 5070 cards dropped at least 5% since the last check."

   { "searchQueries": ["RTX 5070"], "onlyPriceDrops": true, "minDropPct": 5, "maxItems": 50 }
   

In n8n, Make or Zapier, use the Apify node or module, pick this Actor and paste the same JSON.

Use cases

• Cross-border arbitrage checks for resellers and system builders in the Benelux and Austria.
• Repricing and competitor monitoring for shops selling the same hardware.
• Deal alerts for communities and Discord servers, via onlyPriceDrops and webhookUrl.
• Personal wishlists: "tell me when the 9950X drops 5% anywhere".
• AI agents: ask Claude or an n8n flow "is this GPU cheaper in Belgium right now?".

FAQ

Where does the data come from, and is it allowed? From Alternate's public product pages and public sitemap (alternate.nl, .be, .at). The Actor follows robots.txt, uses an honest user agent and about 1 request per second. See Legal below.

How fresh is the data? It is read live during each run. Prices and stock can change within minutes after that.

How much does a typical run cost? At $4.00 per 1,000 products, a 50-product run costs about $0.20 plus Apify platform usage. Details are in the Pricing section.

What happens when the shop blocks me or changes its layout? If a shop answers 403 or 429 three times in a row (after short back-offs), the run stops and fails with a clear message. Items already pushed are kept and the price history is saved. The Actor does not try to evade blocking. A layout change that breaks parsing is reported in the run log, and a page that cannot be parsed is skipped.

Can I schedule it and get only new or cheaper items? Yes. Schedule it on the Apify platform and set onlyPriceDrops: true. You only get, and only pay for, new products or drops of at least minDropPct.

What is not included? Other Alternate countries, products outside the three shops, price history from before your first run, pages beyond the first page of a category, and exact shipping for large orders or free-shipping thresholds.

Limits and honest caveats

• Prices are as shown on each shop, in EUR, including VAT of that country. shippingEur is the standard rate the shop publishes on the product page; real shipping can differ for large orders or free-shipping thresholds, and delivery times differ per country. Verify before buying.
• Only new and in-stock status published by the shop is used; stock can change within minutes.
• Search uses Alternate's sitemap names, which are in Dutch. Product IDs are the most reliable input.
• If a shop answers 403 or 429 three times in a row (after short back-offs), the run stops and fails with a clear message; items already pushed are kept and the price history is saved. The Actor does not try to evade blocking.
• A product page that fails or cannot be parsed is logged and skipped; the rest of the run continues.
• If a product has no published shipping rate, its total is unknown and that country is left out of the market prices (it still appears in offers).
• A small drop does not move the comparison baseline, so slow slides add up until they reach minDropPct.
• The minimum request delay is 1 second. Please keep it that way.

Legal

This Actor reads publicly available product pages and sitemaps, respects robots.txt, collects no personal data and is not affiliated with or endorsed by ALTERNATE. You are responsible for using the data in line with the shops' terms and applicable law.

Support

Found a problem or want a field added? Open an issue on the Actor page. The parser reads each page's standard Product structured data, which is stable, and a layout change is reported in the run log.