What you get
PingWhen checks a public web page on a schedule and tells you when the words on it change. You pick where the alert goes: an email address, a US/CA phone number, or an HTTPS webhook. Each alert says which URL changed, when we saw it, the HTTP status, and a short excerpt such as text now includes "$19/mo", plus a link to your watch list.
There is nothing to install and no dashboard to keep open. The whole product is the form above and one list of your watches.
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.
Good uses
- A pricing, terms, or changelog page you care about.
- A government, school, or permit page that says "updates will be posted here".
- A job board or careers page that is server-rendered.
- A status or "we'll be back soon" page. Turn on is up too.
- Your own site: know when a deploy changed copy you didn't expect.
Down and up alerts come free
The same watch can also tell you when the page is down (two failed checks in a row: timeout, DNS, TLS, or a 5xx) and when it comes back. You won't get an "up" alert unless we first told you it was down.
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 is $9/month for 10 watches checked every 15 minutes. Plus is $19/month for 40 watches checked every 5 minutes, with longer change excerpts. Need more? Add 10 watches for $5/month. Webhooks are included on every plan and signed with HMAC-SHA256.