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 · 🤖 ≈ $0.0196 all in with the AI verdict (≈ 1,300 tokens) · ⏱️ 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	Plan with Apify model access: no key · other plans: your own key — free Gemini / Groq = 1–3 AI verdicts per run, a paid key assesses every change
Which plan	Free demo, your own page texts (template) and up to 50 static pages: any plan · bigger lists, sections, JavaScript pages: a plan that runs Store Actors
Works with	Schedules, e-mail, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, Discord, Telegram, webhooks (Zapier, Make, n8n), Google Sheets, MCP & AI agents

🎯 What this Actor does

It fetches your pages (up to 50 itself, on any 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 — new pages 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

📦 Already running Website Content Crawler? Diff your website crawler data

Paste the dataset ID of your last apify/website-content-crawler run into Dataset ID (or rows into itemsList) — no second crawl, you pay only for the qualified changes. After every crawl: the chained-run recipe.

🆚 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
Your time per 100 changes	≈ 13 h — open both versions, find what moved, write the note (≈ 8 min each)	0 h — ranked, explained, the next action written
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	100 changes	Lacks (source)
This Actor	$0.68 · $3.46 with AI	—
santhej/web-watchdog	$1.71	"No LLM call", no JS rendering (its README)
muhammad-bilal/web-drift-detector	$1.82	AI needs your OpenAI key (its README)
fayoussef/website-change-monitor	$4.54	server-rendered HTML only (its README)
inovaflow/website-change-tracker	$9.60	≈ $0.10 start fee per run (its README)
happitap/competitor-marketing-change-monitor	$23.54	$0.25 start fee, 5.7 % failed runs (Store)
tagadanar/saas-pricing-monitor	$25.08	pricing pages only (its README)
firecrawl-website-change-monitor---track-page-changes-with-ai (#1 Store result)	$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	$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), the Wayback Machine (history).

💵 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.

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" (a real run with a free own Gemini key, 2026-10-17, ≈ 1.5 s and 1,510 in / 210 out tokens per change; on Apify the default model is anthropic/claude-haiku-4.5):

{"label": "Northwind Analytics", "category": "pricing", "significance": 5, "relevance": 100, "score": 97, "tier": "hot",
 "summary": "Northwind raised the Pro plan price from $49 to $59 per seat / month and added audit logs to the Business plan at $99 per seat / month.",
 "businessImpact": "Northwind's Pro plan price increase and Business plan feature addition directly impact sales positioning and win rates against our analytics tool.",
 "recommendedAction": "notify_sales", "aiModel": "google:gemini-3.5-flash-lite"}

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 (≈ 3 min), write the note and the action (≈ 3 min).

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
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

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 from the AI run above, 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"}],
 "summary": "Northwind raised the Pro plan price from $49 to $59 per seat / month and added audit logs to the Business plan at $99 per seat / month.",
 "relevance": 100, "recommendedAction": "notify_sales", "ruleScore": 95, "score": 97, "tier": "hot",
 "assessmentSource": "ai", "aiModel": "google:gemini-3.5-flash-lite", "chargedEvent": "demo", "isSample": true}

Sort one run by score; ruleScore is the rule part and fitScore the AI's — trend across runs on ruleScore.

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

⭐ 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. Paste a Slack, Teams, Google Chat, Discord or Telegram link into Send alerts to.
4. Name a historyDatasetName: one running, dated change log across runs — or import the ready tracker sheet (dedupeKey first to upsert on, your own status / owner columns).
5. Send outcomes (<changeId> = acted) — the digest counts what your team acted on.

Weekly cost is the new changes only — ≈ 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 (memory off, so the same question asked twice returns the top changes both times): {"startUrls": [{"url": "https://www.notion.com/pricing"}], "goalDescription": "…", "maxQualified": 20, "maxDiscoveryChargeUsd": 0.5, "dedupeAcrossRuns": false}

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? Seconds for the demo and a 30-page check (the first run's archive lookups add ≈ 1 min), plus the AI: ≈ 2 s per change 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.
• Facebook Page Post Tracker — New winning Facebook posts and offers from pages you track, in your inbox weekly.
• Instagram Competitor Content — Competitors' breakout Instagram posts and why they won, in your inbox every week.
• LinkedIn Buying Intent Leads — Hand your sales team the people asking for a tool like yours this week.
• YouTube Outlier Videos Finder — See which videos in your niche beat their channel's average, scored against your brief.

🆘 Support

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

📝 Changelog

• 0.3.4 (2026-10-17) — One "Send alerts to" field takes your Slack, Teams, Google Chat, Discord or Telegram link (or any webhook) and routes it by address; webhook posts can be signed, and the form is shorter; A run your plan cannot start now ends with a clear "ok: false" result and the any-plan next step, and a crawler whose output changed stops the run with an explanation instead of reporting "no changes"; Your own AI key picks its model by itself (a free Gemini key just works), a change that comes back after 90 days alerts you again, and changes you already paid for are never charged twice across watch lists.
• 0.3.3 (2026-10-04) — Bring your own data: send rows in itemsList or a dataset ID in datasetId and the Actor picks the mode itself, starts no source Actor and charges only for the analysis. Fields it cannot read are listed in the run log instead of being dropped silently.