Know the day they change prices
Pricing pages change quietly: a plan gets renamed, a limit drops, a free tier disappears. Put your competitors' pricing URLs in PingWhen and you'll get an email (or a webhook into your own tooling) the first time the text changes, with an excerpt like text now includes "$19/mo".
A practical setup
- List the pages that matter: pricing, plans/limits, terms of service, changelog, "compare us" pages.
- Add each URL with changes on. Starter's 10 watches cover a few competitors; Plus covers 40 pages every 5 minutes.
- Send alerts to a shared inbox or an HTTPS webhook: your own endpoint, or an automation tool's catch hook (Zapier, Make, n8n) that forwards to chat. The JSON is our own format, so point it at something that can reshape it.
- When an alert lands, open the page and screenshot it for your records. We store only the latest normalized text, not a history.
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.
Will it work on their pricing page?
Many marketing sites are server-rendered or statically generated, so the prices are in the HTML we receive. Some pricing tables are built in the browser with JavaScript or pulled from an API after load; those we can't see. Open the page, choose "View page source", and search for a price. If it's there, PingWhen will catch changes to it.
Also watch out for pages with rotating testimonials or live counters: every rotation is a text change. A plain pricing page is ideal.
Be a good citizen
We fetch at most as often as your plan allows (every 15 or 5 minutes), identify ourselves as PingWhenBot/1.0 with a link to our bot page, honor Retry-After, and read at most 2 MB. Only watch pages you're allowed to access.
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: 10 pages every 15 minutes. Plus $19/month: 40 pages every 5 minutes, longer excerpts.