VS Code Marketplace Monitor — Track Extension Releases, Ratings & Competitors

Date-filtered listings tell you what was recently updated. This Actor tells you what actually changed for the extensions you care about: version releases, rating movement, install-base growth, new competitors entering your search results — as structured change events with field-level before/after diffs.

Built on the official Marketplace Gallery API (the same endpoint VS Code itself uses). No browser, no scraping fragility, runs in seconds.

What it does

• Watch a niche — search terms (prettier, sql formatter, ai assistant) or categories (Linters, Themes, AI). Every run diffs the result set against the previous run: new_extension, removed_extension, extension_changed.
• Watch specific extensions — track competitors by ID (esbenp.prettier-vscode): version releases, rating changes, install milestones, update dates.
• Noise-controlled by design — raw install counters change every minute; this Actor bands them to meaningful magnitudes and rounds ratings so you only get events worth reading.

Who uses this

• Extension authors — know the day a competitor ships, gains rating, or a new player enters your keyword.
• DevRel & tooling teams — track the ecosystem around your product's integrations.
• Engineering managers — version-change events for the extensions your team standardizes on.

Output example

{
  "type": "extension_changed",
  "source": "watch",
  "id": "esbenp.prettier-vscode",
  "name": "Prettier - Code formatter",
  "url": "https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=esbenp.prettier-vscode",
  "changes": [
    { "field": "version", "before": "11.0.0", "after": "11.1.0" },
    { "field": "installs", "before": 70000000, "after": 71000000 }
  ],
  "detectedAt": "2026-08-04T10:00:00.000Z"
}

Input

Field	Description
searchTerms	Search queries watched as result sets
categories	Marketplace categories watched as result sets
extensionIds	Specific extensions tracked with field diffs
maxResultsPerList	Result set size per list (10–500)
monitorId	State namespace shared between runs

A note on search-term watching

Marketplace search is relevance-ranked, so the tail of a result set naturally fluctuates between runs. For stable niche tracking prefer categories, use a generous maxResultsPerList, or focus on extensionIds watching. Category and ID watching produce clean, low-noise event streams.

Reliability

Official JSON API only — no markup to break. Strict schema validation on every item; the run fails loudly instead of storing garbage. First run stores a baseline; real change events start from run two.

Scheduling

Pair with an Apify Schedule (daily works well) and pipe events to Slack, email, webhooks, or Google Sheets via Apify integrations. Quiet days cost almost nothing.