The short version
- Type your email (or phone, or webhook URL) in the first box.
- Paste the page you want watched in the second.
- Leave changes on. Press Go and pay with Stripe.
We take a baseline right away and stay quiet. When the page's text is different on a later check, you get one email that says what changed. Sign in later with a magic link (no password) to add more pages, pause one, or delete it.
Things people wait on
- "Registration opens soon" pages for classes, camps, permits and events.
- Official notices: court calendars, city council agendas, school closure pages.
- A product or documentation page you depend on, so you hear about changes before they bite.
- A blog or news page with no RSS feed.
- A competitor's pricing or feature page.
Will it work on my page?
Quick test: open the page, then use your browser's "View page source". If the words you care about appear in that source, PingWhen will see them. If the source is mostly a script tag and an empty <div id="root">, the content is rendered by JavaScript and we will not see it. We'd rather tell you that now than take your $9.
Also, busy pages with rotating content will alert often. A focused page (a single notice, a pricing table, a docs page) works best.
How a check works
On your plan's interval we fetch the URL with PingWhenBot/1.0. For HTML we drop scripts, styles and comments, keep the visible text, collapse whitespace, lowercase it, and mask ISO-8601 timestamps. We hash that text. The first successful fetch is the baseline and never alerts. After that, a different hash means a change alert with a one-line excerpt of what is new.
Honest limits
- We watch the HTML we receive. Pages that only render their content with JavaScript (many single-page apps, some store stock widgets) are not supported: we would see an empty shell.
- We watch the whole page's text, not a CSS selector. Pages with rotating quotes, "5 minutes ago" labels, view counters or ads that change the text on every load will alert often. After a burst of alerts we pause that watch for 24 hours and email you a resume link.
- No logins, cookies, or pages behind a paywall. Public URLs on ports 80/443 only, up to 2 MB.
- No free plan. Cancel anytime in the Stripe customer portal.
Pricing
Starter $9/month covers 10 pages checked every 15 minutes. Plus $19/month covers 40 pages every 5 minutes. Cancel anytime from the billing link in the app.