Website Change Monitor: AI Page Change & Pricing Alerts

Every real change on your competitors' pages, explained, in your inbox every week.

⚡ First 25 changes free · 💵 $0.003 per qualified change · 🤖 $0.015 with the AI verdict · ⏱️ demo in seconds

Try it in 30 seconds. Click Try it — the form runs a free before / after demo of four sample pages. Your first 25 qualified changes are free; baselines, unchanged pages and cosmetic noise cost nothing here, and up to 50 pages are fetched here on any Apify plan. → What a run costs · What the AI adds · Run it weekly

⚡ At a glance

What you get	one row per real change: category, significance 1–5, before → after prices — with the AI a summary and the next action
You provide	the pages to watch (pricing, changelog, careers, terms, product pages) — or just your competitors' names
First run	new pages are compared with their latest Internet Archive capture, so run 1 already shows changes
Output	a sheet sorted by significance plus a digest by e-mail, Slack, Teams or Discord
Typical run	30 pages checked daily → ≈ 40 real changes a month, 4.4 % of 900 page checks (estimate — no live month measured yet)
Cost of that run	per month $0.27 rules only · $1.37 with the AI, all in (worked example below)
Free tier	first 25 qualified changes per account
Keys / setup	no API key where your Apify plan includes model access — otherwise your own key: a free Gemini / Groq key gives 1–3 AI verdicts per run (the rest keep the rule verdict at the basic price); a paid key assesses every change
Works with	Schedules, e-mail, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, Discord, webhooks (Zapier, Make, n8n), Google Sheets, MCP & AI agents

🎯 What this Actor does

It fetches your pages (up to 50 itself, on any Apify plan; more with Website Content Crawler), compares each with its last version and bills only the changes that pass your filters:

• Pay per real change, not per page checked — no start fee; baselines, unchanged pages and noise are never billed by us, and up to 20 pages a run pay no per-page fee.
• An AI verdict instead of a raw diff — category, significance, verbatim facts, relevance, impact and the action.
• A first run that delivers — pages seen for the first time are compared with the Internet Archive.

💲 Competitor pricing changes, price by price

Every moved price is paired inside its table row — priceChanges: [{"before": "$49", "after": "$59"}], flag price_moved — and never dropped as noise.

🧹 Website change detection without the noise

Dates, counters, © years and tokens are removed before comparing (plus ignoreTextPatterns; cssSelector watches one region). Small edits and flapping pages are free.

🗂️ New pages, removed pages, and a first-run baseline

watchMode: section reports page_added / page_removed under each URL; new pages are compared with their latest Internet Archive capture (baselineFrom: wayback, the default).

📈 How has their pricing moved this year?

historyBackfill: 12 diffs one archive capture per month of each page in order — a dated row per past change and a price timeline on the REPORT page; $0.10 per page with a past change, once.

🚀 How to use it

1. Click Try it — the free demo: four sample pages of a fictional competitor, three real changes.
2. Put your competitors' pages into startUrls — or just name them in goalDescription ("we compete with Notion and Slack on pricing"), or pick a preset. Keep enableAi on: your first 25 changes show the AI tier free.
3. Press Start — new pages are compared with the Internet Archive, so the first run already delivers changes.
4. Schedule it daily or weekly with notifyEmail — only new changes are delivered and charged.

📚 Learn more: Step-by-step tutorial — how to monitor competitor websites with this Actor

🆚 Why this instead of running Website Content Crawler yourself?

	Website Content Crawler (apify/website-content-crawler)	This Actor
Price	free Actor, ≈ $0.2 per 1,000 pages · 11,774 users / 30 days	from $0.003 per qualified change; ≤ 50 pages fetched here, no crawl bill
What you get	every page's full text again, every run — no memory	only what changed, classified and scored
Same 100 changes, all in	$0.45 of crawling (≈ 2,270 page checks at 4.4 %) — 2,270 unsorted pages you diff by hand	100 ranked, explained changes: $0.68 rules only · $3.46 with the AI, all in (30-page lists are fetched here) — junk costs $0

vs other website change monitors

100 changes all in (76 daily runs of 30 pages), Store prices of 2026-09-27/28:

Actor	Users / 30 d	100 changes	Lacks (source)
This Actor	new	$0.68 · $3.46 with AI	—
santhej/web-watchdog	1	$1.71	"No LLM call", no JS rendering (its README)
muhammad-bilal/web-drift-detector	1	$1.82	AI needs your OpenAI key (its README)
fayoussef/website-change-monitor	1	$4.54	server-rendered HTML only (its README)
inovaflow/website-change-tracker	2	$9.60	≈ $0.10 start fee per run (its README)
happitap/competitor-marketing-change-monitor	5	$23.54	$0.25 start fee, 5.7 % failed runs (Store)
tagadanar/saas-pricing-monitor	1	$25.08	pricing pages only (its README)
firecrawl-website-change-monitor---track-page-changes-with-ai (#1 Store result)	2	$32.40	$0.10 start + $0.01 per page check, changed or not; your own Firecrawl key; no AI verdict (its README)
ryanclinton/website-change-monitor	9	$227.00	$0.10 per site per run, changed or not

A measured head-to-head on the same URLs is dated in the roadmap (2026-10-15).

💸 Cheaper than a Visualping or Distill.io seat

30 pages checked daily cost $0.27 a month rules only · $1.37 a month with the AI here, against Visualping Personal 5K $35 / month (20 pages), Distill.io Starter $15 / month, ChangeTower Lite $12 / month or PageCrawl Standard $13.33 / month (list prices, checked 2026-09-27). Free tools win elsewhere: Visualping Free (5 pages), the Distill.io browser extension (free plan) (logged-in pages), Google Alerts (mentions, never an edit), the Wayback Machine (history — our first-run baseline).

💵 Pricing — what a run really costs

Pay per result: one event per qualified change — no start fee.

Event	When it is charged	Price
free-tier	your first 25 qualified changes, any mode	$0.00
qualified-change-basic	AI off — category, significance, lines, prices, alert	$0.003
qualified-change-ai	AI on — plus summary, facts, relevance, impact, action	$0.015
page-watched	each page checked beyond the first 20 of a run — up to 20 pages pay nothing	$0.0005
digest-ai-brief	the AI brief on top of a watch list's digest, only on a run with new changes	$0.02
client-report	a white-label client report (a monitors entry with clientName), run with new changes	$0.05
history-backfill-page	historyBackfill on: once per page whose archive history holds ≥ 1 past change	$0.10

One free tier: your first 25 qualified changes are free, whatever the tier.

This Actor never charges for: baselines, unchanged, noise, flap, quarantined or error pages, changes your filters drop, repeats, sample rows, the rule digest, the first 20 pages of a run, fetching up to 50 pages. Bigger lists: Website Content Crawler bills your Apify account ≈ $0.2 per 1,000 pages, capped by maxPagesPerRun.

How that compares — "website change monitor" results in the Store charge a median $0.002, mostly per page check: $0.003 is 1.5× that, but only per qualified change — one replaces 23 page checks ($0.00013 per raw-row equivalent). Same-unit rivals charge $0.008–$0.02 per change.

Worked example — 30 pages checked daily = 900 page checks a month (fetched here, no crawl bill) → ≈ 40 qualified changes (4.4 %): 40 × $0.003 + 300 × $0.0005 (10 pages over the 20 free, 30 runs) = $0.27, $0.0068 per change; with the AI 40 × $0.015 + ≈ $0.18 tokens + ≈ 22 × $0.02 briefs instead → $1.37, $0.034 per change.

At volume (same 4.4 % estimate) — agency: 10 clients × 30 pages daily with the AI and white-label reports = 9,000 page checks → ≈ 400 changes: crawl $1.80 + 8,400 × $0.0005 + 400 × $0.015 + ≈ $1.84 tokens + ≈ 220 × ($0.05 report + $0.02 brief) = ≈ $29 a month, vs Visualping Business 20K $140 / month for 200 pages. E-commerce: 200 product pages daily = 6,000 checks → ≈ 264 price / stock changes: crawl $1.20 + 5,400 × $0.0005 + 264 × $0.003 = ≈ $4.70 a month rules only, vs ChangeTower Business $78 / month for 200 pages.

AI tier, all in: ≈ $0.0196 per change, 6.5× the basic price: $0.015 here + ≈ $0.0046 tokens (measured 2026-09-27: 1,306 in / 666 out tokens per change at Haiku 4.5's $1 / $5 per million).

🤖 What the AI tier adds

The demo's pricing change, AI off — the rules pair the price and stop there:

{"label": "Northwind Analytics", "category": "pricing", "significance": 5, "score": 95, "tier": "hot",
 "summary": "Northwind Analytics pricing: $49 → $59 in 'Pro | $59 per seat / month | unlimited dashboards | email support'.",
 "recommendedAction": "review_pricing"}

AI on — judged against "flag price, plan and launch changes our sales team must know" (local run with groq:openai/gpt-oss-120b, 2026-09-28; on Apify the default model is anthropic/claude-haiku-4.5):

{"label": "Northwind Analytics", "category": "pricing", "significance": 5, "relevance": 90, "score": 93, "tier": "hot",
 "summary": "The Pro plan price increased from $49 to $59 per seat per month, and the Business plan now includes an audit log.",
 "businessImpact": "The price hike makes our offering more competitive on cost, while the new audit‑log feature may require us to emphasize our own security capabilities.",
 "recommendedAction": "notify_sales"}

The AI reads the whole table (the audit log the rules missed) and says what it means and who acts — ≈ 8 minutes saved per change, based on the steps it replaces: open both versions (≈ 2 min), find what moved in a 20-line diff (≈ 3 min), write the before → after note and the action (≈ 3 min). It also ranks down changes irrelevant to your goal.

Try the AI on any plan: sample verdicts in the demo, 5 live AI verdicts on us on your first real run, then your own key: a free Gemini key assesses a few changes per run, a paid one all.

⚙️ Input

Field	Default	What it does
startUrls	—	The pages to watch; typed next to the demo they start the live check
sourceMode	actor	actor checks live, list / dataset diff what you have; {} runs the free demo
preset	custom	One click: a ready watch list for pricing, launches, legal, hiring, docs or e-commerce
goalDescription	—	What matters to you — the AI scores relevance on it; competitors named here are watched
minScore	35	The field that decides what you pay: significance × 20 − 5, blended with relevance when the AI is on
maxQualified	100	Cap on changes (and on this Actor's charge); the rest come next run
maxDiscoveryChargeUsd	0.5	Spend cap passed to the crawl
enableAi	true	The AI verdict per change
baselineFrom	wayback	New pages are compared with the Internet Archive; none only stores them
historyBackfill	0	Months of archive history per page (e.g. 12), diffed in order — $0.10 per page, once
fetcher	auto	auto: ≤ 50 static pages fetched here (any plan), the crawler otherwise

Flags

Put a name from the first column into targetFlags (priceMoved works too); an unknown name stops the run.

📤 Output

One dataset item per qualified change — the demo's pricing change (AI on), shortened:

{"changeId": "0acb90ba7dbf9bf711eee79e4c52d1547001cddb", "monitor": "default", "label": "Northwind Analytics",
 "url": "https://northwind-analytics.example/pricing", "changeType": "content_changed", "category": "pricing",
 "significance": 5, "priceChanges": [{"before": "$49", "after": "$59", "currency": "USD"}],
 "relevance": 90, "recommendedAction": "notify_sales", "ruleScore": 95, "score": 93, "tier": "hot",
 "chargedEvent": "demo", "isSample": true}

Upsert key for a CRM or Sheet: dedupeKey — the change id of the cross-run memory; itemId is the page, url the canonical link.

Which record to read: OUTPUT (= RUN_SUMMARY) is the run record with OUTPUT.mode; every run also writes a DIGEST and a client-ready REPORT page.

⭐ Found it useful? A review on the Store helps others find it — it takes a minute on the Actor's page.

🔁 Run it weekly

1. Open the saved task and click Schedule after your first real run (OUTPUT.scheduleTaskUrl), with your address in notifyEmail: every run with new changes e-mails the digest and the trend vs the last run.
2. Keep stateStoreName the same (each page's last version); dedupeAcrossRuns never re-charges a change.
3. Add a Slack, Teams, Google Chat or Discord webhook, or a webhookUrl.
4. Name a historyDatasetName: one running, dated change log across runs.
5. Send outcomes (<changeId> = acted) — the digest counts what your team acted on.

Weekly cost is the new changes only; week 2 has as many changes as the competitors made: ≈ 4.4 % of page checks — 30 pages checked daily ≈ 40 changes a month, $0.27 a month rules only, $1.37 a month with the AI.

🎯 Try it for your niche

Pick one in preset and press Start — three public pages, compared with the Internet Archive at once: competitor-pricing · product-launches (changelogs) · legal-policy · hiring-signals (careers) · docs-api-changes · ecommerce-price-stock (price cuts, sales, sold out / back in stock).

🔌 Integrations, automation and API

API: copy-paste snippets — the real check, capped by maxDiscoveryChargeUsd, timeout from the run-time FAQ.

Minimal agent input: {"startUrls": [{"url": "https://www.notion.com/pricing"}], "goalDescription": "…", "maxQualified": 20, "maxDiscoveryChargeUsd": 0.5}

Which call runs what — demo, live search or your own rows

List-mode rows — what a pasted record needs

sourceMode: "list" runs on any plan: a row needs url and text (or markdown).

Run outcomes — what your integration sees

👥 Who is it for?

You are…	You run it to…	Start with
Product marketer / competitive intelligence	catch a rival's pricing, packaging or messaging change and update the battlecard	preset: competitor-pricing
Founder or PM	watch 5–10 competitors' pricing, changelog and careers pages; one weekly digest	preset: product-launches
E-commerce seller	track competitor product pages: price cuts, sale badges, sold out / back in stock — daily	preset: ecommerce-price-stock
Agency	every client's watch list in one run, a digest, webhook and white-label report each	monitors + clientName
Legal / vendor risk	flag changes to vendors' terms, privacy policies and DPAs	preset: legal-policy

🏷️ For agencies — white-label client reports

Give each monitors entry a clientName, logoUrl and agencyName: every run with new changes writes REPORT-<name> with the client's logo and "Prepared by

🧠 How the AI works

The model judges one change at a time against your goal; what it cannot quote from the page is dropped.

🔒 Data, compliance and limits

• Public pages only; respectRobotsTxtFile honours robots.txt; snapshots stay on your account. Respect the sites' terms and the law (GDPR, CCPA).
• A blocked or empty page is an error row, never a removal.

❓ FAQ

How much will one run cost me? 30 pages: no crawl bill (fetched here) + $0.003 per real change ($0.015 with the AI) + $0.0005 per page beyond the first 20.

What will my first real search cost? The changes found: up to 50 pages and their archive captures are fetched here; bigger lists add ≈ $0.2 per 1,000 pages crawled.

Why pay when Visualping Free, the Distill.io browser extension (free plan), Google Alerts or the Wayback Machine are free? They win for 5 pages, logged-in pages or brand mentions; none gives a typed, scored row per change across dozens of pages.

How long does a run take? The demo takes seconds, a 30-page check seconds too (built-in fetcher; the first run's archive lookups add ≈ 1 min) plus the AI per change: ≈ 2 s via Apify, ≈ 34–160.9 s per change with a free own key (measured) — pass timeoutSecs 3600 (≈ 300 for 30 pages, rules only).

Which Apify plan do I need? Any plan runs the demo, list mode and the live check of up to 50 static pages (fetched here, fetcher: auto); bigger lists, sections, JavaScript pages and the built-in AI need a plan that runs Store Actors — otherwise your own AI key (llmProvider: "byok").

Will I be charged for the same change twice? No — dedupeAcrossRuns remembers every change.

🧩 More Actors from the same developer

• Facebook Ad Library Winning Ads Finder — See which of your competitors' ads run longest, with the hook, offer and angle broken down.
• LinkedIn Buying Intent Leads — Hand your sales team the people asking for a tool like yours this week.

🆘 Support

Something missing or wrong? Open an issue on the Actor's page — requests from buyers ship first.

📝 Changelog

• 0.3.2 (2026-09-28) — basic price $0.0057 → $0.003 per qualified change.
• 0.3.1 (2026-09-28) — the live check runs on any Apify plan: up to 50 static pages are fetched by the Actor itself (Website Content Crawler for bigger lists, sections and JavaScript pages); historyBackfill — months of Internet Archive history per page on the first run; digests to Microsoft Teams and Google Chat; event history-backfill-page; new title "AI Page Change & Pricing Alerts".
• 0.2.2 (2026-09-28) — the measured own-key AI pace and its timeout in the run-time FAQ and the form.
• 0.2.1 (2026-09-28) — first run delivers (Internet Archive baseline by default), competitors from the goal, e-commerce preset, change log, outcomes, white-label reports, OUTPUT.mode; events page-watched, digest-ai-brief, client-report.
• 0.1.1 (2026-09-27) — first release: one row per real change on your watched pages, AI verdict, section watch, Wayback baseline, per-client digests.